Cartography

Inflatable rafts on the Mediterranean. Dark holds of cargo trucks. Family photos wrapped carefully in a backpack that crosses border checkpoints. These are some of the powerful images of modern-day humanity-in-motion depicted in the theater piece CARTOGRAPHY. Sewn from stories of young Eritrean and Syrian refugees, CARTOGRAPHY fuses dance, film, map-making, and projections to explore the tragedy and wonder of young lives in motion.

In 2016, theater director Kaneza Schaal and award-winning author for young people Christopher Myers flew to Munich, Germany, as 30,000 people were arriving in the city each day in the largest migration in recorded history. Listening to the stories of young refugees, they pondered how to create an artwork that placed all of us within this historical moment.

Combining simple storytelling with interactive video technology (audiences shape the onstage video projections with their own cell phones), Cartography maps the perilous physical journeys and the confusing interior journeys which brought four young people from their old homes to their new ones. Performed by a diverse company of actors from El Salvador, Syria, Lebanon, and Rwanda, this is theater for our times, theater for all ages, theater at its most relevant.