Rebecca Davis

Rebecca will create Differences, a cross-cultural collaboration, utilizing dance to spark community discussion about ethnic differences. Working with professional dancers in Rwanda and students in Philadelphia, she will examine the challenges and benefits of living in a diverse community. The substance of the program will be success stories of perpetrators and survivors living together in a post-genocide environment with Rwanda as the case study. Parallels will then be drawn to contemporary American society where we experience similar challenges in dealing with ethnicity, race, and gender every day.

Rebecca will coordinate 1994 in Philadelphia, a creative dance piece in which Philadelphia teens will portray the stories of victims who survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide and the reconstruction efforts that follow such atrocities. Rebecca will spend four weeks in Kigali, Rwanda, working with local NGOs and living with the local people to gather information about the genocide and especially how survivors are recovering and building their lives in the aftermath. Following her time in Kigali, she will select some of these stories to be transformed into creative movement pieces with music and spoken word. In September 2008, Rebecca will work with ten teenagers to formulate a full narrative dance piece that shares these stories with the public. There will be several community and school performances in Fall 2008.