A group of students and faculty from the School of Theater at the California Institute of the Arts, along with other working artists, traveled this past summer to Rwanda to study that African nation’s tragic experience of genocide and explore ways art participates in reconciliation and rebuilding. This was our second such trip, en route to an annual pattern; plans are underway for next summer’s project. We spoke with survivors, perpetrators, artists (overlapping categories: artists were among the engineers of the genocide as well as among the victims, survivors and relief workers—while perpetrators lived through the genocide and many suffered trauma, they are not called survivors in the same sense that the targets are; language—the passion of culture— must be radically argued at every turn). We also spoke with teachers and scholars, ambassadors, the president of the country, former exiles, priests, social historians and more, to garner their insights and reflect in mutual witness to our interwoven but distinct histories. We read and rehearsed plays, moved together, watched films by emerging filmmakers (under the stars, goat on a paper plate and a bottl