Conflict Theatre in Your Village!

Moving and experimenting: The Training Process

02. May 2003

 

Most of the “actors” in the Kachahari theater groups have never acted before. They are grass-roots activists from the communities where their drama will be shown. As part of the project, they received a 10-day initial theater training. After this the groups went on tour in their own communities, putting on performances and gathering experience with the method. After this, the groups gathered again for 6-day follow up where they reflected together on their work.

The actual training in theatre began with the facilitators/trainer familiarizing the participants with the history and theoretical aspects of village theatre on the first day and a couple of hours' of participatory discussions on various kinds of conflicts prevalent in the communities and the causes and resolution of such conflicts on the second day. Besides discussions, group works, practical exercises and rehearsals at the training hall, the participants were asked to go out to the town or wherever they liked in the vicinity of the venue in Banepa, a beautiful township on the outskirts of Kathmandu valley, find real conflicts and present them in the form of a drama back in the training hall.

Training with a Difference

The participants found the Kachahari theatre training quite different from other training program they have attended so far. Each participant had an active role to play. Unlike in other training program the participants were involved in warm up physical exercises, little bit of yoga, voice exercise and different games every morning before the actual training program began to help them remain fresh and energetic mentally and physically.

They were divided into five groups and each group was given the responsibility of preparing turn by turn a daily report and presenting it the next day, and producing a wall newspaper every day. Since the wall newspapers contained a variety of materials including the ones relating to the training program itself, personal impressions, comments mostly in lighter vein and mild satires, it generated lot of curiosity and all the participants anxiously waited for the wallpaper to come out in the morning.

The way the training was conducted helped the participants keep themselves busy doing one or the other creative thing, demonstrating their talents and interacting among each other. The training method and all activities done during the training were also essential for team building, and helping the participants to overcome inhibitions and enable them to open their hearts to each other. This was quite important because they were supposed to bring to light the conflicts they are faced with at personal as well as at community level, discuss the ways to use such conflicts positively, conceive a drama to expose the contributory factors behind such conflicts and deliberate on how best community people can be involved in discussions on the issues of their rights, conflicts they are facing and ways to secure peaceful social change.

Overcoming Inhibitions

In the beginning the participants came up with somewhat vague issues. They seemed reluctant or unable to go deep into and share/discuss what kinds of conflicts they are actually facing in their respective communities. Some participants were defensive. Their experiences with oppression were personal and painful. They had learned that telling their own stories could lead people to look down upon them. It took quite some time to help them overcome such inhibitions. But gradually they started looking into themselves and giving vent to even their personal feelings in relation to a variety of unique examples of conflicts. Such honest expressions made the theater original, lively and transformative.

 

The participants confronted each other throughout the training. But most of all they confronted themselves through the theater they were creating. In scenes showing police stations, teashops and landlords houses, they attempted to express the kind of oppression they felt and saw around them. Putting it on a stage forced the activists to reconsider what these conflicts actually looked like from different sides. They began to ask new questions through their stories: How do people show power and subservience in their daily life? What stops people from resisting oppression openly? How do people respond to power in safer ways?

By the time the training concluded and the participants were about to go perform in their respective villages they looked confident, enthused and more self-aware. Ten days of staying together, working together and getting close to each other, however, made many of the participants and even facilitators cry at the time of departure.