USF Theatre Professor to Participate in International Theatre & Literacy Project in Tanzania

Kerry Glamsch, a theatre professor in the University of South Florida’s College of Visual and Performing Arts, will travel to Tanzania this summer to teach in the International Theatre & Literacy Project. The New York-based ITLP conducts playwriting workshops for children in developing countries. Glamsch is one of 10 theatre artists who will work in pairs with 100 teens during the program, being held June 28-July 12 at schools in various small villages near the city of Arusha in the northeastern corner of Tanzania.

Each pair of teachers will work with 20 students, 16-year-old boys and girls who will participate in workshops in improvisation, playwriting and performance. Each student group will participate in the theatre workshops five hours a day, five days a week for two weeks. The groups will present plays for their respective schools at the end of the first week. For the conclusion of the program, all of the plays will be presented to Tanzanians from throughout the region.

Glamsch, who has taught acting, scene study, playwriting, improvisation and other classes at the USF School of Theatre and Dance since 2003, had already made plans to travel to South Sudan this summer to help build a school when he met Marianna Houston, founder and executive director of ITLP, in New York through a mutual friend. Glamsch wound up replacing a teacher who dropped out of this year’s program.

Glamsch was attracted by the opportunity to use his teaching skills to make a positive impact on young learners from the other side of the globe.

“Theatre helps engage the imagination,” Glamsch said. “It can help them to think abstractly rather than memorizing facts by rote. It helps them explore social issues in which they haven’t had a voice so far. We’re using theatre to assist in their learning experience, in building bridges between our community and theirs. This is a chance to do what I feel I do best in order to make the world a better place.”

Last year’s plays were focused on empowerment, as related to women’s rights and social issues. The emphasis of this year’s plays will be determined, in part, by the students’ interests.

“Marianna Houston is a strong proponent of women’s rights and human rights,” Glamsch said. “The idea of women’s rights in the Tanzanian culture came up consistently last summer, in workshops during which they would recreate their relationships in their families and in their villages.”

“And it’s also necessary that we pay attention to what’s on their minds and what’s in their hearts. What do they want to communicate? Theatre is always addressing what’s going on right now in one’s life, and in the life of the community.”

This summer is the fourth time that the ITLP has traveled to Tanzania. Iain Hunter, chairman of the ITLP board, promises the teaching team an experience marked by challenges as well as rewards.

“It’s not all going to be fame and glory – there will be long hard days of work, possibly in environments or circumstances unfamiliar to many,” Hunter wrote in a recent letter to the participants. “But what we can promise you will be the extraordinary reward of seeing the fruits of your teaching efforts shining through in the eyes of the students under your tutelage.”

The language barrier and cultural differences are among the challenges facing the team, which includes university professors, public school teachers and professional actors mostly drawn from New York and Los Angeles. Each two-person teaching team will be provided will an interpreter.

“Their first language is Swahili, but hopefully through the various exercises we’ll learn a common language,”