Grappling with distance: Making theatre across continents, cultures, languages and race

In this reflection, I critically examine two moments in the ten-year practice of the Winter/Summer Institute (WSI) that illuminate the complexities of working across multiple layers of distance – geographic, cultural, linguistic, racial and educational. WSI, an applied theatre project co-founded by eight artists and educators from the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Lesotho, Southern Africa, has provided a space for exploration, interaction and collaboration with participants from vastly different cultures. It began in 2006 in Lesotho, in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and has brought people together to question assumptions and biases, engage in problem-solving, improvise ideas and create exciting theatre. Using WSI’s Lesotho work as its foundation, I seek to explore a number of key questions: How, in taking up contentious social issues, can participants – including facilitators – be pushed to grapple with embeddedness in our own cultural landscapes? How does one prepare to work across huge differences while refraining from imposing our own normative outcomes? And, in collaborative theatre working across distances and differences, how do we weigh and address conflicting claims to truth, particularly when so much is at stake? This reflection describes how, in grappling with these kinds of questions, the best preparation for our applied theatre work is that which allows us to think deeply ahead of time and to be as nimble as possible in navigating the moment to moment, the unexpected. This article points to the importance of recognizing the rich potential that exists for competing narratives and for multiple interpretations, and the value of being critically aware of our own discomforts and of trying to step back from them.