Kampala International Theatre Festival (review)

Theatre artists from six East African countries gathered in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, for the first annual Kampala International Theatre Festival (KITF). Held at the National Theatre—part of the Uganda National Cultural Centre—the festival affirmed a continuity with rich periods of theatrical activity in Uganda’s recent history (with speeches invoking the career of Wycliff Kiyingi, the first African playwright whose work was produced at the Uganda National Theatre in 1953 and who died just weeks before the festival). At the same time, it affirmed the productive power of exchange—most visibly between East African artists from different countries, and less visibly though nonetheless prominently between East Africa and the United States.

Initiated as a project of Sundance Institute East Africa (SIEA), a program run by the US-based, nonprofit Sundance Institute and ultimately realized through co-sponsorship by Sundance and the Ugandan organization Bayimba Cultural Foundation, the Kampala International Theatre Festival brought together theatre pieces by artists whose work has been supported and developed at SIEA theatre labs held at several East African locations. It was, however, the regional emphasis on gathering new theatre work from all six participating countries (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and Ethiopia) that distinguished the festival. Indeed, the East African regional exchange promoted through the festival was far more readily apparent than the role played by Sundance. Each piece was billed as representing one particular country, with each country contributing one play (except for Tanzania and Kenya, which presented two shorter pieces or readings each). Nevertheless, many productions resulted from international collaboration, bringing together playwrights, directors, and performers from several of the participating countries; in other cases the texts themselves drew materials and styles from multiple national positions.

The festival’s offerings represented diverse genres and aesthetic sensibilities, including political satire, Swahili storytelling, musical theatre in the US tradition, and family drama. They all engaged directly with contemporary East African contexts and highlighted several recurring themes, most consistently women’s empowerment, political and economic corruption, and generational tensions in a modernizing, globalizing world. The diverse approaches to a stylized and inventive use of stage space reflected Sundance’s influence through programs developing directors as generative artists, a practice that has fairly recently taken seed in the region. The majority of the pieces presented were either in English or included English subtitles—a given for many of the participating artists who work primarily or exclusively in English, and a choice for others, aimed at prioritizing accessibility to a pan–East African audience. Almost all performances revealed a precarity of material resources or tensions over the evolving professional theatre culture: for example, electricity went out momentarily during one performance, and botched cues for video projections signaled rushed technical rehearsals. These fissures revealed an active set of negotiations among artists and administrators around the ongoing shaping of a local professional theatre culture.

The centerpiece of the festival was Desperate to Fightby Ethiopian playwright Meaza Worku. Of all the festival productions, this was the most fully realized and polished in terms of direction, design, and technical elements. Set in an unnamed city (with Addis Ababa in mind) and tweaked slightly by Ugandan director Aida Mbowa and cast to reflect a Ugandan context, the play engages the audience in a critical moment of decision-making for 35-year-old Marta, married and divorced three times, as she contemplates the possibility of a fourth marriage to an older widower. This opportunity is likely to be her last chance at matrimony, motherhood, and the social legitimacy that these positions afford. Alternating between direct audience address and flashbacks depicting the unraveling of each of Marta’s three marriages, Worku’s play is an honest examination of the pleasures afforded, and sacrifices demanded, by modern marriage in this unnamed East African country—and, indeed, in many other parts of the world. Marta refuses again and again to make compromises to preserve her marriages, but she is left lonely and lacking what she wants most of all: a child. In addition to being a study of marriage...