Shailja Patel: Bwagamoyo: The Father

Bwagamoyo, the second work in the Kenyan poet, playwright, theatre artist, and political activist Shailja Patel’s four-part opus Migritude, charts a voyage from colonial Zanzibar to Kenya’s 2008 post-election violence by way of the male body. Drawing on the history of the artist’s father, born and raised in Zanzibar, and Patel’s personal involvement with Kenya’s post-election crisis, Bwagamoyo shows how the architecture of Empire is codified on the bodies of men, and how the stories of our bodies are intimately mirrored in the larger Body Politic, and in our national histories.

Inspired in part by Nordic myths and the work of Ingmar Bergman, Bwagamoyo was one of 7 scripts selected from over 500 for the 2010 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, where it was workshopped with Liesl Tommy (who is currently directing the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ruined) and Shirley Fishman, dramaturgical director of La Jolla Playhouse. Earlier work-in-progress readings of Bwagamoyo were presented at Sweden’s Slottsbiografen in Uppsala (where cinema legend Ingmar Bergman saw his first films and handled his first projector) and Kenya’s National Theatre. CNN calls Patel “the face of globalization as a people-centered phenomenon of migration and exchange.”

This performance is made possible by the W. Ford Schumann ‘50 Endowment for the Arts and The Lipp Family Fund for Performing Artists.