Oct. 3-5 at 7 p.m.
Theatre 101

The School of Performing Arts presents “Bits and Pieces,”created by Misheck Mzmura, a third-year Master of Fine Arts student in theatre-directing and public dialogue. The show runs from Oct. 3-5 at 7 p.m. in Theatre 101 and is the second production of this play to be mounted this year.

The debut performance in April was created through a generation process called devising, in which Mzmura led the student actors and musicians through different reflections surrounding the body of rain-making myths present in Africa. The original troupe was composed of international students from Africa and Southeast Asia.

“I wanted to see, even myself, how I would be able to tell that story in a different context,” Mzmura said about the impetus for the play. “It’s very different if I tell this story in Africa. Most people would probably relate to that and understand it.”

Through their interaction with the material and the sharing of rain-making myths from Ghana, Malawi, and Nigeria, the students identified “common themes that are almost universal,” Mzmura said. One such theme was the idea of power and authority.

From this lens, Mzmura began looking to stories from the Western world that echoed these themes and found them in Shakespeare’s “Marullus in Julius Caesar” and from the Abrahamic traditions in the story of Yahweh casting Satan from heaven.

“I take my performances from different worlds. I think that the stories that are there should be able to be told in any area around the world, in the same way we see Western stories being told in Africa,” Mzmura said.  While his intention is not to engage with the source material in the religious context, he has found that the idea of belief significantly impacts the expressions of authority within these stories.