Sunshine on a Rainy Day

We had an amazing day on Saturday, kicking off an exciting new partnership with Chickenshed.  As Dave Carey said in his introduction to the day, it's odd that we should be on this theatre's doorstep, and it took an Australian living in Wales to put us in touch - but thanks to Ian McKenzie-Thurley for seeing the commonalities of interest.  We're all very keen that this relationship should grow.

Sunshine on a Rainy Day was a one-day festival of Southern African culture, held at Chickenshed to complement their play The Rain that Washes, and curated by us.  It's amazing just how much you can cram into one day, if you set your mind to it.  The morning saw two storytelling sessions for children, with Nyemu and Wedzi of World Musik Makers - a Zulu couple who are wonderfully charismatic, and incredibly committed to African culture.  Nyemu tells me that they are now letting out their house in Cambridgeshire to pay for the transportation of equipment to the school they support in Zimbabwe. 

The afternoon started with Idrissa Ouedraogo's film Kini and Adams - a brilliant piece of work which shows relationships collapsing as a mining operation shifts the aspirations of a community.  There was a pretty strong discussion after that - and an even more powerful one in the panel session, Theatre for a Change.  I chaired this, with Arifani Moyo from the Indigeneity project, Christopher Maphosa (on whose life The Rain that Washes is based) and Kate Stafford from Bilimankhwe, who has herself been blogging about the day!  The discussion moved between theatre and politics, theatre for development, theatre and prison, theatre for and by children (in particular CHIPAWO in Zimbabwe), and to the very heart of the post-colonial debate.  It was particularly exciting for us to have the South African High Commissioner, Dr. Z.S.T. Skweyiya, and his wife in the room, and contributing very robustly to the debate.  There was also Dr. Ralph Mguni, the Secretary General of ZAPU, who is awaiting the fall or death of Mugabe before he returns to his Zimbabwean home.  Ralph spoke towards the end of our discussions, and made very clear the importance of cultural activism in the development of the post-colonial space.  For an organisation like ours, working at the interface between intercultural theatre and international policy, this was an inspiring afternoon.

The play, written by Dave Carey with Christopher Maphosa, and performed by Ashley Maynard (pictured) is a solo piece dealing with Christopher's own journey with ZAPU, which took him to Bulgaria with Joshua Nkomo, in preparation for the liberation of Zimbabwe, and then into a nightmare of oppression after the election of Mugabe.  Christopher came to England as a refugee, and his story again underlines the importance of cultural work with refugee communities - it was through working at Chickenshed that he once again found himself a home.  The theatre was packed, and the audience excited!

As if all that wasn't enough, we ended the day with a jazz concert from the great South African trumpeter Claude Deppa.  How exciting was that?

More from Gabarone

Another fantastic day in the workshop. The morning was spent on Lecoq's Seven Levels of Tension, which is always a great way to energise inexperienced actors and move them towards spontaneous and original work. That led on to an exercise called "walking into the wrong room", which is self-explanatory and very funny.

In the afternoon, we made use of pieces of clothing that I'd asked the actors to bring in - each had an item with a particular emotional meaning for them. The exercise was deceptively simple - they just had to find a way of presenting that piece of clothing to the whole group. It was truly extraordinary. One young man beat the drum while wearing feathers on his head and a leopard-patterned vest. Another put on shorts, took off his shirt and became a Praise Singer. A mixed-race woman acted her journeys between Africa and Europe, and her decision to buy a traditional German dress so as to embrace that part of her identity. It was all intensely moving, deeply honest, almost shocking in the complexity of its identity politics.

Long talk with David about theatre for development. He's been involved in the form since the 70s, and knows everybody. He's also full of amazing stories about work with Zapu PF during the guerilla war, workshops in Bangladesh which landlords tried to sabotage, theatre workers being imprisoned in or deported from Malawi. We discuss the fact that theatre for development seems to have lost its radical edge these days, has become a little "worthy", and very westernised. In part, he blames the shifting agendas of funders, and in part the more rigorous accounting procedures they are following. In the old days, you used to be able to sneak in revolution under the counter.

From our submission to the Commonwealth Group on Culture and Development

We have been invited to submit our ideas to the Commonwealth Group on Culture and Development. Here's an extract from what we sent in:

"In addressing the dialogue between culture and development, it is crucial that the Commonwealth Group should see these arenas as equal partners, rather than regarding one as the medium through which the other can be achieved. All too often, culture for development practice follows the model that culture can be “used” to put across a pre-conceived “message”. More often than not, this “message” is to do with apparently enlightened mainstream / Western values being “better” than those of the indigenous culture. Such practice, while fitting very clearly the specific agendas of many NGOs, for example in relation to AIDS awareness, is neither good culture nor good development. It is essentially propaganda, and perpetuates a neo-colonial mode of thinking, in which so-called “developing” cultures are regarded as inferior. It is not surprising that such practice rarely leads to real change.

The sort of cultural practice which can genuinely lead to change is practice which acknowledges and validates indigenous cultures and cultural forms, and which encourages a genuine dialogue with and within the community. Performances should not be driven by the “message” that there is a pre-ordained answer to a problem, but should rather seek to open up the problem to the community. It may be that a range of viewpoints are offered or encouraged by the performance, and that the audience is given the space to articulate their own ideas in response. Such approaches lead to creative solutions which work far better than those imposed, because they arise from the cultural context.

The model is, of course, inherently democratic. This is in itself important in terms of developmental agendas. Dialogue and creativity are far more potent than propaganda and passivity.

The key issue is to encourage governments, international agencies and NGOs to put sufficient trust in the cultural sector to permit this sort of initiative. It is difficult, in terms of “outcomes” and “targets”, to justify investment in open-ended processes. However, we would cite a number of initiatives which have followed these models, and which have been highly effective in terms of development, empowerment, and democracy.

It is also crucial to ensure that the cultural productions which result from initiatives at community level are able to engage directly with the agencies, especially local and national governments, with the power to effect change. This is an area where the Commonwealth Group’s reports might be particularly useful: there is a need for a paradigm shift which encourages governments to regard culture as central to the development agenda.

In 2007, Border Crossings published Theatre and Slavery, a book which accompanied our production of The Dilemma of a Ghost. This book includes a case study by Shikha Ghildyal on her work with child labourers (near-slaves) in India and Nepal. The work was emphatically about allowing these children a space in which to articulate their own concerns, and giving them a cultural platform from which they could engage with people in authority.

In the same book, there is a dialogue with Rustom Bharucha, in which we discuss many of the issues around culture and development. In particular, he looks at the ways in which cultural actions can be empowering processes for socially and economically marginalised people and communities, and how these might then become platforms for their interaction with civil society and governments.

The methods used by Shikha Ghildyal were taught to her by Michael Etherton, whose work with Save the Children seems to us to be a model of good practice in this area. Michael’s work is also documented in his book African Theatre: Youth (James Currey Press 2006). Sadly, Save the Children no longer uses his approach, and this is because of the language of targets and outcomes which current funding systems require. There is a clear need for a major shift in the way in which developmental agencies view culture if these more integrated, progressive and effective models are to become widespread."

Theatre for Development

Dzifa's mid-term report to the Arts Council on her Fellowship begins in a characteristic Ghanaian way, with a proverb: ‘It is a child who has never travelled who boasts that his mother is the world’s best cook’. So, she's obviously finding her exposure to the UK theatre a valuable experience!

On Tuesday, I took her down to Winchester, to visit the University's MA in Theatre for Development, run by Tim Prentki. A fascinating day for both of us. Dzifa and the National Drama Company are often asked to help out with development projects in Ghana - she talks with justifiable pride about some work they did to help women in remote areas understand issues around pregnancy, childbirth and modern medicine, overcoming a taboo about knives being in contact with the body. One of her requests was to find out "how it's done here". I had expected the answer might be "not at all" - my image of TfD had been of NGOs heading out into Africa and Asia - but it turns out that most of Tim's students are about to begin major projects in the UK, and he confirms that this is the trend. Matters close to home, like disability, climate change, and child rights, are coming to be more and more significant in the TfD agenda. Tim points out that this is not unrelated to DCMS and Arts Council policy trends - there's quite a bit of money available for work with a clear social agenda.

In spite of our involvement with Third World countries and cultural diversity within the UK, and the importance of education /community work in all we do, I've tended to shy away from specific TfD work with Border Crossings. I suppose I tend to adhere to Sam Shepard's idea that "Ideas arise from plays, and not the other way round". Theatre which merely illustrates a social point tends to be bad theatre.

But, as Tim points out - this is also bad development. Much of the TfD work done around HIV in Africa was so preachy that it didn't have any effect at all. The more valuable forms of TfD, and the ones towards which these students are clearly being encouraged, are those which draw off the ideas, needs and creativity of the people involved. Like Natya Chetana does in Orissa. And actually, like we do when we have community workshops to explore the background to a new piece. Maybe we're closer to TfD than I thought.