This wasn’t easy to watch. Beginning with lengthy video recorded accounts from survivors of the atrocities humans committed against one another, of the fear and confusion that they experienced during the Rwandan Genocide, the play comes to the audience visually, but also through little shortwave radios with headphones. It is close, almost claustrophobic. It feels all the more personal and somehow simultaneously more private, yet more public. As it shifts to the live action - a glass box view into the recording studio with the equivalent of today’s “shock jocks” spewing hate while they dance around the studio and enjoy pop music of the time - the radio broadcast continues to be imperative. These voices and sounds are coming directly to us. They speak over one another; the surtitles (the production is performed predominantly in French but also in Kinyarwanda) lag behind what they are actually saying, so the English viewer gets only pieces. It is no less difficult to hear and watch.
These events took place in 1994, and whilst it would be nice to think that this sort of activity was isolated to the past, we now live in a time when this happens even more frequently — and more publicly — with twitter mobs, facebook misinformation, tv stations inciting violence and uprisings across the world. Watching this production now (it first debuted in 2012) it seems to argue that with more technology humans have only become more isolating, more hateful, ready to hurt those who disagree or whom they have decided are different. If that was true in 2012, it is only more so now in 2023. Where the production may have shocked 11 years ago, it now echoes.
Kudos to the performers of this difficult work. It is purposefully slow; nothing happens. At times your mind wanders, drifts, gets bored — all intentionally crafted. These activities shift into our subconscious, and then jolt us back, reminding us that they are here, in this world and we can’t let them become background noise we ignore. They are intensely harmful. At times the production is infuriatingly slow, in the best possible way, to achieve this awareness.