Humanitarian Theater in the Great Lakes Region

Abstract

In nominally “postwar” contexts throughout Africa’s Great Lakes region, participatory theater has been mobilized almost exclusively as a tool for either awareness or healing. The rhetoric prescribed for peace and development is so dominant in the humanitarian market that the artist’s ethos is channeled in directions more ethical than aesthetic. The shared circulation of participatory theater through the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi shows how an aesthetic model is exported and becomes a transnationalized tool, one designed to be tailored to any kind of crisis context. Thanks to NGOs’ powerful influence, this model shapes theater and performance landscapes by influencing generations of writers and actors, uniting creators through artistic networks. This theater is characterized by a strong aspiration to performativity which occurs in texts and performances through the centrality of the chorus, frequent mise en abyme, and the quest for catharsis.