Dogsbody

Dogsbody is a new work written in a collaborative process by San Francisco’s experimental ensemble Theatre of Yugen with Artistic Associate/playwright Erik Ehn and directed by Dijana Milosevic, founder of Serbia’s DAH Teatar. It will premiere in October 2009, commissioned and presented by San Francisco’s contemporary arts venue Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.

Looking at contemporary uses of killing on the spectrum of war to genocide, Dogsbody is an adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad from the point of view of child soldiers. In recent times children have come to be in the front lines of bloody and brutal violence in guerilla warfare throughout the world. One example of this escalating practice is the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) led by a messianic commander (Joseph Kony). For over two decades in Northern Uganda and now Southern Sudan, children (as young as seven and numbering over forty thousand) were kidnapped and then forced into service as soldiers and sex slaves for rebel armies. Known as the “Forgotten War”, this disastrous conflict has gone largely unwitnessed by the West, and only after 20 years of generational and societal devastation has it received international attention and effort towards resolution. Similar use of children exists in many other countries including Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Burma.

While the distressing situation of child soldiers is a highly charged societal issue of our time, Theatre of Yugen’s work is dedicated to exploring the nature of the soul through formal expression, and we approach the subject from this axis rather than as a docu-drama or for political means. As artists, we recognize as an act of social activism the courage and willingness it takes for both artist and audience to render and to witness the provocative and the disturbing facets of war, force and destruction. The act of creation, perhaps more than a general concept of “peace”, is in itself the opposite of war and a regenerative act. In particular, our play will go intimately to the interior core of examining our human capacity for force and violence in the most extreme perversion of humanity – when children are the perpetrators and even their families are their victims. Using the ancient epic and poetic source of The Iliad alongside traditional physical theatrical forms, we create the foundation for a story set in a future America, near the oil refineries of Texas.

October 14th, 2009
at NOHspace (2840 Mariposa Street at Alabama Street)
Public Discussion on Child Soldiers

IGSC is a nonprofit organization based in Kigali, Rwanda. IGSC’s mission is to testify, to study genocide through rigorous cross-disciplinary scholarship, and to understand various mechanisms and structures of violence, with the goal of preventing genocide and mass violence.