Laughter Diplomacy: Transcultural Understanding at Play in Rwanda

It is called the "aha!" moment—a flash of discovery, insight, or recognition, the moment at which a realization occurs or a truth surfaces fully formed. Within the individual, such moments provide evidence of the brain's creativity beyond the mind's ability to perceive. Interestingly, these moments are often accompanied by laughter. Actor, director, and comedy mentor Ed Greenberg believes that "[l]aughter is powerful. Laughter heals. Laughter builds community" (n.d.). In 2007, he founded Los Angeles-based Laughter for a Change to share the wisdom of improvisation by bringing "laughter and comedy to communities where a good laugh is in short supply" (ibid.). The idea for Greenberg's "life's work" emerged after he spent a week as a US cultural envoy to Rwanda, where he conducted an intensive, seven-hours-a-day workshop in the skills of comedy improvisation (2010c).

A cultural envoy is defined by the brevity of his/her international assignment and by the invitation received from a foreign embassy. Deriving from the French verb "envoyer"—literally, to send or transmit—a cultural envoy is one who shares an artistic or cultural process or product. Such diplomats, according to the US Department of State, "are expected to impart a combination of practical and theoretical expertise in their fields" of specialty. Although "impart" connotes a potentially uncomfortable model of top-down transmission, the underlying purpose of the envoy's activities is building and strengthening "relationships between the US and foreign countries." Thus these brief residencies foster mutual understanding and provide benefit to both those who host the envoy, and to the envoy him-/herself.

In Search of Comedy

"We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us."

—Philip Gourevitch (1998, 71)

In late 2006, Rwandan visionary Eric Kabera traveled to Los Angeles cultivating relationships with film-industry partners who sustain the Rwanda Film Festival and the Cinema Centre and Film Institute he runs in Kigali. He was also on the lookout to recruit a comedy specialist who might travel to Rwanda to teach his "people to laugh again" (Greenberg 2007). As the maker of the documentary 100 Days, which was among the first films about the 1994 genocide, Kabera was keenly aware of how portrayals of the violence had come to restrict definitions of his country from within and without. "For people to go beyond the genocide is very difficult," he states. "We can't forget our past—it's in our everyday lives—but we have to choose. Do we get stuck with it or do we get on and face the prospect of a better future?" (Kabera, qtd. in Bloomfield).

The question recalls a statement made by Brent Blair and Angus Fletcher in their recent Theatre Topics article, "'We Cry on the Inside': Image Theatre and Rwanda's Culture of Silence": "Plays such as Hope Azeda's Rwanda My Hope . . . simply rehearse the well-worn public narrative of genocide" (25). In pointing out the "well-worn public narrative," Blair and Fletcher acknowledge the prevalence of stories that continually represent the tensions or events of the 1994 genocide, or respond explicitly or thematically to that era. They cite an example created by Azeda and her company for the tenth commemoration of the genocide; Rwanda My Hope's hundred minutes symbolized the hundred days of violence (Muhoozi).

Kabera, in contrast, works tirelessly to cultivate new Rwandan narratives, moving beyond the thematic confines of ethnic conflict in search of new themes, re-imaging Rwandans and re-imagining Rwanda. Nicknamed "Hillywood," the Rwanda Film Festival, for instance, takes independently and locally made films into rural areas of the country and shows them in the open air on an enormous inflatable screen. ¹ In a similar vein, the Cinema Centre and Film Institute teach filmmaking skills to the next generation of Rwandan storytellers. Kabera is, obviously, an unofficial artistic ambassador for his country, and he traveled to Los Angeles to identify an American counterpart who might help him further his cause.

While in California Kabera met UCLA's then director of entertainment studies and performing arts...