Finding One’s Place in a World of Transformation

The Festival Transamériques 2014, with its twenty-six thought-provoking shows from fourteen different countries, attracted 31,000 spectators to Montreal in May and June. This year was co-founder and director Marie-Hélène Falcon’s final festival after thirty memorable years of exciting programming. Falcon’s early festivals took place every other year, presenting innovative theatre from around the world. In 2006, the festival opened up to include dance as well as theatre and it is now held every year. From the outset, Falcon’s goal was to promote and support audacious contemporary work from around the world with a special focus on the striking work coming out of Quebec. Thanks to her festival, Québécois artists Robert Lepage, Denis Marleau, and Wajdi Mouarad were given an early platform, and Ariane Mnouchkine, Thomas Ostermeier, and Romeo Castellucci were introduced to Canada. This year’s festival program continued to bring outstanding international artists to Montreal while paying tribute to the best theatre in today’s Quebec.

One of the most thrilling pieces I saw this year was Hate Radio, written and directed by Swiss director Milo Rau and produced by his International Institute of Political Murder. Never before seen on this side of the Atlantic, Rau’s piece was political theatre at its best, a powerful reenactment of radio broadcasts in Kigali, Rwanda that promoted the mass killings of the Tutsis by the Hutus in 1994. Hate Radiorecreated the sounds and fury of a popular radio broadcast by Radio Télévision Libre des Milles Collines (RTLM), a favorite of many listeners during the horrific Rwandan genocide of 1994. Financed by Hutu extremists and dedicated to inciting Hutus to slaughter their Tutsi neighbors, RTLM used a barely disguised format of pop music, phone-ins, and sports coverage to attract its listeners. Remaining realistically close to the original, Rau condensed and consolidated verbatim excerpts from several RTLM broadcasts to create two hours of non-stop venom, brilliantly delivered by four master actors, enclosed in a glass studio with audiences on opposite sides.

Before being introduced to the radio show, and before we even suspected what was waiting for us behind the walls of the enclosed rectangular set, we heard personal testimonies told by four bigger-than-life actors facing us on large Venetian blinds. One, a female journalist whose mother is Rwandan, arrived in Kigali just before the massacres began. She speaks of her sense of impending disaster. Another, a survivor, tells us that his entire family was massacred, and another explains that if you could not prove you were Hutu, you were executed. Their delivery is strangely calm and matter-of-fact. Suddenly strident sounds of guns and shouting interrupts their calm, and we hear the news that Rwandan President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. It is April 6, 1994, and the slaughter begins. The Venetian blinds are quickly raised on a fully equipped radio broadcast studio, with four actors playing Georges Ruggiu, a white Belgian journalist; Valérie Bemeriki, RTLM’s main moderator; Kantano Habimana, the station’s fanatical ideologue; and a disk jockey named JoJo. “It is 9 p.m.,” he announces, “and it’s raining.”

Thus their dehumanizing broadcast begins. Their hate-filled rhetoric may be horrifying but the newsmen are clearly having a good time. They drink and smoke and laugh and dance and joke their way through their broadcast, enjoying every reference they make to those “cockroaches” (code for the Tutsis) and gleefully reporting on the numbers killed each day—seven, thirty-one, fifty-one—and, they add, “the graves are not yet full.” DJ Jojo dedicates Nirvana’s “Rape Me” to Bill Clinton, and they all sing along. The word genocide to them is meaningless since everyone is being massacred, they tell us, not just one group. We listen to them on headphones so that each of us receives their ruthless discourse individually and “live.” In the final moments of the broadcast, Kantano asks JoJo to play Joe Dassin’s “Le dernier slow.” As...