Some more random notes from Joburg...first of all, this is a multilingual city. Everyone here speaks at least two languages. Signs are printed in English and Afrikaans, the two white languages, but the Africans switch between Zulu, Sesotho, Xhosa, sometimes Venda, often in the same sentence. At the jail yesterday the Themba actors and facilitators took responses to their questions and interventions for their play in at least four languages. It's incredible...of course English is the main language, but the facility with which people move between the others is amazing to me. I feel proud to at least be ahead of the American curve with two and a half languages...
The other thing that strikes me about Joburg is the birds. Sometimes it's easy to forget that I'm in Africa...Joburg generally looks like your average run down, fading middle american city, it's just bigger, but then you turn a corner and there are the birds...the kind you'd think to see on a safari, brightly colored or with curved, spooned beaks, pecking at the grass in front of the university, or the weaver birds that have made their teardrop shaped nests in the trees at my guest house. Previous to this I've only seen them in National Geographic and now here they are literally in my back yard.
I taught my first workshop at Themba today--they are a smart group and we got into sophisticated work very quickly...I used some exercises I learned from FoolsFury and Michael Rohd, thanks to you both! All of this to prove that theater artists are connected in a web, across the globe...
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