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Laia Ribera and Danish Sheikh on LGBT awareness through theater

Eager to use the arts to discuss women’s issues, in 2011 Salvadorian theatre actress Laia Ribera Cañénguez set out to write a play summarizing debates within lesbian and feminist issues. The play – AFUERA – was first performed by Guatemalan lesbian theatre company Siluetas in front of a small crowd in Guatemala and saw great success. The play was later performed across Central and South America to audiences ranging from incarcerated women to indigenous groups.

Speaking at the 2013 inaugural session of the Salzburg Global LGBT Forum, Ribera explained:
“It was a very difficult process where we spent five months discussing, trying things, getting people to see small sketches. It was sometimes very frustrating. But in the end we ended up with a piece in which we talk about a lot of different issues, some of them like lesbophobia and the role that the church place in the control and oppression of sexualities, the binary system of gender identities, and other questions in our community that are more intimate, about lesbian relationships and the problems we have there; about our fear of loneliness.

“We have had a lot of lessons taken from the play. One of them – for me the most important – is how we can do political activism without losing the joy, without seeing that we are sacrificing ourselves, and also to use art to find other ways to express ourselves.”

Also recognizing the power of theatre, lawyer and keen amateur dramatist, Danish Sheikh, draws inspiration from a man widely regarded as the greatest playwright in history, William Shakespeare. Sheikh attended the Forum in 2015 and 2016, where he not only shared his legal expertise but also performed Shakespearean monologues during the Open Forum. He was struck by the contemporary take on love and sexuality in Shakespeare plays such as Measure For Measure, in which fornication is prohibited, drawing similarities to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, introduced by the British empire during colonial rule, which criminalized homosexuality in the country. This fascination with Shakespeare’s work led the lawyer to perform adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, focusing on the intersection of love and law, in a popular Bangalore park, later adapting the plays to star queer characters.

“I was always confused by the idea of love in Midsummer Night’s Dream where a love potion makes Helena fall in love with Demetrius. Later, I realized that Shakespeare was saying how irrational the idea of love can be. It is an important point because of how law tries to regulate love (with Section 377) and how it comes up short,” he explained to the Times of India.

Laia Ribera Cañénguez on LGBT awareness through theater