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| Drew Kahn (c) Bruce Fox, SUNY Buffalo State. |
I enjoy driving the
Anne Frank Project bus, but there are a lot of seats and people in it, and lots
of help. Collaboration is at the heart of storytelling and what we do. I always
feel like if we are not doing what we are teaching, we are not authentic. Our
business plan is really, just doing what we teach. I know that we are wired to
communicate, to commune, to collaborate and to connect. I don’t think it is
overstating it by saying that all of the world’s problems come by defying this
design. We are meant to be with each other and solve the problems together.
That’s the thing about the story-building process when students get very
concerned about the product and what we will put on stage. I tell them, that I
have a secret for them – I don’t care about the story. What is important to me
is the process you have gone through to build that story. That to me, that
story and story-building is a vehicle for community. I really want them to
understand in this laboratory that we have in the form of the theatre hall, is
that they have the tools and the vocabulary to make people, communities and
their families and organizations outside their theatre better. I’m fortunate
because I get to practice what I preach.
The university I teach
at, I think they thought I was a little cuckoo when I would say that theatre is
really only here to make the world better. They were like ah, he is a theatre
professor from California, he is crazy – but now, I hear our college
administrators saying things like theatre exists only to make the world better.
I think that is primarily why theatre should exist in an academic framework,
not necessarily to make more actors but to create more diplomats, conflict
resolvers, community builders and identity explorers.
One of the things we
do is work with many schools, middle and high schools, and the teachers ask me
after a workshop or a residency what I believe are the most important lessons for a teacher. I always have two quick answers to
offer: (a) Listen to your students, their stories, they’ll tell you where they
want to go, and, (b) You have to model, especially in today’s generation.
Students are very savvy and if you do not do what you say, they disregard it.
I started at Buffalo
State University, which is part of the SUNY (State University New York) system,
which has 64 campuses in this large system in New York State. Buffalo state is
one of those campuses, and I’ve been teaching here since 1993. For the first
decade of my work, I was a traditional theatre professor, teaching and
directing plays, but always tweaking plays because I thought they were great
vehicles for issues that mattered to students, not just about making a good
production that looked good, but also those that added meaning to their lives.
As my mom would always say, I’ve always had a social justice bug. I’ve always
been a little itchy and angry. Part of being an activist is that you wake up
being a little angry at the start of the day, and you want to be less angry at
the end of the day. But that fight, that fire – that keeps me going.
My campus is a very
diverse campus. Half of our students are non-white, which is beautiful. So,
very often, we produce plays in America that are written by white men and with
parts for white people. So, a lot of our diverse communities don’t see
themselves on stage. That’s a big loss because a big part of America looks as
much as like you as it looks like me. When we decided I was going to direct the
Diary of Anne Frank – I being Jewish, grew up with Anne Frank, but I was
shocked to know that a lot of my students didn’t know about Anne Frank. Of
course, it is mandatory reading for most American seventh grade schools, but a
lot of teachers have gotten bored and have chosen to look at other Holocaust
readings. One of the frustrations for me is that Anne is looked at as a
celebrity, like the poster child of the Holocaust. We lose the fact that she
was a little girl. I wanted to reintroduce our audience to the little girl,
Anne Frank, not the celebrity. I also wanted my students of all cultural and
diverse backgrounds to see themselves on stage.
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| The Diary of Anne Frank (Jewish Anne) (c) Bruce Fox, SUNY Buffalo State. |
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| The Diary of Anne Frank (Rwandan Anne) (c) Bruce Fox, SUNY Buffalo State. |
Anne Frank has taught
us to put our radar up and to realize when things like this happen. The same ingredients
go into making bullying successful: dehumanize your victim, provide a system to
harm the victim, get support for it, and make sure good people do nothing.
Those little microcosms, those little atoms – if you let them go unattended to,
you let them become things like genocide. It’s the same format – I try to
impress upon teachers and students that we can eradicate this.
As I was looking at
all these genocides of the 20th Century, I came across Cambodia,
Turkey, Bosnia and Rwanda. America was introduced to the 1994 Rwandan Genocide
by that movie, Hotel Rwanda. It was
helpful in being an ambassador for what was happening while we were ignoring it,
but it was filled with fallacies, too. I did a lot of work and I came across a
really beautiful Documentary on Rwanda by HBO, called Sometimes in April and another one called Ghosts of Rwanda. Those two pieces of research really opened my
eyes to what was happening in 1994. My students were born in 1993, 1994 and
1995 – it wasn’t this distant thing called World War II. It involved Africans,
so a lot of our non-white students could see themselves on stage!
We ended up saying,
why not have two Anne Franks? – our Jewish Anne Frank hiding from the Nazis
during World War II, and our Rwandan Anne Frank, a Tutsi girl hiding from Hutu
extremists in 1994 Rwanda. There’s a book called Left to Tell, by Immaculee Ilibagiza – who is really Rwanda’s Anne
Frank. She was really the source for my Rwandan Anne Frank. In the native
Rwandan language of Kinyarwanda, we called our Rwandan Anne Frank “Anana,”
which meant looking up to god.
In the theatre
production of Anne Frank, Anne is hiding in the annex. The way the play passes
time, is when Anne is narrating her story, she breaks the fourth wall and speaks
to the audience directly, quoting passages from her diary to the audience. Then,
she returns to the annex, which may be a couple of months later. During those
moments, I brought out both Anne Franks. They shared the diary. Unbeknownst to
them, they were reflecting each other. We also had a short movie I made,
preparing the audience with images from the Holocaust and the Rwandan Genocide.
Their souls were already warmed with the idea that something unique was going
to happen. That eventually, seen together, was so successful, largely because
of the team, the designers, the faculty and the students, who were incredible.
They embraced the concept, and we had a great rehearsal process with survivors
from both Holocausts. They lived the work in a way that was really committed.
After the first week of showcasing the play, we broke attendance records.
I started to feel a
little guilty because we should have had 30 Anne Franks on stage – the theory
that we have an Anne Frank in every genocide proved true. Calling the project
the Anne Frank Project was amazing – it is amazing that we have this diary,
because she was an incredible writer with a huge soul and crammed an enormous
amount of life within her fifteen-year long journey.But what about all those
diaries we missed, those children, from Syria and every country imaginable? How
about those diaries we don’t have? Certainly those stories are worthwhile. If I
had a dream to do the play again, I’d do it with different nationalities every
night – and unfortunately, we would never run out of ammunition.
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| Story Building work in Limuru, Kenya (c) Bruce Fox, SUNY Buffalo State. |
The President of the
college told me that we should do the play every year because it activates our
diversity mission. We’re on an academic campus where thinking is everything and
doing is not as important – but on our campus, thankfully, both are equal. I
told her we can’t do the play every year because it will get boring, so maybe
we could do a conference. I was invited to present our work in Amsterdam in the
International Diversity Conference. I didn’t think anybody would pay attention,
but they were hungry for what we did. SO I thought we could do a one dayconference
and rally around one of Anne’s quotes, and then have other departments do a
kinesthetic workshop around it. We didn’t want it to be about talking about it
– we want to do it. You don’t ask students to be involved in a story or peace
process by saying “Here are theories you can apply some day.” We want them to
leave the work of the Anne Frank Project having already done it – that they
leave as an activist, not as a hopeful activist. We did that conference and
called for proposals. It started at 9:00 AM and was to go on until 4:00 PM, but
it lasted until 8:00 PM when I had to kick the students out of the theatre—it
was clear that we were on to something special.
The students felt so
good about applying their passion! We used Anne’s quote to ignite the
conference: “How wonderful it is that we need not wait a single moment before
starting to improve the world!” We were onto something that needed to continue.
This year will be our 8th Annual Social Justice Festival. It is a
mainstay and an expectation on our campus. We’ve gone from a theatre program to
an arts program to a university-wide program. I now report to our Provost, and
AFP is a tool for our campus in many ways. We invite people to participate from
all over the world – we have a 1/3rd-2/3rd system, with
1/3rd being theory and 2/3rd being action for every
session. We’ve welcomed over 40,000 participants to our festival over the years.
We have always identified our mission to be consistent with the mission of the
college. I consider us a car in the college’s garage that they should drive
when it is about activating the diversity, community and international education
missions. That festival is our annual big event.
Immaculee spoke at our
campus, in 2010. We also have Sophia Veffer on AFP’s advisory board, who
happens to be a Holocaust survivor, and went to school with Anne Frank and had
a very different experience of the Holocaust. She had 15 different hiding
places, until they found her and she spent two years in Bergen Belsen. She
eventually survived. Her legs were badly damaged. She was in hospital, and a
female doctor in Holland at that time – which is very rare – told her that she
wanted to give her a book that had a story which reminded the doctor of Sophia.
It turned out to be one of the original printings of Anne’s Diary – except,
back then, it was a compilation of her entries, not so much the publication it
is today. She went back to Holland and resumed her life. She has been at the
center of the Anne Frank Project in multiple ways. You could imagine –
introducing her to Immaculee was heart stopping. Sophia speaks at our festival
each year. We always pair her with another survivor. Last year, we had a 25
year old Congolese student who survived the war in the DR Congo. We’ve had
survivors from Nepal, from Cambodia, others from Rwanda, from Bosnia – but
always, in partnership with Sophia.
Having done so much on
Rwanda, after Immaculee visited, I wanted to go to Rwanda. I received a grant,
and went with a dear friend of mine, Carl Wilkens. He was the only American
that was in Rwanda during the genocide. He was doing work for the 7th
Day Adventist church. He and his family lived there. He stayed and helped save
lives of many orphans and children. I met him at a conference and asked him to
take me to Rwanda – I had enough money in the grant to pay for both of us. It
was an incredible honor and I got to access places I wouldn’t have known about
without him. I went on a friend-raising tour to see if I could bring students.
We went to experience first-hand Rwanda’s reconciliation process. It was life
changing. The country’s story is not spoken about enough and should be a model
for so many countries suffering from conflicts and oppression! I’ve
visited once a year, for the past ten years, and for five of them, with
students. To put them in the middle of this country that has decided to rebound
from a bloodbath, and rebuild themselves based on community, unity, forgiveness
and compassion, is a sincere honor – one of my students on the way back, was
processing and crying, and she tried to put into words what she experienced.
She said, “In Rwanda, they don’t just read or talk the Bible. They live it.
They live it. They live it.”
We go to schools and
prisons and teach drama-based education, communicate and dance. We visit
victims and their families. We go to refugee camps of mostly Congolese, and to
arts organizations. We go on a safari to watch animals. We go to Genocide
memorials. Rwanda chose to memorialize Genocide in a very non-Western way. For
instance, popular locations for the horrors of the genocide were the many
churches. They would tell Tutsi on the radio to come to a church and father
so-and-so would protect them – but once they got there, they were killed.
Rwanda chose to leave the churches as they found them. There’s blood on the
walls, clothing of those who perished on the pews. It is an enormous emotional
experience. My son once asked me if I get used to it – But no. I can taste it
as I tell you and it is extreme. Rwanda wanted to make sure that people
remembered the truth. There are many genocide deniers and this memorialization
is therefore very important. My students have to process that and we go to two or
three of these memorials where they have to put words and feelings to this. We
do a lot of drama-based education, exploring and processing through
story-building. We walk the walk of storytelling…we use it as our primary
processing tool.
The President of our
college says that going to Rwanda is not just an academic brain-stretching
experience, it is a heart-stretching experience. That’s something we do not do
enough of in Western Academia. Life is really difficult and if our job is to
prepare our students to navigate the complexities of their lives, then to take
them to London to see theatre and have fish and chips may not be enough. We
need to trust our students and we need to immerse them in situations where they
develop the tools and vocabulary to succeed. Since I graduated from Grad
School, no one ever asked me to write a 30-page term paper. But they have asked
me to tell my story and life continues to present me with heart-stretching,
challenging and emotional experiences. Shouldn’t our responsibility at least
partially be to prepare students for experiences they are going to experience,
and not those that live in a book?
To continue that
sequence, we bring students to Rwanda, their hearts explode, we do it carefully
of course. We come back together, take a few weeks off and then we spend the
semester together in a class called Ensemble Theatre. We ask them to consider
their international learning and present their experience in any way they find
it fit to the campus community. They have to give it a theme and title, and
unbeknownst to them, they are involved in these story-building processes.
That’s the first part.
Then those stories come together, and there’s usually about 10 to 14 students
in class. We take all those story’s themes, find common themes they talk about,
and then we take all of those stories and start to build our story. That’s the
second part of the class. We build a story with the intention of performing at
the end of the semester, and tour it to local high schools in the following
semester. It is not a play about Rwanda, but one inspired by Rwanda, with the full knowledge of what the students
would like to have seen and taught when they were in high school. Last
semester, we eclipsed 100 schools that we’ve visited! We have become a staple
in the local school system, and never do a play without a workshop. A play,
then, in a sense, is always unfinished. We leave the play at a point of “What
would you do?” My students follow the play with a workshop. They go from actor
to facilitator and teacher, and they cross that sacred boundary of the stage
and go into the audience. The workshop is always about having the students who
just watched the play to practice the lessons of the play.
One play my students
built was called Dear Me, about a boy
whose best friend committed suicide in High School because he came out as gay
and that didn’t go well, so he drowned himself in the school pool. The play
starts at the funeral. The main character runs away from the funeral and goes
to their secret hiding place and he starts to write him a letter because his
friend loved writing. As he writes souls from conflicts past come alive, Anne
Frank, a Native American, a teacher killed in a school shooting, a Rwandan
genocide survivor all visit him and help him through the grieving process. At
the end of the play, we ask all of high school students to write a letter to
someone they want to connect to. The theme of Dear Me is toshow that you can always stay connected. Then, we
choose one of the letters to make into a physical play. We have had some
incredible experiences with that play. And we do this in the presence of the
school counselors – we are not therapists, so we make sure that there is help
if it is so needed. We’ve had a bunch of high schools asking us to do a Social
Justice Festival exclusively for them. We’ve also evolved into residencies
where we spend a full semester at schools to train teachers how to use the
story building process of AFP in their classrooms.
Going back to the
four-fold process that keeps everything from bullying to genocide alive…the way
to counteract bullying, oppression and genocide involves three steps, which I
learned from Rwanda. One, the perpetrator must publicly apologize. Two, the
victim or their representative must publicly forgive. Three, the two of them
must come together to agree to a reconciliation process guided, driven and
tailored by them. People in Rwanda have used this – to the point that a person
they once saw as the devil, is now seen as a family member. This process is difficult and incredibly
successful in Rwanda—exposing our students to this proves to them that real
change through forgiveness is actually possible.
Today, when I look
back, I always say that the Anne Frank Project has been the biggest
professional mistake of my life – it’s been a beautiful accident that I did not
intend.
