How Performing Arts Help to Heal

Crimes against humanity—such as those in Armenia in 1915, Rwanda in 1994, and those we are witnessing today—impact those who live through them and the generations that follow. How do we heal from such harm? Sonya Armaghanyan and Wesley Ruzibiza are two artists from different continents who prove that performance can move us through and beyond unfathomable crisis and traumatic experiences. They met as Global Fellows at the Lab for Global Performance and Politics in 2021 and have built a friendship through stories and creative exchange. In this conversation with Sebastián Torres, they reflect on their own experiences of healing through art and the power in performance as a space for recovery and connection.

Sebastián Torres: Could you each talk about a memory you recall, a moment when art arrived in your life and became something essential to your survival or identity?

Sonya Armaghanyan: There were the circus performances that my parents would take me and my brother to and the puppet theatre shows that my parents—well, my mom—would take us to. There was this one trapeze artist… She was just swinging in the air, and I remember she was wearing this bright purple, very sparkling costume. Watching this movement in the air as a child, I was just thinking, This is magical. That flight, that grace, the artistry and all of it. I think that was the first thing I wanted to become, a trapeze artist, which, well, never happened.

Then, the puppet shows. many of the shows we watched were based on the stories of Hovhannes Tumanyan, who is an Armenian poet, writer, storyteller, and a folk story writer. A lot of his fairy tales and stories have wisdoms, especially for children to learn from them—life's wisdoms. The puppet shows were these magical boxes containing answers for me who was new to the world and to life and was trying to understand what is happening around them.

War was present in my life from childhood. The war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Artsakh, as we Armenians call it, internationally known as Nagorno-Karabakh, in the nineties. Then the second one in 2020, very recently, followed by the exodus and displacement of the Armenians from Artsakh in 2023.

The history of the Armenian genocide of the 1915—all of this was feeding into my life growing up. But my parents did a really good job of protecting me and my brother emotionally. And part of it was through art.

Very naturally, through these encounters with the theatre or movement, I realized this was a space for curiosity, for asking questions, exploring who I was.

Wesley Ruzibiza: For me, it's quite precise. I had just come back from exile with my family in Rwanda, and it was after the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. I had this fantastic hate for my own country. I couldn't really comprehend the level of ugliness and hate that allows people to get to the point of killing each other—terminating people’s lives in a way that you will never imagine.

So, in university there was this play that was happening. It was an intervention by a Chadian theatremaker. We invited writers from all over the continent of Africa to write about the Rwandan Tutsi genocide. They ended up creating a piece out of all the books written during that time, and the piece is called Corps et voix, paroles rhizome by Koulsy Lamko.

I went to see that piece. It was my own story, my people. I could understand the emotion, the hate, and the trying to reconcile and rebuild after. I understood, in one piece, my whole country, my culture, my people—not even through words, but through dance, emotion, how people were expressing and conveying the message. That was it.

When I got out of that room, I was like, “If there's one thing that I want to do in my life, I want to be able to give this kind of experience to people.”

It didn't only heal me; it also taught me. It made me become a whole.

Sonya: What else is there if not art?

I was only, I think, nineteen or twenty when I met Melissa Brown, an American who was a director. Armenia didn't have English speaking theatre. I told Melissa, "If you direct a play, I will do everything else that there is to make it happen."

The group that came together were local Armenians, diasporic Armenians, and foreigners working in Yerevan. If these people met just in the street or at a party or anywhere else, they probably would not really converse or have cup of tea and go deeper into who they are, what they do, what they like, what they dream about, what they wish, and so on. But during the month-and-a-half of rehearsals, we were coming together several times a week and creatively working towards a collective goal, creating this place so that we could perform together in English, which wasn't the first language for most of the people in that group. All of a sudden, we were laughing together. We were hugging each other. We were going out together after the rehearsals, and we didn't want to part.

I think this was my first realization that by working together creatively, even if you are coming from completely different backgrounds, you start trusting each other. You start understanding each other and simply start seeing the human being that is in front of you.

Sebastián: I love etymology. For “resilience,” which is part of this conversation, I had to look for the etymology of the word. It comes from a Latin verb resilire, which means to jump back, to rebound, to spring again. Originally it was used to describe physical movement, like something that is bending and then returning to its form. Then, in the seventeenth century, it entered into the English language to describe materials that could absorb impact and then regain shape. Much later, psychologists begin using it to refer to human capacity to recover, to adapt, to reorganize after adversity. I love that the root meaning is not enduring pain heroically, but rather to move, to change shape, to return to life like a bamboo tree.

Where do you witness resilience in your life, Ruzibiza? Where does it manifest?

Ruzibiza: The first thing that comes to mind when we speak about resilience is the ability to reimagine what is no longer working. How do we reinvent that thing? For me, resilience is the ability to reimagine and reinvent what is not working without waiting for authorization to make a change. The first step is to create your own vision and imagination of the way you want to present it to others.

If I take the example of a country like mine, it all began with someone in a refugee camp saying, “I want to imagine a country where all Rwandans can return and live together; a country where no one is treated as a second-class citizen, a country where there are no divisions between Hutus and Tutsis.” It began with someone imagining that possibility, daring to dream it, and then fighting to make that vision a reality.

Reinvention begins with questioning. It is not something you do alone. When you question yourself and recognize that something is not right, questioning others as well may lead you to the beginning of an answer.

Last, but certainly not least, is healing. Healing is also a form of resilience. You cannot create or propose a better world without first beginning to create that better world within yourself. And by healing yourself, you also help heal others.

Sonya: I think this is one of the things that Ruzibiza and I really have in common, this belief in the power of imagination and reimagination. For me, imagination is very active in the body. It can drive something to happen. And I will quote Ruzibiza from another conversation we had. He said, “If you can imagine, then maybe you can make it happen.” And I really liked when he said this, because that's what I mean when I say it's an active movement in the body.

For me, art and imagination really go hand in hand, because art is so rich with everything from symbolism to stories to colors to the magic of the arts that nurtures and creates a space for imagination. When there is a crisis, especially with young people in context of wars, the imagination can get lost. But through art and creative process, reimagination becomes possible.

In 2016, I did a theatre project in Nepal. We had a group of young people, ten young Nepalese men and women who started coming to these workshops three times a week. We were just exploring and playing. Part of imagination is having that space to have fun and connect through that joy and laughter. Play, I think, is also important.

And then another part of imagination for me is connected to little things that are deeply seated inside us. Associations or memories or things that maybe we're not even aware of. Through art we can help these stories inside us come out.

Ruzibiza: It's important to be surrounded by love, like Sonya likes to say, but it's also really important to surround yourself with people that are lifting you up and making you feel like every single thing that you're doing is worth it.

Sonya: I love love. At the end of the day, for me, art is about that: It is to remind ourselves that love exists and that different manifestations of love can flow in the body and outside of the body.

Ruzibiza: Most of the time, when I look around the world—Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ukraine, Armenia, Sudan, Libya, etc., the state of democracy in the United States—it feels as though every corner of the world is burning. In the middle of all that, I had to find a way, not to find happiness, but to find peace. For me, that peace came through reimagining the world, questioning it, and asking myself how it could be different tomorrow.

With all these wars unfolding, I reached a point where I simply sat down and thought, “I want to disappear. I don’t understand what is happening to this world anymore.” It felt as though humanity was refusing to learn from its past, repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It felt like a kind of collective madness.

So I asked myself, “What can my answer be?” My answer became a play. A play that gave me peace. began to write, drawing from my own story. I come from a family of perpetual refugees. Before 1994, my father grew up in exile. My mother grew up in exile. I was born in exile, and before and after returning to my own country, I had lived across different parts of Africa and Europe. Everywhere I went, I was the foreigner. I was the other. I was the Black person. I was Rwandan. From that experience, I created Multitude to remind us that, before anything else, we are human beings, and that we need one another. Whether I am Black, Rwandan, or any other identity people choose to place on me, I cannot move through this world unless I am first seen as a human being.

Creating Multitude became my response. It became my place of peace. When I finished it, I felt lighter. I felt that I had done something.

Sonya: I can say that on a very personal level I try to be okay with whatever feelings emerge in different situations and contexts. So, if I feel sad, I let myself feel sad. If I feel frustrated, I let myself feel frustrated. I came to realize that it doesn't mean that I also don't feel happy. All these feelings coexist in the same body.

Also, I started really finding this joy in little things. This has become extremely important for me, not to take for granted the smallest things. Recently, I've been noticing the light a lot. In different weather, in different spaces, whether a mountain, a sea, or city buildings, I keep paying attention to the light. This brings me joy, to just see how light moves, how light shines, how it goes from really bright to soft, the reflection on buildings, the shadows that it creates. All of a sudden, it becomes this whole world of images, stories, and relationships emerging through the play and movement of the light.

This is also in relation to others. I feel with the world going mad now there is even more urgent need for care. When I say care, I also mean love. Unapologetically, that's all I want to talk about, and that's what I want to do a project about. I want to find the definitions of love based on different spaces, mentalities, cultures, languages, the rhythm of love in the body, but also in language, the melody of it and hoping that maybe by talking about this and reminding about it, the need for it… love is connected to care, to understanding, to forgiveness, to softness, to all of these things. The simple things, like smiling at a passerby, bring me a lot of joy.

So, this is on a daily level, very individual, personal. But when I start thinking more globally, and I'm thinking about Palestinians in Gaza or the situation in Congo or what is happening in Sudan, Ukraine, and so on, I am like, "How do I expect these people to be able to notice these little things?" The little things are being destroyed on daily basis. So, I don't even feel okay to talk about the little things when they're being destroyed. I asked this question to myself: When would be the right time in those spaces to go and bring art, to create art?

I am now changing the topic, but recently and after a lot of advocating among artists, there is a growing movement in the world that is working at this intersection of arts and health. It's becoming its own area of work. There's a lot of research to make it evidence based. Part of my hope is that through these initiatives there will be better, more structured mechanisms to bring arts to the communities that need it the most.

Ruzibiza: Let me add one more thing, because I think it is really important in everyday life. It is not so much about finding small moments of joy as it is about finding small moments of beauty. Having grown up as a refugee, I have learned that the people who have the least are often the quickest to recognize beauty. They are the ones who, despite having almost nothing, still find love, still find beauty in moments that everyone else passes by without noticing. So do not hesitate to enter those spaces, to spend time with those people, and to learn from the way they see the world. That is perhaps the simplest practice: to notice beauty in the present moment, and to find it even in the most unexpected places. Sharing that beauty with the people around you is, in itself, a form of resistance. It is a way of building resilience, and of healing yourself while helping to heal others.