An end-of-the-year message to Global Arts Corps friends

Dear Global Arts Corps friends,

It’s been a year of transitions and transformations for GAC. First, See You Yesterday had its American premiere at the Paramount Theatre in Boston in association with ArtsEmerson this past May. After tours to Africa refugee camps, the Kigali genocide center in Rwanda, as well as three cities in Cambodia, it was a great pleasure to bring it to the full houses in the U.S., where it had enthusiastic audience receptions and critical acclaim. The Boston Globe declared that it is “a nightmarish period of Cambodian history evoked in ArtsEmerson’s wrenching See You Yesterday.”

This past July, Michael and I, now based mostly in Paris, brought on Grant Rosenberg as Managing Director of GAC as we continue to expand our presence worldwide. Along with us, he has some ambitious plans for Global Arts Corps, and he’ll tell you about them after introducing himself.

Thank you for your continuing enthusiasm and support,

Jackie

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It was a bit of serendipity, meeting Michael and Jackie Lessac this past April at a restaurant-café near Luxembourg Gardens. Introduced by Penelope Fletcher, the owner of nearby The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore, we immediately had much to say to each other. Two weeks later, after more conversations about the kind of work they want to do going forward with GAC, and how Europe is central to that, they brought me on board.

Originally from Chicago and now a dual citizen, I’ve lived in France for 18 years. I spent my first decade here as a journalist and videographer for TIME magazine before spending the following six years as programs manager at the American Library in Paris. Other work I’ve done has also prepared me for Global Arts Corps: I am a French-to-English translator, and also worked at Columbia University’s Paris campus during its inaugural year of the fellowship program at The Institute for Ideas & Imagination.

These are fraught times, and GAC’s work, at the crossroads of the arts and geopolitics and history is something I am very pleased to be a part of it. Here are a few things we are doing, and our plans for the coming months and years:

We’ve recently overseen a redesign of our website to one that we feel better reflects the mission, reach, and scope of GAC for the years to come. We also have an exciting final edit of our new documentary film Landmines. As we seek funds for finishing costs, we have been screening it as a rough cut most recently at the UNESCO biennale in Angola in September (next to be screened at the U.N. in Geneva in 2020).

In Paris on January 20th, Landmines will be shown to an invited audience at the illustrious Royal Monceau Hotel, an event organized by students of the Jeannine Manuel school in Paris, who have taken on in order to raise funds to bring the Cambodian show See You Yesterday to Paris and other parts of Europe. This whole event was started by 20 international students from the school as a way to bring the world’s youth together and explore difficult issues--in this case a historical one that feels desperately current.

As part of our international expansion and presence in France, we now have, in addition to our 501c3 in the U.S., a French 1901 Association as a way for GAC to be officially recognized in France and Europe and expand our international reach. This will also eventually allow donations by E.U. residents to be tax deductible. We were helped with this by a new friend of GAC, Paris-based retired attorney Tom Rose, who oversaw this pro-bono.

We’ve recently brought on two wonderful young women to work with us. Bella Wood, who Michael and Jackie have known from their time in Wyoming, now in her final year at Fordham University, has come on as Director of Youth Engagement and Development and is working from our New York office. Here in Paris, Elena Tadros, a recent University of Montreal graduate who is also doing important work with local refugees will be assisting both for administrative needs as well as some of our upcoming projects. Born in France to Egyptian parents, Elena is trilingual (French, English, and Arabic) Bella is bilingual in Spanish and English and of course with our international work these language skills are essential.

In 2020, we will begin visiting six continents as we scout for theatres around the world to take part in our next project that will explore multiple conflicts. Michael first told you about it last year in its earliest stage when it was known as Radical Recovery, and it’s taking shape now. It is now entitled The Maelstrom Reckoning: Reconciliation, Rehearsed, and will culminate with a festival bringing together six theatre troupes exploring their conflicts and interacting on the same stage, initially in Paris.

As a first step and pilot project, Michael will direct a production of a play written by one of our GAC partners, Jeton Neziraj, entitled, provocatively,The Destruction of the Eiffel Tower. One of our other partners, Arben Bajraktaraj, will act and co-produce with a theatre in Paris as well as in communities in outlying areas of the French capital. It’s a beautifully honest play that looks at love, desire and explores Islam and the complexity of its place in contemporary Western society.

As the decade comes to a close, we hope our work continues to interest you, and we appreciate any financial help you might give to keep our work going. I look forward to bringing these projects to fruition and meeting as many of you as possible when the moment presents itself.

Warm regards,

Grant