Education Abroad: South Africa

Theatre Study Abroad: Arts and Culture in South Africa

Want to learn about South African arts and culture? How the performing arts reflect, challenge, and shape culture? Meet some of the world’s most fabulous theatremakers and world-shakers?

Join Dr. Megan Lewis, director of CSU Theatre for the 2025 Arts and Culture in South Africa education abroad course!

WHAT: In this summer faculty-led program, the performing arts will offer students a lens through which to examine questions of social justice, race, class and gender politics, history, language, memory, and the role of the arts in our global world. Focused around the National Arts Festiva that takes place over ten days in Makhanda (renamed from Grahamstown in 2018), South Africa, students will experience the second largest theatre festival in the world (outside Edinburgh in Scotland) and the largest in the southern hemisphere. Join Prof. Megan Lewis, South African theatre and performance studies scholar, to see new plays and cutting edge international performances that we would not be able to encounter anywhere else. We will meet playwrights, actors, artists and other students interested in performance and theatre and engage with, and reflect upon, the historic, sociopolitical, and creative contexts of the work we see.

Students will complete a 10-module online course and then travel to South Africa for 3 weeks. We will visit cultural sites and museums in Johannesburg to study the sociopolitical and historical context of South Africa before heading to Makhanda for 10 days of the arts festival. We will end our journey in Cape Town, where we will see additional visual and performing arts and explore various cultural sites and museums.

WHEN: Participants will depart in Summer 2025 from Denver on a group flight. There is a 10-module online course that starts at the beginning of summer session followed by 3 weeks in country.

WHERE: Johannesburg, Makhanda, and Cape Town, South Africa

PROGRAM LEADER: Dr. Megan Lewis, Associate Professor of Theatre and Director of Theatre

ELIGIBILITY REQUIREMENTS: Minimum 2.5 GPA.  Program leader approval. Good disciplinary standing.

WHEN: Summer 2025

NOTE: There is a 10-module online course that starts at the beginning of summer session followed by three weeks in country.

WHERE: Johannesburg, Makhanda, and Cape Town, South Africa.

PROGRAM LEADERS: Dr. Megan Lewis, Associate Professor of Theatre and Director of Theatre. Johnie Rankin, Master Carpenter, School of Music, Theatre, and Dance.

Contact

Dr. Megan Lewis is a South African-American theatre, performance, & film scholar concerned with the staging of national identity, gender, and race in a variety of performance media---including monuments and public pageants, traditional staged texts, and documentary and narrative films. She is a multidisciplinary educator with a passion for inspiring intellectual curiosity and advocating for the performing arts as a powerful force for social change.

 

Megan Lewis

  • Associate Professor of Theatre
  • Director of Theatre
  • Director

970-491-5336

Megan.Lewis@colostate.edu