Advanced Playwrighting: Guhahamuka

Guhahamuka is a Kinyarwanda word meaning “breathlessness,” sometimes applied to the wordlessness that befalls the survivors of trauma. We will progress through a series of graduated exercises design to work-out the fundamentals of writing for the live encounter, with an emphasis on the uses of testimony, and language that pushes into spaces where language doesn’t fit, doesn’t belong, fails, converts itself to different energies. How a writer’s technique images spiritual practice, and avails of the useful impossibilities of incarnation and transcendence. Taking on a practical language from contemplative traditions as means of ordering the writer’s craft.