Storytelling and Performance
Presented as part of USC’s Genocide Awareness Week, three events organized by the USC Shoah Foundation will explore artistic responses to genocide, highlighting the ability of creative expression to shine light in the darkness and give voice to silence. The events will reveal the power of the arts to communicate messages of survival and hope in the face of great tragedy. The series is sponsored by the USC Visions and Voices initiative.
Playwrights Yvette Rugasaguhunga and Catherine Filloux will perform short theatrical pieces on the Rwandan and Cambodian genocides. Following the performance, Rugasaguhunga, who survived the Rwandan genocide as a child, Filloux and USC dramatic arts professor Stacie Chaiken will discuss the ability of theatre to inspire global audiences. They will explore the power of storytelling and using firsthand accounts of mass atrocities to create a broader awareness and understanding about genocide.
Watch Catherine Filloux's video "Theatre, Memory, and Grappling with Complicity - Cambodia" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrKmFXRefCQ
About the Artists:
Yvette Rugasaguhunga, a survivor of the genocide against Rwandan Tutsis, funded the Yvette Rugasaguhunga Survivors’ Education Fund in 2010. At age fourteen, she lived through the genocide that claimed more than one million lives. Although she survived with six siblings, she lost many family members, including her father, four siblings and three grandparents. She started working with survivors at age fifteen. Throughout high school, she took on leadership roles at organizations of survivors both at the school and the province level. After moving to the U.S. in 2004, Rugasaguhunga embarked on her journey to speak about her genocide experience after encountering a genocide denier.
Catherine Filloux is an award-winning playwright, whose new play LUZ recently premiered at La MaMa in New York City, where she is a Resident Artist. Filloux has been commissioned to write a one-woman play for the actress Marietta Hedges surrounding the civil rights movement and the KKK, which will premiere at La MaMa in 2014. Filloux’s libretto, New Arrivals, also recently premiered at Houston Grand Opera, Song of Houston (Composer John Glover.) Her more than twenty plays have been produced in New York City and around the world. She is the librettist for Where Elephants Weep (Composer Him Sophy), which opened in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and The Floating Box: A Story in Chinatown (Composer Jason Kao Hwang), which played at Asia Society and is released by New World Records. Filloux’s awards include: Voice Award for Artistic Works (Voices of Women), New Generations-Future Collaborations Award (Mellon Foundation/TCG), PeaceWriting Award (Omni Center for Peace), Critics Choice Opera News, Roger L. Stevens Award (Kennedy Center), Eric Kocher Playwrights Award (O'Neill) and the Callaway Award (New Dramatists). She is a Fulbright Senior Specialist (Cambodia & Morocco), Asian Cultural Council Grant, NEA and MAP Fund recipient, and also a Core Writer (The Playwrights’ Center) and New Dramatists alumna. Filloux’s plays are widely published and her play anthologies include Dog and Wolf & Killing the Boss, Two Plays, NoPassport Press, and Silence of God and Other Plays, published by Seagull Books, London Limited. She lives in New York City with her husband John Daggett. http://www.catherinefilloux.com
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