DFL 2009 Festival launches successfully
The Drama for Life Festival was officially launched on Saturday August 22 on a high note. An ambitious programme put together by Drama for Life roared into life with the Drama for Life Director Warren Nebe giving a brief welcome speech.
A traditional dance group set the ball rolling with their warrior like dances and traditional songs. They greeted and welcomed all with their song hello, hello, siyalibingelela. This marked the beginning of an action packed day filled with workshops and performances.
Betsi Pendri’s workshop was well attended. Betsi is the founder and director of the Living Together Project. This is an organisation aimed at helping families and communities overcome the stigma associated with HIV and AIDS.
On the day of the Drama for Life official launch, Betsi ran a workshop by the title of Characters and Conversations; Democracy, Participation and HIV\AIDS. Participants may have come in expecting to listen to her talk about her subject only to learn that they were going to be taken through a productive and fascinating process of playmaking.
It started with a game called Zakhe where one of her assistants magically created a song within a space of five minutes. Before participants knew it, they were singing and dancing. This was to work as a precursor to a well thought out workshop that makes individuals look within themselves and ask themselves questions.
The process involved creating well meaning characters with latent flaws that could only be exposed by interacting with other characters. Participants were asked to create characters for themselves. These characters were then paired with other characters to facilitate conversation. Conflicts and contradictions were then thrown into the situations and relationships created.
For instance there was a woman who worked as a human rights activist and had a gay daughter. She did not approve of or even permit her daughter’s sexual orientation. The activist even went as far as confronting those who got involved with her daughter. She did all this in the name of love. During the improvised conversation she had with a cobbler, she went on about how she would lose everything if her daughter went ahead with her lesbianism. All this was genuine concern for her daughter but what stood out most in the conversation were her double standards around the subject of human rights which she champions. She wants to deny a human being her sexual rights in the name of love. The drama piece thus presents itself as a mirror, giving her and audience members the opportunity to view and examine her behavior.
Betsi’s workshop provides participants with an opportunity to see their own hidden flaws in pursuit of genuine agendas. Contradictions hit them like a wet fish making them come to a realisation that while they allow themselves to be obsessed about certain things, they expose themselves to contradictions and in the process hurt those they support to love.
Another critical element coming out of these workshops is the fringe benefit of script writing. Many a time script writers find themselves trapped in didactic scripts with round characters who have very little to contribute to the viewer’s thinking. In trying to teach lessons to their audiences, these writers lose the mark and turn off the very people they wish to touch.
Betsi takes participants through an exercise of creating complicated characters that speak to people’s real situations and gets them thinking and reflecting on their own actions. Any theatre practitioners involved in theatre as documentation or ethnographic performance will find these workshops enriching.
It is clear that given more time the workshops would benefit participants even more. The characters and conversations end in pairs and never get to the level where longer stories are created using those pairs.
It would be interesting to see what would come out of putting all the stories together and creating a story based on those stories. This could also be used to quickly workshop good stories coming from different experiences.
In the afternoon, an installation was presented by PJ Sabbagha and DFL scholars. It was a well choreographed movement taking the audience through the journey of the human experience in the context of HIV and AIDS.
It begins with children at play being interrupted by a gorilla. When the gorilla first appears, they bolt in fear. They slowly begin to learn ways of continuing playing even as the gorilla threatens. This is the story of humanity and how human beings have had to live with the pandemic and find ways of surviving within the context.
The story would have been incomplete without telling the side of those who died of the disease. The movements take the audience through this and through the personal stories of those affected and infected by HIV and AIDS. The movements culminate in the audience writing messages of hope on the sheet that was used to display dead bodies.
UBOM! got everyone talking with a scintillating play called Risky Business. This particular display left the audience asking for more. It is clear that the creator of their script has a serious eye for psychology.
The play dissects the human psyche and displays it in the context of HIV thereby making the audience see their own thought system. The play leaves the audience with the challenge of taking responsibility for their own lives in relation to HIV.
Drama for Life scholars, Cletus Moyo and Teboho Rantsoabe punctuated the events with moving poetry as they played around with interesting rhythm and rhyme.
Other displays on the day included Selloane Mokuku’s workshop entitle Passing it On-Theatre for Young People with Young People, Lincoln Theo’s Healing and Giving Skills to LGBTI People with HIV and AIDS and Themba Interactive play called Hopes and Dreams.
The guest of honour, Dr Ava Avalos, a medical practitioner based in Botswana was visibly emotional as she took to the podium and had a lot to say about the need for more collective effort in dealing with the pandemic. She said that the pandemic was our pandemic which we had to deal with together. She encouraged all to get tested as the disease could now be treated just like any other terminal illness.