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The play premiered in Rwanda, the scene of one of the most brutal acts witnessed in recent years, which saw up to a million people killed over three months, Michael Lessac, the director of the play, admits that there are other genocides that rank with the one in Rwanda, but the singularity of the Rwandan experience was the macabrish efficiency with which the killers worked. He said the seed of the play was a desire to share South Africa's healing experience with the rest of the world. "It began with an idea that we want to tell a story, and tell a story through the young interpreters." But why the translators, why not the receivers or givers of the violence? The translators sat between the victims and the perpetrators. They told everyone's story," he said. "We wanted to tell the story through people who felt both sides. They were never able to turn away, for two-and-half years." Unlike the rest of the world, who could ignore what was going on by not reading the papers or watching the news. The production is intense and much of this is borne by the music. "Hugh Masckela took the real testimony (delivered at the commission) and turned it into something of beauty and pain." The music, all composed and arranged by Masekela, carries the burden of memory, of pain, of the sordid experiences and of human strength. Even though the translators were told not to get involved, to detach themselves from the stories that they translated, it is through the music that they become one with their subjects, and where their simultaneous positions as screens and as subjects of the commission ebbs and flows. I don't remember how the American writer James Baldwin became part of the conversation, but soon we were talking about him. "Baldwin would have understood what happened here,” said the New York director, paying homage to a fellow New Yorker. Indeed, Baldwin wrote about human cruelty to other humans: "The world has never lacked for horrifying examples," he ventured to say. "Even if Birmingham (Alabama) is worse, no doubt Johannesburg, South Africa, beats it by several miles." Or in the play The Amen Corner. "Son, don't try to get away from the things that hurt you. The things that hurt you, sometimes that's all you got. You got to learn to live with those things and use them." The play does not shy away from the testimony that hurts us, and makes use of a montage of props, such as the digital projections that are shown on the screen made of shirts. "The shirts represent the ancestors that are still present," Lessac said, vaguely. In Rwanda, though, they assumed a different meaning. The shirts reminded them of the killing fields; some of the victims were mechanically ordered to remove their clothes before facing the machete. "The screening means different things in different places,"said Lessac. But, for me, this just accentuated the chaos that the play is really about. One finds oneself trying to absorb the vivid music, make sense of the dialogue and attempt to watch the projections on the shirt screen simultaneously. This is a kin, 1 thought, to translating the truth of a process that is sticky

Carey Show, The Naked Truth, Just Shoot Me, Everyone Loves Raymond, George and Leo, Titus, Lucky... among others, Lessac is also a singer/songwriter and has recorded an album for Colombia Records. Mr Lessac holds a doctorate in developmental psychology, and has taught both theatre and psychology at numerous universities. In 2005, he established a sister company in South Africa, called Colonnades Theatre Lab, SA, which has been jointly responsible for the development of the award-winning theatre piece, Truth in Translation. The Truth in Translation project has toured to Rwanda, South Africa, the USA, Sweden, Belfast, Zimbabwe and won the Fringe First award at the Edinburgh Festival 2007.

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