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Theatre Arts for Advanced Secondary Schools

Theatre creation
Theatre creation involves translating identified problems and identified solutions
into a theatre performance. At this stage, the process expected to raise questions
and provoke more discussions from the community for more insights into
the problems identified and analysed. Participants in the process, in this case
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community members, select theatrical forms they are familiar with, including
those which they want to use to communicate their views on the identified
and analysed problems. The artistic forms may include drama, dance, songs,
storytelling, music, poetry and recitations.

After interpreting and analysing collected information, facilitators require
embarking on guiding community members through the creation of theatre
performance based on the collected data and the proposed theatre forms. The
process of theatre creation goes through a normal procedure of theatre production,
although in theatre for development, improvisation is mostly applied. Common
steps in creating theatre are story development, devising a theatre (play, dance,
storytelling and the like) and rehearsing.

Story development: Story should be developed from the information obtained
from the data gathered in a community. Facilitators may guide the participants
to devise a story around experiences of some individuals or families. Despite
the fact that the story is developed on the basis of true experiences of people
in a community, storyline and characters should be fictitious. It is therefore
necessary to adopt a distancing approach. For example, if the issue raised during
data collection is about a bully teacher in a community school, when developing
a story, storyline should not pick exactly the same story and the same teacher’s
personality.

Devising a theatre performance: Facilitators lead the activity of creating a
theatre by considering themes obtained during story development. They have
to examine situations that will be accepted by the people. They should think of
different situations that will reflect themes and characters. However, in choosing
characters, they should not imitate personalities. Members of the community are
allowed to use any form of theatre they like, be it dance, storytelling, songs or a
play. Figure 1.2 shows facilitators sketching a play during a workshop.

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