WorldEnsemble Log

in collaboration with Carol Morrison

The Story of BrooKenya! – How We Made a Soap Opera and Saved Some Lives is now available online. Just click to see nine colorful pages that tell the tale–starting with the idea to “create community through performance”, through the production of a soap opera with 125 residents in Brooklyn, New York City and Kisumu, Kenya, to the dramatic real-life denouement years later. This picture story was exhibited at the Brooklyn Central Library, September-November 2009. The piece incorporates stills taken from 100 film scenes produced by an extraordinary, life-changing collaboration of people living 7,000 miles apart. To see some actual scenes from the project, go to the Screening Room at BrooKenya!

Dear Friends,

In this time of turning, I contemplate the miracles of last year.

It began with saving some lives in Kenya.

As you may recall, back in 2002 Kitche Magak and I agreed to ‘create community through performance across borders local and global’. With scores of residents in Brooklyn, New York and Kisumu, Kenya, we built BrooKenya!—a web of stories lived and told, told and lived. We spun the boundaries of colonialism, vast distance, and fissures of home turf into the connective tissue of story, kinship and possibility. When violence exploded in Kenya a year ago, the new neural pathways we created allowed us to funnel money and morale from Americans to Kitche and friends in Africa. With great courage, they passed these gifts across a tribal divide—buying and delivering food to the starving and persecuted huddled in police stations, speaking out on the radio to end the aggression that threatened all. Our small piece of netting was knit with other grassroots networks. Together we kept people alive in Kisumu during the month before international aid agencies arrived.

We know how many people were killed in Kenya during that time. But we don’t know the number of people who might have died but did not because of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. News of death and destruction is never the whole story. Else, as my friend Kitche says, ‘we would have packed it in a long time ago’.

I reflect on this as our global market economy goes through a treacherous but much needed restructuring. We hope for it to get better, and sooner rather than later. In the meantime, we turn to the commerce of community—an economy of offering, receiving and passing along gifts; these contracts of the heart we often call love. This ancient, subtle humming is always there, singing our world into being underneath the grand orchestrations of financial exchange. With the din of the trading floor muted, we can more easily hear this clear simple voice. Witness charities overwhelmed by volunteers here in New York City.

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