"What would make a woman who was mass raped during the genocide stay during the performance where there is mass rape?" Azeda asked. "I want her to stay there. I don't want her to stand up and leave because I'm not doing justice to the story."
Azeda, the founder, artistic director and choreographer of Mashirika Creative and Performing Arts in Rwanda, spoke about her 2004 play "Rwanda My Hope," which commemorates the 10-year anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. The development of the play required both familiarity with the subject and the ability to take Rwandan viewers on a journey in order to effectively present their stories, Azeda said.
Since the play was originally performed in Kigali, Rwanda, the link between the performance and the audience consisting largely of Rwandans was central to her work, Azeda said.
The outflow of emotions from members of the audience suggested that the performance was something "real to them," according to Azeda. The small outbursts from the audience members consisting of screams and whistles constituted the most touching reactions to the original 100-minute performance of the play, which represents the 100 days of genocide, she said.
Art should become a tool for "social transformation," Azeda said. Although she was allotted only two weeks to craft a completed play, Azeda said she wanted to ensure that performers adequately expressed the "unspeakable" aspects of the genocide.
"There were a lot of things you could not speak," Azeda said. "One who could not speak could sing. One who could not sing could dance."
Theater professor and Director of the Dartmouth Dance Ensemble Ford Evans said in the panel discussion that an artistic piece must leave room for the viewer to interpret its meaning.
The creation of a new language of "movement," for example, allows performers to generate impulses and create an artistic work that will not polarize an audience, Evans said.
Evans described a DDE project that seeks to portray sexual assault at Dartmouth. "Undue Influence," which will open in the spring, examines the ways students and faculty perceive sexual assault, and transforms these facts into movement, he said.
Evans said many students hesitated when asked to share their views on the subject, until he asked them to become a character, "someone they knew, or imagined could exist and the floodgates opened."
Only when Evans prompted students to construct "mind maps" detailing their experiences with sexual assault did they become aware of the issue of sexual assault's proximity to their lives, he said.
"This idea of sexual abuse is so close to them that it was very difficult for them to become vulnerable in this environment," Evans said.
Although the script for the project has not yet been written, Evans said he expects the piece will chronicle the events taking place at a typical fraternity party.
In her presentation, art history professor and event panelist Mary Coffey stressed the "performative role" of the viewer in relation to the Orozco murals in Baker-Berry Library, both as a whole narrative and a series of individual parts.
In order to understand the violence depicted by the murals, viewers cannot simply observe the images, but must also attempt to develop the larger story and implicate themselves in the murals' content, Coffey said.
The murals, "The Epic of American Civilization," qualify as avant-garde art that actively engage viewers, who must be "active and erudite" when understanding its background.
As a war illustrator, Orozco purposefully avoided making the mural too graphic and instead left the viewer with the responsibility of reaching his or her own conclusion, Coffey said.
Evans said this awareness of the visualization of violence in art is integral to its impact.
"Let the piece stop short of giving a specific point of view," Evans said. "Have a point of view, but don't limit what the answers might be."
