Me and my two exceptional translators, Susan and Fatimah, taught these four year olds to do the traditonal Afghan stick dance (I wrote about the inspiration for this a few days ago-one of the many serendipitous occasions of my time here). The girls worked very hard for the Friday performance that was to be attended by all the other orphanage girls ( also scheduled to perform), Simorgh students and their families, and the US consulate members with big hair (our funders)-about two or three hundred people.
Not much went according to plan. Susan and Fatimah went early to the market on Friday morning to buy dresses and costumes for the older girls who were going to perform an original puppet play they had created. The program was set to begin at 3Pm with the bands Gene tutored -they were about an hour late. Next up was the Simorgh Theater Company, the group of young actors I worked with primarily for the ten days we were in Herat. The core group is brilliant, about 5 twelve and fourteen year olds and a few older girls. The whole group numbers about 30 with ten boys. The boys created their own play, a slapstick scene in a classroom in which they got to try out the hip hop they had learned from Michael. The scene created entirely by the boys opens with two of the younger ones, Jafar voicing a moose marionette and Mustafa, the voice for the brown bear hand puppet arguiing who is the better dancer the Moose or the Bear. They were suddenly up first because the music for the first play hit a snafu Jafar got his moose (thank you, Alaska) marionette tangled up
(to be continued)
(Note: for good photos of Herat, check my blog post March, 2009)
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