Amnesty at 50

It was my birthday on Saturday - thanks to everybody who left messages on Facebook! It was also an important birthday for Amnesty International - and I've been reading the special issue of their magazine.

It's very striking just how much of this magazine deals with theatre. There's a discussion of a play which was made from an exchange of letters between activists and a political prisoner. There's an interview with Daves Guzha, who I met in Zimbabwe as long ago as 1998, and who is still using performance to work against Mugabe. There's a piece on the assassination of Juliano Mer-Khamis from the Freedom Theatre in Jenin. And there's a very strong piece on Henning Mankel and his Teatro Avenida in Mozambique.

Mankel talks about the importance of theatre in illiterate communities - he's very clear that literacy is a way to improve health conditions in a very direct way. And he says something else which could almost be a description of our work at Border Crossings:

"Living theatre is one of the few meeting points in the world where all the false borders, like language and race, come down. Actors, white or brown or yellow, even if they don't speak the same language, can start working together and create art immediately."