Incident at Awassa

An American director collaborates on Ethiopia's first AIDS Education Circus— and narrowly avoids provoking a theatre riot

By David Schein

April 2001, The Market, Awassa, Ethiopia: The audience closed in so tightly around the performers that there was hardly room to perform. Too tight, I thought, hugging the inside of the circle, one of two “forengis” in a crowd of over a thousand Ethiopians who were leaning in and starting to push, stumbling into the playing area. Someone could get hurt. The market police weren’t helping matters. Every time they flicked their whips, the front row careened backwards onto the people behind them—who retaliated by pushing forward so that the crowd spilled back into the playing area, only to be whipped back again.

My cast of Ethiopian teenagers, performing the premiere of their AIDS Education Circus in the marketplace of Awassa, didn’t miss a beat, adjusting their gymnastics to the ever-shrinking perimeter, fighting with cartwheels and flips to keep the death’s-head AIDS-puppet monster in place, singing the audience back, performing on a dime. I roamed the inside of the circle, making pushing motions, using my full palm and spreading my fingers wide while I bowed, oh, so whitely, made eye contact, pushed softly, pleaded in my few words of Amharic, “Amar say conalo” (“Thank you”), “Ishi” (“Of course”) and in English, idiotically, “Please, please, gentle, gentle, nice, nice,” reaching down to pull squalling tots out from under the feet of the front line by their arms and handing them to the audience. If the crowd kept pushing forward, everyone would collapse in on each other.

This was at the point in the show when M’buye—my strongest teenage performer, so commanding in his half-mask, eye patch and big Batman voice—was supposed to call out in Amharic, “Only Condoms Will Kill the AIDS Monster,” grab the garbage bag of condoms and throw handfuls of them into the audience. No, M’buye, I thought, don’t throw the condoms, please don’t throw the condoms. If he threw them, the young men might fight for them and the world’s first Theatre Condom Riot would ensue. Many would die. I’d go to jail (they have great ones in Ethiopia, called “holes in the ground”), and in four years the American Embassy might get me a trial. All because of bad blocking. I’d figured on an audience of 200 and got 2,000. I thought the performers would be able to control the size of the circle. We’d worked so hard on expanding and contracting, but the lesson to be learned was: Once a circle is three deep, the perimeter can’t respond.

I tried to get M’buye’s attention with my eyes, but he was too busy fighting the crowd back. He threw a couple of condoms. Oh, no. There was a fight over the condoms in the back of the crowd. People were pushing in. Oh, please, M’buye, I prayed, hoping he’d see me shaking my head, DON’T THROW THE CONDOMS. I was scared to my bones, hyper-alert, ready to jump in and stop the crowd, ready to die for the theatre. But with the adrenaline of fear, there was a familiar companion—
I have to admit it: that great big theatre glow, the one you get when your show is really working. Everyone wanted to see Mr. AIDS dance and blow kisses. The show was a killer.

Two weeks earlier I’d come to Awassa, capital of Sidama province in Southern Ethiopia, on the invitation of my German friend Dr. Hermann Hunzinger and his Awassan friend Aster Dabels, to make some theatre with teenagers, street kids. The kids had been initially collected by Aster’s sister, Sunnait, who had started feeding them in her back yard and sending them to school. For four years now, Aster had been raising money to support the food and school fees, and Hunzinger had gotten involved. Meanwhile the kids, remarkably, without any formal coaching, had taught themselves tumbling, juggling and tightrope. An older boy, Berreket, who’d had some gymnastics training, had become their director, and they’d done well, placing in competitions with gymnastics troupes from other cities affiliated with the Circus Ethiopia movement. Hunzinger, knowing that I worked with kids in Chicago, had told me about these young folks and asked me, “Is there a way to do something with them—something special that could raise money for the project?” Right, Hunzinger, I’d thought, it’s hard enough to get money for teen theatre here in the States. In the second poorest country in the world—fat chance for slim pickings! But somehow the phone conversation shifted to the subject of an NPR program I’d heard about how theatre and storytelling had been such an effective part of AIDS education in Uganda—perhaps we could form an AIDS Education Circus in Awassa? Hunzinger suggested that the Awassa market, one of the largest in Ethiopia, would be a perfect place for a show like that. Okay, I said, I could workshop the kids for an intensive two weeks. We’d build a show for the market and they’d perform it. “Okay, if you can get to Frankfurt and back,” Hunzinger said, “I’ll bankroll the rest. When are you available?”

It was a gig from Hunzinger heaven. I’d never been to Africa. I hit the library and the Internet and found that Ethiopia has the fourth highest rate of AIDS infection in Africa. Sixty million people and a 65-percent illiteracy rate. Little infrastructure. The one country in Africa that was never colonized. Three main roads in and out of a country the size of Spain and France combined. Landlocked. You can’t get a boat up the Blue Nile to it. One railroad built in 1898. The Tibet of Africa, wedged in between the hornet’s nests of war on either side in Sudan and Somalia; to the north, a recently subsided war with the present government’s sworn enemy, Eritrea, had in three months taken 120,000 lives. What a place to do theatre: millions of people off the grid, way out in the highlands, no TV, no radio, no drama critics, no parking, a ready-made ensemble. The scheme could work. Maybe. Of course it would, I said to myself. Once you start folks singing and dancing, there’s a common language. We’ll develop a warm-up, the warm-up will become the show, and it’ll be a piece of cake. Let them eat theatre.

When it came down to it, the project made as much sense to me as my latest piece, a choral work about my wife’s underwear called The Black Panty Suite. I got my shots and then got more, packed malaria pills, did two months of fund-raising in two weeks for my Chicago theatre company, Free Street Projects, and got on a plane for Frankfurt with a garbage bag of condoms and an alarmingly empty notebook.

Landing in Addis Ababa, my first images were of Hunzinger, my Swabian benefactor, and Aster, the Ethiopian princess-turned-German-housewife/social activist. True colonials can look at a place like Ethiopia and know that this world is their oyster and they can buy anything or anybody. But when I hit an underdeveloped country with my rucksack and my visa, I always feel fat, white and rich—that’s who I am on the street: just look at my shoes, there’s no denying it, the children know, they swarm around me begging, and I fill my pockets before I go out. Some days of silence are usually in order so that I can begin to understand, not what I see—that would take a lifetime—but at least my own reflection, who might I be to the people who see me.

First impressions of people: The women on the road crews swinging picks, lean sinew laying down cobbles. Solomon of the Van, our guide, a six-foot-two Oromo from Harrar (the town out toward the wilds of Somalia where Rimbaud died), always the watcher-outer for me with my eyes big and mouth shut, keeping track of my rucksack, my wallet. Light-skinned people with an African tinge, carrying the smell of coffee, roasting beans and eucalyptus. The “forengi” motel by the airport, a secluded outpost where various gringos on a mission could assemble forces before they took off for Ethiopia. The guy who was bicycling from Djibouti to South Africa. The Englishman from the British Museum with his safari vest of many pockets who had come to learn the Abore language before the tribe went extinct (“Only 25,000 left in Omo Valley, that’s critical mass for a language”). The French travel agent who had come to investigate the possibility of producing tourist safaris in Ethiopia (“There is no infrastructure in this damned place,” he said, as he headed home totally defeated). The pink-and-blue monoxide sunset on the airport road; the city sloping south to a darkening sky over the Rift Valley; the vans and taxis crammed, tens of thousands of people walking home; the begging children; the beautiful sign taking up a whole wall, blue and brown and yellow, a noble African couple with their well-dressed child, beaming with their creamy spoons in hand, the banner behind them proclaiming, “Yogurt, the Wave of the Future.” The leper clomping along on wooden hand-blocks, legs like brown rubber sukinis, face lit up in a huge smile by a small television on the counter of a tobacco shack on the airport road—and no, it couldn’t be, the figure on the tube lighting that smile in the leper’s face is Judge Judy, piped in by satellite in English. The leper liked Judge Judy and basked in her glow, nodding approval to me at her verdict, which seemed to be going against the blonde with the beehive. We watched her together in the living room of the world.

We shopped for supplies before we left Addis, scoring a hundred pounds of rice for the kids, potatoes, and enough bottled water to last the forengis two weeks. We attended a meeting I’d pre-arranged by e-mail with the cultural aide at the concrete-barriered American Embassy, who told us that the ambassador’s top priority was AIDS prevention, and set us up with contacts for meetings when we returned to Addis. Then we got in the vans bound for Awassa, 120 miles south past the lakes of the Rift Valley, Zway and Lengano, where we stopped to see the storks and the hippos. We drove past cattle herders and horse carts and charcoal stands by the side of the road, and everywhere, thatched huts and goats, cows, sheep, chickens, kids, camels, life, people, Africa.

We arrived in the dark at Sunnait’s house in Awassa, a little bungalow in a walled compound, and suddenly I was the American, one of only a few who had visited since they’d all been thrown out in 1972. There was good Ethiopian beer and there were many people. I met Sensamo Mengistu, the sports minister of the province of Sidama; Dr. Million Tumato, who was in charge of HIV/AIDS education for the province; Girma Melesse, a round koala bear of a man who managed the project for Hunzinger and Aster; and young Berreket, the kids’ director, who spoke just enough English to enable us to make a plan: a schedule and a pick-up time for me. I was taken out to meet the kids, in their eating tent, 40 of them. I said, “I’m David. I’m real excited about this,” and they smiled, and one of them said, “We’ve been waiting for you,” and I said, “See ya at nine,” and another said, “At the soccer field,” and I said, “I’m from Chicago,” and in unison they said, “Michael Jordan,” and then we were embarrassed and didn’t know what more to say.

In the morning there were storks nesting in the trees by the hotel and big black-and-white monkeys clambering around. Berreket picked me up in a “cultural taxi” (a horse and buggy) and we clomped a couple of miles to the soccer field. At nine some of the kids were there, but by ten lots of people were there—the kids, various groups who had come to see the American forengi’s first training, some men in suits (government?), some in traditional dress, and Hermann, Aster, Mengistu, Girma, Solomon and many additional teenagers. I shook hands with everyone and—feeling like a janitor posing as a surgeon before the first slice—I said, “Let’s begin. Please, Berreket, show me what the circus can do.”

Berreket clapped his hands and the kids lined up and began. Thank God, a warm-up! I could have kissed him. They were leading each other through moves, in rhythm, breaking sweat. What a relief. They spoke the language of theatre—it was an ensemble. I jumped in and warmed up with them. My audience laughed and pointed. I invited them to join in. Of course they didn’t. But I got some kicks doing jumping jacks, push-ups, cartwheels and somersaults, and running a lap around the soccer field got rid of the fear.

They showed me what they knew: gymnastic moves, fast chains of front-flips, cartwheels, walkovers and half-gainers, and some circus stunts—juggling, slack rope, batons and chairs. They could build a pyramid. Sort of. What else? They did some “mime,” which for them was acting scenes without words. I tried to guess the story of the scene and then somehow started directing. “Do it again. Use your hands. Try that. Use your eyes.” We fell into the language of rehearsing. It was natural. One kid, Sentayo, spoke good English and that helped immensely. Soon I was teaching them Linklater breathing and sighing. And Lessac shapes, the inverted megaphone. Soon we were singing. And dancing in the circle, chorus and solo, the ritual of warm-up. Oh, could they sing. Oh, did we dance. When I looked up an hour later, the audience was gone. We had begun.

We put the AIDS Education Circus together in 10 days. We rehearsed in two shifts during the day, accommodating different school schedules, singing, dancing, drumming, trying gymnastic stunts and martial arts, laying down scenes. We wrote at night, after supper in the food tent. They wrote in Amharic with my facilitation, translating back and forth until I had an idea what was being said (at least I hoped I did). The kids wrote in their notebooks, choosing the best idea, translating it for me, arguing, finding consensus, sometimes getting pissed or tired, or just clowning around. It was just like making a show anywhere.

The show was simple. The troupe runs in with bodies held over their heads, throws them in the air. They flip down to the ground. Bang: We’ve got the audience. First song: Why did they die? Malaria, tsetse, pneumonia, TB, heart, stroke, alchohol, parasites, anything but...the relatives sing. Ghosts spring up: “You lie.” Each Ghost tells its AIDS story: the truck driver and the prostitute, the wife and the husband, the kid who got it from her parents, the guy whose girlfriend lied.

Then in comes the big AIDS puppet, shaking and blowing kisses. They fight him with flips, kicks, cartwheels and summersaults. He always wins. Mr. AIDS blows kisses at the audience and shakes his ass. He drinks a beer. Sex is fun. Come on.

No, no, the children say, and keep trying to fight Mr. AIDS. But nothing works. How do you fight AIDS? Did someone say condoms? Yes! Be smart! An actor does a flip in place and when he lands he has a condom in his hand—and condoms work on Mr. AIDS like Kryptonite on Superman. The puppet fights for the condom, snatches it, tries to bite it, but too late—a little kid, the tiniest actor, flying through the air, gets the condom back. The puppet sags.

Someone calls out: “One to One” (monogamy). The girls stand on the boys’ shoulders. Oh, poor Mr. AIDS, he doesn’t like that. He’s wavering and toppling, staggering now. The troupe dances to the hospital, the girls still on the boys’ shoulders. They form a giant moving pyramid and unfurl a large banner that says CONDOMS, MONOGAMY, TESTING, FIGHT AIDS TOGETHER. AIDS falls, AIDS dies, the puppet is carried off. The circle forms and a really simple rocking song ensues that says, again and again, CONDOMS, MONOGAMY, TESTING, TREATMENT, FIGHT AIDS TOGETHER. The children dance with the audience. Condoms are thrown to the audience, information about local services is distributed and broadcast by the AIDS truck, and condom demonstrations are given.

We cinched up the plan with the provincial HIV/AIDS education office (Dr. Million Tumato and his sound truck). The sports minister got the okay from the market authority and the city powers. Berreket took me to market day to scope out the scene. I’d never been anywhere like it. It was a huge place of 12,000 people, stuffed with hay and donkeys, piles of grain, beans, T-shirts, sneakers, firewood, camels, ghat, gange, baskets, kitchenware, heaps of coffee, bricks, cassettes, healers, peppers, potatoes, flip-flops, buffalos and lumber. It was like being inside a Jackson Pollack painting. We decided on three places to do the show. We’d perform, move through the market singing, perform, move, perform and move again. The AIDS truck would follow us.

Aster found a local artist to make a giant death’s-head puppet: Mr. AIDS. The kids trucked out their old gymnastics costumes and on performance day we trooped, singing and dancing with our banners and Mr. AIDS, three miles through the town to the market. Little children followed us calling out “Atto AIDS” (Mr. AIDS). Hunzinger videoed. Aster and I had cameras. We set up. The crowd began to gather. I can’t remember ever feeling happier than I did that morning. I was thinking, “I’m here in the market of Awassa doing a show. I’ve finally made it. This is my Broadway. This is my Hollywood.”

In fact, it was nearly my Kent State. At the point when the market police were whipping the audience back as they surged forward, faces angry and fists clenched, I had to do something. I had to try to stop the show, somehow, before the audience fell in on the performers. I called upon Jesus, I called upon Ghandi, but it was Viola Spolin who saved me: Raising my hands, a lone forengi in an Ethiopian sea, I signaled the kids to stop. I placed myself between the police whips and the angry audience, stood high on my tiptoes and fell slowly onto the audience. They caught me. And held me. It was the “trust exercise.” A strange stillness infected the market. And then, the group intelligence impelled the right movement: Slowly, everyone stepped back.

I nodded to M’buye. The company, undaunted, resumed, the audience again pressed in, but this time with care, and the kids, adapting our circle-your-wagons blocking to one-third the planned space, cartwheeled and tossed each other on a dime. At the end, they danced with the audience and handed out the condoms “ant to ant” (one to one). We made it through the show. I was shaking. Hunzinger was laughing with relief: “Oh, David, that was truly an unforgettable piece of theatre.” And it was. We’d performed with conviction, we’d mesmerized the crowd, we’d shown enough love to miraculously get a thousand people in the heat of anger to take six steps back. No one died. Great show.

When we set up the second and third shows, I drew a line in the dirt, making a huge performance circle, put little kids in the front row and big guys behind them to protect them. The remaining shows were smooth, though the kids were hot and their voices were going. We handed out thousands of condoms and reams of information. Dr. Tumato and Mr. Sports Minister were happy. The market police calmed down. We marched home. I felt fabulous, and so did the kids. We’d won. Our Tony. Our Awassa Obie.

I bought three sheep and three cases of pop. We sang and danced goodbye that night, and the next day we drove north to Addis to do business. I had a show and I had to sell it, same in Addis as in Chicago, except in Addis UNICEF is Steppenwolf, and the regional reps are markets and refugee camps. I made the rounds: UNICEF, American Aid, Pathfinder and other international agencies with a focus on youth or HIV/ED. I returned to the U.S. and, lord help me, started raising money for the Awassa Children’s Project. Last July, American Aid gave the circus a couple of thousand dollars. Folks from the embassy e-mailed me pictures of the show from the market of Shashemene. Now the kids are touring the southern towns on the road to Kenya, and I’m on my way back to tweak the show and to try to set up gigs in the refugee camps along the Sudanese border.

There’s no end to this story, at least not at this juncture, but there is a point (and a glorious one) that that puts shivery hairs on end at the back of my neck whenever I think of it. The point is: There’s a huge need for theatre in the real, vast “out there”—way out there beyond the loges and the balconies, beyond the struggling black boxes and the hot-tix booths and the developmental workshops, even beyond community theatre or street theatre as we know it. There is a need for theatre in the dusty markets of the globe…and with that need the possibility of making amazing artistic contact with fellow humans in the most faraway places, the possibility of doing exactly what we know how to do, what we’ve trained to do, what we are best at: warm-ups, rehearsals, writing shows, performing and producing in the world ensemble. Come join us.

David Schein is the artistic director of Free Street Programs in Chicago. For more information about the Awassa AIDS Education Circus, contact him at Awassa@hotmail.com.

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