Wednesday morning, 7am: I find myself standing bleary-eyed outside the Community Theatre Centre in James Town, about to get on a beaten up tro-tro with 13 considerably more awake looking Theatre for a Change staff members and CTC members. We are waiting to drive to a town called Amasaman - about an hour's drive away from Accra - where we will be launching a new project, called 'Stepping into Action'.
Before I arrived in Ghana, a high profile member of the local community saw TfaC's work featured on Ghanaian TV and invited the company to come and run a project in her community. The launch event is for stakeholders from the local community and is designed to gather support from well placed and influential local people, who are crucial to ensuring the project's success.
The meeting starts slowly and I start to wonder whether anyone will turn up. 10 minutes later and the small room is heaving with people - at least 40, most of them women, some of whom bring babies and small children.
Over the next 3 months Stepping into Action will recruit (or 'mobilise') 20 young people aged 18-24 and train them in using Interactive Theatre. They focus on teenage pregnancy and what the company calls 'behaviour change': shorthand for a process inherent to Interactive Theatre which allows young people to make positive choices about the way they approach certain situations in their lives.
In January, 10 of the participants will pair up to run 5 of their own 'focus groups', helping to train another 100 local young people. The other 10 will continue to work as a group, performing forum theatre pieces across Amasaman. It's an approach which reflects TfaC's desire to pass their method on to as many people as possible in the quickest way possible, creating a wide network of Interactive Theatre practitioners and participants.
The launch consists in the main of 2 sections: speeches and discussion about the way Theatre for a Change will approach the project and a performance by members of the Community Theatre Centre in James Town. This is, of course, the highlight - I'm really surprised by the talent of the young performers and the way they connect with the audience.
Naddei's story
The performance is about a 15 year old girl called Naddei whose parents are too poor to continue to pay her school fees. She meets an older man who, pretending to know her mother, convinces her to let him help her out - she must sleep with him in return. She becomes pregnant and is eventually kicked out by her domineering father.
After the performance, Nii - a wonderful, likeable facilitator - asks the by now very vocal audience for their reaction to Naddei's story. He explains that the performance has presented us with a problem (a 'model') and we must now try and find solutions to it (an 'anti-model'). Someone suggests that the mother talks to Naddei's teacher about the school fees. Another would like both parents to confront the man who raped (or 'defiled') Naddei.
Both courses of action are played out and the audience are this time invited to step into the action, using a technique called 'touch tag' to take the place of the performer playing Naddei. Suddenly Naddei becomes more forceful, or more honest, or better equipped to find a way out of the situation in which she has found herself.
It's only a demonstration so we don't go into nearly as much depth as we could, but it is still fascinating. The women watching are enthusiastic, vocal, opinionated and ready to stand up and play out the roles. I'm fascinated about seeing a less confident, less prepared audience deal with the same situation.
On the way back in a bumpy old tro-tro, Johnson, one of the TfaC Senior Programme Officers, is delighted by the meeting. One thing in particular pleases him: in the midst of a discussion about the need for parents to better support their children some of the mothers present said they wanted to start up their own performance group. Now all he needs to do is find a way to run it ...
VIDEO
After the meeting I interviewed Johnson about the project, the meeting and the next step for the Stepping into Action project in Amasaman. Please click on the video at the top of this page to see the interview and clips from the project.
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