PPP
in Practice
Key points
IMPROVISATION - the bottom line
Keep it that way as long as is possible. Even final performances
should be flexible enough to be allow for missing actors and accommodate
new ideas or changing local realities. Often the nuances of meaning
which lead to new perceptions are a direct result of a shift in content
or emphasis within a performance.
When working on issues and creating plays that will be performed
by a community group (as opposed to the actors/facilitators):
-
get used to switching parts around - don't create plays
that use ALL the members of the community group. At the very least,
this develops the skill of stepping in when someone is absent.
-
More importantly still, each performer gives a part a different
nuance of meaning. If they take the improvised story into
a new dimension, that may reveal further aspects and attitudes
towards the issue being explored. The facilitators are listening
to these 'messages between the lines' of the improvisations and
it adds to the richness of the research process and outcomes.
-
Going further you can get members to play each of the roles
to see how they feel and where they take the performance.
A man playing the wife's role for example, or a sex-worker playing
a client's part. Such exercises inform the performances and are
research in themselves. They have a very important part in the
PPP cycle.
Facilitation skills:
"only everyone can know the truth" (Goethe)
(aside- please, anyone who knows the
exact source for this quote …)
Prashnakarta - the one who asks questions.
That's how we referred to the facilitator in Nepal. So often trainee
facilitators tend to use up precious moments talking and even lecturing
to the audience. Especially if they are trained teachers. I once asked
Adrian
Jackson
what the secret of the good Joker was, and he replied that the Joker
must really want to know what the audience members think about the
subject. There should be no preconceptions about the correct solution
to the problem. Difficult to do, but an excellent target. And you
can't find out anything while you yourself are talking .
New facilitators often find it hard to ask the right questions. Indeed
many find it hard not to speak when there is a silence - to explain
again or merely to pass over the question. But that silence is the
space, the gap that might have allowed an audience intervention!
Sometimes a disappointed facilitator may even close down a session
claiming that the audience didn't respond, when in fact they didn't
get time to think and formulate their question or response.
Opportunism can be a virtue ...
As always, the facilitator needs to be both diligent and opportunistic,
ready to point up shifts in meaning and explore them. The midwife
doesn't normally know what kind of baby will emerge - but once the
process begins, she knows what action to take. There was a good example
of this in Nepal, though it faltered at the final step.
Please
clic to read this one.
And in Namibia a passing comment within an improvised scenario, about
access to garden tools, was picked up and explored by the facilitator.
It led to the 'Self-Oppression play'. This was a forum piece that
was later performed at the launch of the Youth Enterprise Scheme (YES!)
that brought together the, often unemployed, young farmers of South
Namibia..
Click
here to bring in a brief account of this.
performance 'codes' as a starting point
Many of the street performance groups in Nepal tend to follow their
own tradition of producing hour long scripted works (with a message)
for performance in the streets.
Yes, this is in keeping with some traditional drama forms. But after
an hour in the sun the audience is not likely to be ready for a spirited
and perhaps sensitive discussion - which is not a traditional activity,
quite the opposite. Particularly if the question that is asked is
"what did you understand from the play?". People are naturally shy
to speak in public and often do need to be coaxed to speak out before
a large audience.
After all the whole process is still concerned with empowerment.
Sometimes just speaking at all is difficult and recognition is due
to those who are brave enough to do so. The act of speaking out is
an empowerment in itself. Interventions from the audience should always
be recognised, even applauded.
Another reason for the small performance codes of the 7W and the 'five
minute play'.
The 7W exercise described below is based on simple depictions of
circumstances drawn from the community. Asking about them can be more
specific and is easier than asking what inference people have drawn
from a heavyweight performance.
The device of moving forwards and backwards in time looks for causes
and consequences without having to articulate this as a concept. The
facilitator can always return to any image in a short scene or still
picture especially when it has been created as a picture of a crossroad
in someone's life. Where there are two ways, both can be explored
or we can examine why the hard road was not possible , why things
did not change - or could not.
All is based upon a visual picture, responses are explored in the
same way - dialogue is physicalised.
Ideas of change are hard to formulate. The facilitator is a midwife,
helping difficult ideas to find breath and life. [S]he needs to learn
the art of 'not-doing'. Rather than yanking the baby out into the
air the midwife should encourage the process of birth to happen at
its own speed.
Mini-festivals and local performance events
The 5 minute 'codes' - performed by facilitators or workshop and
community volunteers - can be woven together into fuller performances
for local presentation within the community and eventually beyond
it (looking outwards).
If there has been work with different sectors of the community, or
neighbouring communities then a local performance event, or mini-festival,
might be an excellent way to get together and share the performances
which will each express different perspectives of related topics.
Or different views of the local reality. As we did in collaboration
with Kamoto Community Arts in Ng'ombe, Lusaka in 2001.
The festivals are designed to explore the differences in perceptions
and ideas as formulated in workshop and performance with different
sectors of the community. This may well include performances celebrating
the identity of a particular group.
There is need for celebration. Development workers with
their eyes fixed beadily on issues and difficulties may even begin
to stifle creativity and misrepresent the true diversity of their
partners' lives.
The starting point of development is often to re-establish personal
dignity - empowerment. In Kathmandu we worked, all too briefly, with
a group of children who had been rescued from a life of near slavery
in the carpet factories renowned for child-labour and appalling conditions.
Now they were being looked after: they had food and shelter, they
had clothes to wear and they were going to school. They were happy.
Yes they were ready to talk a little about where they had been -
but the details only came out, later, in their
play.
And the performance did not wish to focus on how awfully they had
been treated. Instead it told a story of hope - with some plans for
retribution. In the process of regaining their own confidence and
identity they preferred to celebrate with us their common joy and
plans for the future. That is empowering in itself. Digging about
in their traumatised past would surely have been destructive.
and they should be transformative events in themselves ...
These min-festivals should, ideally, be transformative or liminal
events. The performers at least should emerge from the experience
changed in some way - be it in dignity, pride and solidarity. Just
as the disabled and able kids in Ng'ombe after their mini-festival.
Of course, it may not be necessary to run a whole performance festival
like the one in Ng'ombe for this - it may be enough, for example,
just to bring all the partners together in a local workshop.
Sometimes these events will 'uncover the covered' (Pintile Davids,
RISE Namibia), revealing areas/issues or points of view that had not
been expressed in any other medium.
Later this year cdcArts
will embark on a similar programme in Greece where we will work with
teachers from a range of schools. Some of these have almost exclusively
Albanian pupils, others Gypsies, Afghanis and other marginalised ands
refugee groups. Others of course are Greek. But the task will be training
the teachers in the use of PPP techniques within the classroom and
the end result will be a mini-festival where the different schools
(their pupils) will meet and share their points of view in performance
and workshop.
| 
