The Healing Power of Art
The Healing Power of Art
January 2011
If you’re on campus February 4th, you don’t want to miss the South Africa Project, a performance at the Marvin Center by 12 young artists from the township of Winterveldt, South Africa, who portray their daily struggles through song, dance, theatre, and poetry. They are here thanks to the efforts of Theatre Professor Leslie Jacobson, her students, and the Bokamosa Youth Foundation.
“In Winterveldt, South Africa, the people have a concept called umbuntu, which loosely translates to ‘I cannot be fully myself unless I help you to become fully yourself,’” said Jacobson, who has traveled to the rural township every summer since 2003. “This performance transforms that healing notion into a powerful example of how people can move beyond poverty and despair and into a new and better future. We all can benefit from this awareness.”
Winterveldt has a 50 percent unemployment rate and HIV/AIDS infection rate that affects nearly a quarter of the 700,000 people who live there. Teen pregnancy, tuberculosis, family violence, and rape are also prominent in the community. At the town’s Bokamoso Youth Center, Jacobson and her colleague Roy Barber, faculty member at St. Andrews Episcopal High School, help the gifted Center staff to teach life skills—self-actualization, safe sex, respect for oneself and others, problem solving, anger management, how to write a resume, among others—though theatre, music, dance, and writing.
“The arts help the students focus their thinking and understand their issues and challenges in new ways,” said Jacobson. “We create a play with music around what’s happening in their lives and it helps them to overcome the hardships they face every day.”
Over the years, Jacobson has worked with the youth to create a series of plays, including Family Portraits: The Door is Open, which expressed the young people’s experience with domestic violence, and Halfway to Somewhere, about success and what it means in the context of life and culture in Winterveldt.
“Seeing the transformative power of art is something you never forget,” said Jacobson. “It stays with you.”
Many of the GW theatre and dance students who accompany Jacobson to help her in her work have been awarded scholarships and fellowships to fund their travel. Among them are 2010 graduates Elizabeth Acevedo, Caroline O’Grady, and Scout Seide, who traveled to Winterveldt in 2009.
“Our students are so remarkable and want to help change the world in so many ways. The work at the Youth Center is a great match,” said Jacobson.
“The South Africa project combines two of the things I am most passionate about: theatre and social politics,” said O’Grady. “Even though I was there to teach, I learned just as much from the students I worked with at Bokamoso. Despite the poverty, crime, and harsh conditions, the youth reach for a better life and future, grasping at any opportunity to further their education.”
Funded by a Gamow Fellowship, O’Grady filmed a documentary about the Bokamoso youth and the Winterveldt community. Once she returned to campus, she was assisted by the School of Media and Public Affair’s Documentary Center Professors Nina Seavey and Natasha Klauss, and alumnus Ryder Haske, BA’10, in the editing and production of the film.
While O’Grady was filming, Seide used her abilities in dance, creative movement, and stage combat to broaden the students’ expressive techniques in the life skills workshop; and Acevedo, a Luther Rice Fellow, led the Bokamoso youth in a series of poetry workshops that resulted in a book of their poems.
“Working with the Bokamoso youth was an incredibly rewarding experience and still inspires me,” said Acevedo. “I pray they all continue writing.”
This summer, Director of the Art Therapy Program Heidi Bardot and a group of art therapy graduate students will join Jacobson in Winterveldt.
“The art therapy students will take us to a whole new level by incorporating the visual arts,” said Jacobson. “The South African culture has artistic traditions in beadwork, painting, and embroidery. The graduate students’ work with the young people will really take the Center’s visual, healing arts to a new place.”
The February performance at GW is part of a month-long series of performances in Washington, D.C., to benefit the Bokamoso Youth Foundation. During their final week in the U.S., the visiting artists will live on campus with GW students and attend classes, experiencing what it is like to be a university student in an American urban city.
“These young people have opened themselves to receive what our GW students offer,” said Jacobson. “And in exchange they give so much to us. I’m excited for them to bring their unique stories to the people here at GW.”
More details about the South Africa Project are available on the Department of Theatre and Dance website.
Image caption: Youth rehearsing for a play in Bokamoso.
