Youth in History Drama Writing Exchange

Zhao Chuan and Qondiswa James will be brought together live, and Anuja Ghosalkar and Pierre-Angelo Zavaglia will be hooked up through multimedia interactions. With their different skin colors, accents, laughter and pain, they have traveled across four continents and five countries, crossing long borders and barriers, trying to escape from their isolated existences and struggles to find a common destiny and an emotional resonance that can connect them. It was a voyage.

They began by looking back, meeting with stories of people from different places who had been seasoned and battered by life, people who were struggling to find their way in the sea of history and their youth. The interviewees include South African dreamers, musicians and activists, Bollywood actors and rappers who were born Muslims in India, Chinese New Wave artists of the 1980s, and Venezuelan immigrant mothers who traveled across the ocean. The interviews with these figures connect the efforts of seemingly unattainable people, and even more so, connect a common history – one in which the survivors stand up from the brutal, or melancholic, or passionate waves of youthful practice and history.