An innovative Georgetown lab looks to theater to quell political fires

“Why do you go and storm the U.S. Capitol, or damage property or do any of those violent acts? You do it because you believe your voice is not heard,” recited Nicole Albanese, a self-described liberal who graduated from Georgetown University in May. The phrases had been these of Daniel Cochrane, a politically conservative alumnus of Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., who, in flip, delivered two minutes of remarks by Albanese.

“It’s such a big country, its identity has definitely shifted and changed,” Cochrane stated, as Albanese watched. “So, I think some people don’t really have as clear, like, an idea of how it has changed.”

All night, pairs from the 2 faculties stepped into the roles of their companions — an train to get folks with opposing views to pay attention to each other, utilizing the instruments of efficiency. The brainchild of Derek Goldman, chairman of the Georgetown Department of Performing Arts, this system known as “In Your Shoes.” It is one aspect of a singular Georgetown effort, the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics — a blended unit of drama and diplomacy that appears particularly well-suited for a nation divided in opposition to itself.

“All of this work is what I’ve been calling ‘witness across difference,’ ” stated Goldman, who created the Lab in 2012 with Cynthia P. Schneider, a former U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands who’s now a professor at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. “Which is a way of saying that there is a particular power that performance has, to allow us to listen deeply, bear witness and ultimately empathize with each other.”

Empathy, or reasonably the shortage of it, has been a topic on the high of the American rhetorical menu over the previous 4 years: It might even be argued that President Biden’s election displays voters’ need for a compassionate chief with a expertise for listening. Empathy, too, appears in some method to be on the coronary heart of lots of the Lab’s interdisciplinary initiatives: to interact buddies or strangers in dialogue by means of artwork and creative apply — whether or not on the degree of on a regular basis discourse or between nations in types of cultural diplomacy.

“Each of us from our own perspective has gone full-steam ahead with our real belief in the power of the arts broadly, and in particular live performance, to be a transformative experience,” Schneider stated of her collaboration with Goldman. “And that live performance has the capacity to engage people around political issues in a very profound way. And really in a way nothing else can.”

The Lab is project-oriented, reasonably than a classroom-based enterprise, co-sponsored by the theater program and the School of Foreign Service. “We’ve been around for 100 years, and we were designed to be about cultural competency and empathy,” noticed Joel Hellman, dean of the School of Foreign Service. He added that it is sensible for his program to be a part of the Lab, as a result of “we’re constantly trying to open minds.”

Goldman and Schneider’s aspirations for the Lab have propelled it onto various paths. One of the Lab’s long-term tasks has been a play concerning the late Jan Karski, hero of the Polish resistance throughout World War II and later a Georgetown professor. An early model of “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” starring David Strathairn and written by Goldman and former pupil Clark Young, was carried out on the opening of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw in 2015. The play has been made right into a film with Strathairn and will likely be proven at movie festivals later this yr.

Over the previous a number of years, too, the Lab has been grappling with an unsightly Georgetown legacy: the college’s historical past of proudly owning and promoting enslaved folks. “Here I Am,” a digital efficiency piece that may premiere in April, is the story of Mélisande Short-Colomb, a New Orleans girl and a descendant of two of the 314 enslaved individuals who in 1838 had been bought by the Maryland Jesuits to elevate cash for the college. Short-Colomb, 67 — who 4 years in the past turned a Georgetown pupil after studying about her ancestors — performs the piece she created with actress-playwright ­Nikkole Salter.

It was whereas taking considered one of Goldman’s theater courses that “Here I Am” was conceived. “The class was not a performance-based class, but a memory-based class where we wrote about memories,” Short-Colomb recalled in a Zoom interview. After she wrote about her personal experiences, “at the end of the semester, Derek said, ‘I think you have something.’ ” After a broader play concerning the group of enslaved folks, who turned referred to as the GU272, fell by means of, Short-Colomb stated, she and Lab officers went to the college administration and obtained approval for her venture.

One of the by means of strains with tasks as completely different as “Remember This” and “Here I Am” is the notion of witnessing, and the ethical authority that arises from private testimony. “What I have found over the years doing this is that people respond to it with a visceral, gut reaction,” Strathairn stated of the Karski present. “It’s more of an empathic feeling that can nurture a different way of thinking — especially in a theater, when you have 300 people of all different ideologies, sharing an empathic moment.”

“In Your Shoes” goes deep into sharing, too. It’s a collaboration between the Lab and Georgetown’s Democracy and Governance program, sparked in 2018 by program director Daniel Brumberg’s curiosity in college students exploring political polarization. As the idea for the “In Your Shoes” meetups took form, Brumberg contacted Cory Grewell, a professor of literature and drama membership adviser at Patrick Henry, a 40-minute drive from Georgetown. Its homepage notes that the school “exists to glorify God by challenging the unacceptable status quo in higher education.”

Grewell stated he instantly acknowledged the worth in Goldman’s methodology: what Brumberg describes academically as “facilitated dialogue.” The college students is probably not strolling a mile in each other’s footwear, however they take a number of main strides in them.

“It’s not simply bringing people from different ideological camps to talk,” Grewell stated. “You really have to imagine what makes this other person tick, their fears, their desires.”

And as Brumberg advised, just a little showbiz in academia can’t damage: “I guess Derek would say there’s an actor in all of us.”

For the Lab’s “In Your Shoes” Zoom session final month, individuals from earlier gatherings reunited, and got a normal “prompt” for his or her discussions. “We said, ‘Focus the conversation on your experience around January 6 and since then, and what they surfaced for you,’ ” Goldman recalled. Before the coronavirus pandemic imposed restrictions on bodily contact, the Patrick Henry and Georgetown college students gathered in individual, and over the course of this system, they interacted with completely different companions.

“It’s separate from finding common ground, or ‘Let’s see what we can agree on’ type of rhetoric,” stated Ijeoma Njaka, a Brown University graduate who works half time because the Lab’s inclusive pedagogy specialist. “There are students on both campuses who were interested in this project because they thought they were living in a bubble.”

One of the objectives of “In Your Shoes” is to encourage individuals to seize not solely the phrases of the opposite individual, but in addition a few of their mannerisms — a delicate acknowledgment of how fully they’re being noticed and heard. “To my delight, the approach was not about diminishing differences, it’s about encouraging differences,” stated Cochrane, who graduated from Patrick Henry in 2019 with a level in political idea and now works on authorized and coverage points within the D.C. space.

Cochrane stated he was involved that the exchanges may devolve into arguments about then-President Donald Trump. The comradely spirit engendered by the train short-circuited any animus. “We were discussing matters that were very controversial — there’s an obvious recognition that we disagree — but never with any animosity,” he stated.

Albanese, whose Georgetown diploma is in American research and theater, had “some walls up” at the beginning of “In Your Shoes” in her junior yr. “It took me a while to get vulnerable with people from the other school,” she stated, including that asking each other questions on household and loneliness broke down these partitions. “Just meeting actual people who identify as conservative and who are my age adds so much nuance to understanding what they actually think.”

The potentialities for “In Your Shoes” appear auspicious. Goldman stated he has supervised variations of this system at worldwide theater conferences — and has been queried about utilizing the method in marriage remedy.

As for Cochrane and Albanese, the Lab opened their eyes. “The remarkable thing about performing as Daniel was how my body clicked right into it — this physical release,” Albanese stated.

Her efficiency, in truth, earned raves from probably the most member of the viewers. “She did a fantastic job,” Cochrane stated. “What it shows is that she truly did listen.”