Colonnades Theatre Lab (South Africa)
The Colonnades Theatre Lab (South Africa) was a project devised to promote the arts and culture in South Africa, specifically performance drama.
A South African non-profit Section 21 company in 2005, dedicated to using the perceptual power of theater as an agent of change in societies moving from conflict to peace, it was established as a sister organization by Michael Lessac and the Colonnades Theatre Lab, Inc. of New York. The first undertaking of the organization was to undertake something called the Truth in Translation Project (funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation[1]).
The idea of the Project was to tell the story of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission from the perspective of the interpreters who translated the testimony into the many languages spoken in South Africa. Presented in the form of a play accompanied by music, the project aimed to highlight the trauma, anger, sadness and healing that accompanied South Africa’s attempt to deal with the political violence and human rights abuses of the apartheid past.
The grant was specifically made to enable Colonnades Theatre Lab (South Africa) to take the play to all the areas in South Africa that were still still struggling to come to terms with the conflicts of the past, as well as to international audiences in conflict-ridden places like Palestine, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Northern Ireland.
