That gave me a very specific perspective of being able to stand on the outside and look at how cities work and how power works and then interrogate it and communicate across differences of culture, community, and location. I grew up in a way as a double-outsider: as a citizen of the global south and being outside what is considered global centers of power, and being an outsider in the society that I lived in. And second, being a brown minority citizen of the black majority newly independent African nation. The two things that shaped me most growing up were first being a Kenyan of the post-independence generation. How has your personal history evolved with your artistic vision? When I heard I was selected, I was blown away. I worked through the night before the submission deadline and hit the send the button. I asked myself if it was even worth going through the process, and finally I decided it was worth it even to just challenge myself to see if I could put my work into something that looked like a play. Submitting to Sundance Institute’s Theatre Lab was a huge long shot for me. I never thought of myself as a playwright or formal theatre maker, but my work just lends itself to those forms. My passion has always been how to capture the political: how to tell truths about the global south to audiences in the global north in a way that’s engaging and accessible and enters people’s hearts. In a nutshell, how did you arrive at this moment today on the cusp of attending the Lab? We spoke to Patel both before and after she attended the Lab to connect the dots of an artistic breakthrough in the making. Her current project, Bwagamoyo, explores the construction of masculinity under the control of colonial empires in East Africa. As her poetry performances literally outgrew the slam setup in terms of running time and space constraints, she made the leap into full-on theatre. For years, she has written and performed slam poetry about her personal connection to Kenya’s history. Patel has always been passionate about politics in her work. Patel, along with fellows Adam Bock and Jennifer Maisel, took her script through intensive workshops to get ready for the stage. This crossover setting was the perfect backdrop for slam-poet turned playwright, Kenyan-born now Berkeley resident Shailja Patel to burrow into two weeks of deep revision. Earlier this month, Sundance Institute’s Theatre Program temporarily moved one of its labs from the Sundance Resort to Massachusetts at the creative haven of MASS MoCA.
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