Since I’ve been teaching the Theatre of the Oppressed in civil war torn Burma, my university students and I joined the global call to perform The Gaza Monologues in solidarity with all the Palestinians suffering genocidal violence in illegally occupied Palestine (for all of us to see with daily and nightly horror on our screens). As you can see from these images, my Burmese students got creative in their performances, with some using avatars and video footage backdrops on Zoom.
Not so long after we performed The Gaza Monologues, a number of my Burmese students had their homes and all their possessions blown up in airstrikes by Myanmar’s military planes. They told me that when their homes were blown up, they remembered performing The Gaza Monologues in our class and that memory gave them strength and perseverance to continue their studies (despite enormous hardships) and to not be completely destroyed by hopelessness and depression. They never imagined that they too would find themselves in similar circumstances.
Miraculously, my students just graduated with their Associate’s Degrees in an in-person ceremony in Thailand (which you can watch here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAb23rJI-wE).
