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PARTICIPATORY PERFORMANCE PRACTICESwhat it is:The process of Theatre for Development is a strategic tool, that could (we would say 'should') be at the heart of any community development initiative that envisages social or behavioural change. PPP draws together a range of Theatre for Development and Participatory Research methods. It is process and product. Community artists tell their own story, highlight their own concerns and develop their own strategies amongst themselves, with their neighbours or with those policy makers in the wider world who have power over their lives. Facilitated by the processes of PPP. There is nothing new in these aims, but TFD has not been getting closer to realising them. PPP has evolved in response to a growing misconception of TFD as a 'bolt-on accessory'. It seeks to explore a full and participatory engagement with local culture as distinct from the practice of TFD purely as an information service. |
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why:Development agents frequently commission existing performing artists to intervene in a community and explore given issues, even creating plays that highlight particular concerns and recommendations. PPP casts - and trains - such outside performing troupes in the role of facilitators. In this way participatory research with the community as partners is prioritised and integrated at all levels in a process that works towards cultural action and performance by the community as artists within a Community Development initiative. At the same time PPP still allows for the outside facilitator/artists to weave their research outcomes into their own performance that can be used in turn to generate a recurrent and parallel cycle of PPP activities - another PPP campaign. |
furthermore:these pages seek to chart the path, context and methods associated with PPP. They will try to justify the need for yet another TLA (three-letter-acronym). But they are not intended as dogma. Taken separately the details of PPP are nothing new, they are an attempt to respond to a specific dilemma that TFD faces and look to the reader (or 'site-visitor') to respond with alternatives, suggestions and tales of other efforts to marry the different (dis)advantages of performer-centred, NGO facilitator-based and people-centred TFD practices. AS such this is intended as a thesis - for discourse and debate, which should be published or at least represented within the same pages. A final 'locked' or 'read-only' synthesis is envisaged, but only after the current offering has been subjected to response and antithesis, from other practitioners and theoreticians in the field. |