Ugandan musician Samite Mulondo will close the Hangar Theatre's summer season with two performances of "Resilience," a solo show combining live African music, storytelling, history and projected images.
Performances are scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Aug. 8 and 2:30 p.m. Aug. 9 at the theater, 801 Taughannock Blvd. in Ithaca. Each performance will be followed by an audience talkback.
The show features seven original songs and seven stories exploring survival, hope, shared humanity and the role music can play after trauma, according to the theater.
Samite will discuss growing up in Uganda, where his brother and stepfather were killed during the regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. He later fled to Kenya, lived in a refugee camp and moved to Nairobi before settling in the United States.
During the performance, Samite will play the kalimba, litungu, adungu and African- and Western-style flutes.
"I hope the audience comes away realizing they are stronger than they believe, and that with time, things do get better," Samite said in the theater's announcement.
Samite, a former Ithaca resident who now lives in Tully, was the subject of the 1998 PBS documentary "Song of the Refugee." He founded Musicians for World Harmony in 2002 and has worked with refugees, former child soldiers, AIDS orphans and people experiencing memory loss, according to the release.
The production grew from Samite's TED Talk, "Lessons of Humanity: What My Grandfather Taught Me," and was developed over several years with collaborators at the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, Connecticut.
More information is available from the Hangar Theatre at hangartheatre.org.
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