Sema: The Kenya Project is a showing of music, photos, and stories from East Africa. Following the oral storytelling tradition, Nathan Carroll uses nothing but his voice and body to share stories of tilling soil barefoot while singing Celine Dion with Kenyan youth, becoming stranded in a broken down vehicle in the middle of an illegal drug trade, visiting the Kigali Memorial with an orphan of the genocide, and rafting and bungee jumping at the base of the Nile. At the heart of the piece is the story of Nathan’s relationship with his Kenyan host and father, a man struggling to hold onto his home, his community, and his life. Interspersed in the narrative are Nathan’s original songs, written in English and Kiswahili. Cries of heartbreak, homesickness, friendship, and joy.
Pronounced “say-muh” and meaning to say in Kiswahili, “sema” is a popular greeting among East African youth. The piece addresses being an outsider or newcomer in a foreign environment, the relationship between the “developed” and the “developing” world, and the stigma of HIV/AIDS. The show shatters pre-conceived notions of what “Africa” is and provides a different insight from what we see in Disney’s The Lion King or World Vision commercials.
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