What is a 29 year old Romanian post-punk doing in the middle of an African village screaming in the local moré language and  rolling about, and why the 200 locals around laugh? The African adventures of two web-editors…

This summer Nadina and I were crazy enough to decide to spend our holidays in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, with a group of people from the Belgian NGO Quinoa. The project was the creation of a performance of “Forum-Theatre” and its representation in some villages around the capital.

On the way to one of the villages where we played

How we ended up in the “land of upright people”

When I got hired by the Parliament, I promised to myself to dedicate some time to some old passion: development issues and…travelling around the world. That’s how I applied to become responsible of one of the “Quinoa” projects. When I heard about the Forum-Theatre in Burkina, I got very excited, because I had read much about it in Argentina, during my master diploma in “communications for development” few years ago.

The Theatre-Forum is a form of Theatre of the Oppressed, a method developed by the Brazilian director and activist Augusto Boal. The aim is to transform the spectator in actor of the theatre experience, and indirectly of his own life.

The experience on stage

The opportunity of practicing theatre was one of the most valuable things of our experience. This form of theatre is the most effective mean of communication for rural, remote communities in many parts of the world, where they that don’t have access to mass media and often not even to school. “It is much more effective than any conference!”, an official of the European Commission’s local office told us. And we couldn’t agree more.

You get to the village – no roads, no water, no electricity. You get down in the market place, or another public space, and you start the music with an electric generator.  Children start to get close, curious like when the circus comes to town. Little by little, adults join the circle, women first and then the men. In the meanwhile you build the only element of the scene: a black sheet, like a screen behind the actors’ space. Few words of presentation, and the play begins. What is crazy for us, is the participation of people during the play! They discuss what they see on stage, they laugh a lot, especially when they see a nasara (white) speaking in moré, their local language. They cross the scene if necessary, and they applause or whistle the characters.

The essential of Forum-Theatre is to present “a play that must necessarily show a situation of oppression that the Protagonist does not know how to fight against, and fails. The spectactors are invited to replace this Protagonist, and act out – on stage and not from the audience – all possible solutions, ideas, strategies” (Augusto Boal, 2004).

Therefore, the moderator proposes to the audience to come on stage and re-play one scene, in order to modify the course of the events, bringing the play to a different end.

People come, take the stage, and – playing the character they have chosen to replace- they tell of their life experience in such a passionate and authentic way, that even if they are speaking moré, you can feel them, and be touched.

“Filles de vie”

The most moving experience for me has been when we accompanied the company playing a pièce on young prostitutes in a very poor neighbourhood of Ouaga.

At the end of the play, when the floor was given to the public, the girls – 12, 14 years old – came on stage and took the microphone to play. They finally had the right to speak, and they did, as a necessity. They could explain to their families, to the neighbours how they ended up there, and what made them suffer: the judgement of the others, the exclusion from the family, the way the society considered them. They asked comprehension and respect, but above all they explained that they were forced to the street because their parents didn’t accept their pregnancy. And that the change should come from the parents.

We couldn’t understand anything during the “forum”, all was in moré. But we realised that something extremely powerful was happening there, that this day would change someone’s life, or at least would shake some consciences.

Black and white actors playing a scene on children's traffic, during our tour in the villages

“Forum-Theatre is a collective rehearsal of reality”

As a professional of communications, and having studied this method some years before, but only in theory, it was extremely interesting to see how well it works. Here, in my opinion, the ingredients of the success:

Places where you don’t have electricity, therefore no TV, no radio, and nearly anything else: theatre maintains its “magic” and remains an important mean of communication, especially when the actors are good and able to catch the public’s attention.

The liveliness of African public: you could never expect such an involvement of the public in the Western concept of theatre, where the boundaries between the stage and the spectators are very well defined, and the public is educated not to interfere with the scene.

The strength of the subject: the theme is chosen for people to reflect themselves and their own problems, and to find – through the “forum” – new, positive answers to a common trouble. This means that more subject is close to the real worries of a certain community, more the representation will have an effect. Our play was on trafficking of children, a very common problem there.

The power of word: giving the floor to the excluded, this is the revolutionary practice! Seeing your situation represented on the stage and then having the legitimacy to have your say, the legitimacy of “parole”: this means giving power to the people to become aware, to claim their position in front of the society, and  therefore become actors of their own lives. The director of our company told us that “if people that saw the play will find themselves in the same situation, you can be sure they will act differently after this”. And, even if this is a complete heresy for the academics, I believe that sometimes communications can change the world.  ”Forum-Theatre is a collective rehearsal for reality”, used to say Boal: I suspect he was right.