Acts of Witness

Acts of Witness features two theatrical events performed in rotating rep: Blood Knot, a classic play by Tony Award-winning playwright Athol Fugard, and Poetic Portraits of a Revolution, a world-premiere multimedia slam poetry performance by Chapel Hill’s Sacrificial Poets.

Athol Fugard’s Blood Knot is the story of two South African brothers whose lives are twisted by the madness of apartheid. The New York Times describes the play as “a contemporary classic… both a deeply human experience and a symbolic statement.” The powerful allegorical story continues to resonate deeply in a world still unable to deal openly with issues of race and wracked by seismic shifts in response to social injustice from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street. Featuring J. Alphonse Nicholson and Lucius Robinson, and directed by Joseph Megel.

Poetic Portraits of a Revolution is a poetry-driven, multi-media documentary performance about the transformative events of the Arab uprising. The piece is built from testimony collected by nationally-recognized spoken word poets Will McInerney and Kane Smego of the Sacrificial Poets, along with Mohammad Moussa and Sameer Abdel-khalek, during a trip to Egypt and Tunisia that was sponsored by the Academy Award-winning organization Empowerment Project.