World Voices | ROUTES

PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, NYC
CUNY Graduate Center
Martin E. Segal Theatre Center
365 Fifth Ave at 34th St
Manhattan

Tickets: Free Admission

Tuesday, May 5, 2015, 2–3:30pm
Strings, Angella Emurwon (Uganda)

After 20 years away, Baaba, the family patriarch, is set to return home. Maama has ruled the homestead with a firm hand and acrid tongue, and has created a family myth that helps her maintain status in the community and keep the rest of the family in line. The return of Baaba forces her now-grown children to evaluate their relationships with Maama and their place in the world, while Uncle Lokil, Baaba’s brother and Maama’s on-again off-again lover, sees Baaba’s return as an opportunity to regain his rightful place in Maama’s life.

Angella Emurwon is a writer, award-winning playwright, stage director, and screenwriter based in Tororo, Uganda. She has written three radio plays (Blackberry Girls!, 2009; The Cow Needs a Wife, 2010; and Sunflowers Behind a Dirty Fence, 2012), two of which have won BBC Audio Drama Awards. Her first full-length stage play, Strings, received a dramatic reading directed by Rogers Otieno at the 2014 Kampala International Theatre Festival. She is a Sundance Institute East Africa fellow, a member of the 2013 Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, and a Maisha Film Lab screenwriting and youth mentor.

• • • •

Tuesday, May 11, 2015, 5–6:30pm
Black Maria on Koinange Street, Sitawa Namwalie (Kenya)
A young African woman from a privileged upper middle-class family comes of age learning how to survive in an African country at the time of the dictatorships of the 1980s. She has to navigate life away from the safety of her family and learn how to survive. An encounter with the police and other night creatures exposes the underbelly of her charmed existence when she discovers the harshness and precariousness of life on the city streets of Nairobi at night.

Sitawa Namwalie is a writer and performer. In 2008 her first dramatized poetry performance, Cut Off My Tongue, was successfully performed in Nairobi, and it was later selected for the Sundance Institute Theatre Program’s first East African Theatre Lab. Cut Off My Tongue was also featured by TED Talent Search in its global search for new and undiscovered performances. In 2014 Sitawa participated in the SPOKEN WOR:L:DS project, a collaboration between poets, hip hop musicians, and spoken word artists from Kenya and Berlin. She currently works as a development consultant in East Africa in the areas of environment, gender, and governance.

There are other playrights presented in the festival, for info.: http://worldvoices.pen.org/event/2015/02/25/world-voices-international-play-festival-2015

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