Applied theatre, an umbrella term for outreach performance projects beyond conventional stages and institutions, has been a higher education discipline in UK institutions since the 1990s. Although it generally justifies its key purpose as transformative of social or political state of affairs, it has been challenging to validate the efficacy of applied theatre. Over time, the desired changes have become increasingly specific, from general social changes to particular alterations in, for instance, communal participation, personal attitudes and immersive experiences of specific issues. In the early 1990s, Baz Kershaw’s effort to determine the impact of radical community theatre over the past decades in the UK got lost in macro-political changes.1 A decade later, Judith Ackroyd declared that there was still ‘a crying need for evaluation of applied theatre’.2 A few years afterwards, Michael Etherton and Tim Prentki’s editorial ‘Drama for Change? Prove it! Impact Assessment in Applied Theatre’ merely seemed to indicate how difficult the task would be.3 In 2009, James Thompson steered away from the challenge altogether with the argument that ‘affective’ impacts are more relevant to determine than ‘effective’ changes anyway.4
In this article I will consider the validation of efficacious applied theatre from an alternative point of view, not as external social impacts or internal experiential transformations, but as performative interventions into social relations and policies that situate, embody and enact the very aims of the outreach projects. Examples are given of performance practices and models in Africa and the Middle East which do not necessarily adhere to an academic protocol or a political mandate, but which instantiate prefigurative and democratic reforms of social and political changes on their own terms.
Rather than seeing the ‘end of effect’, as Thompson wished, the ‘effect discourse’, as Gurgens Gjaerum calls it,5 seems to have gravitated toward critical multi-persepectival studies, juxtaposing analyses of theatre companies’ remit alongside monitoring and evaluation of particular projects, as well as assessments of social impact combined with the self-empowerment of groups and individuals, and enhancement of human well-being aligned with managerial donor relations.
A case in point is the evaluation praxis of DramAidE (Drama for AIDS Education) in South Africa. Lynn Dalrymple, then Director of DramAidE, made a brave attempt to lay out the conditions and methodology of impact assessments during the worst years of the AIDS pandemic in the country.6 Monitoring and evaluation had become a standing requirement of stakeholders and donors in the early 2000s, which meant that the impact of performance practices needed to be substantiated with support from methods like observation, focus group interviews and questionnaires in schools vis-à-vis surveys at health care facilities. Impact was often informed and guided by social scientific concepts such as the health belief model and the theory of reasoned action, backed by more applicable models of communication for change, such as the Knowledge, Attitude and Practice/Behaviour (KAPB) change model.7 Most of these theories and models became increasingly criticized by HIV prevention workers and researchers, primarily due to their applicability towards privileged individuals in the global North rather than poverty-stricken communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Nevertheless, DramAidE had a methodological orientation based on Paulo Freire’s pedagogy and which was closely aligned with its own core activities. This produced a heuristic, community-based methodology that combined self-reflection and interpersonal dialogue, which in turn led to social mobilization, community analysis as well as to applied theatre for people without considerable education or wealth.8
Dalrymple emphasized that the impact studies should above all benefit participatory target groups rather than donors, and that the methodology should be based on action research rather than generalised scientific models of behavioural predictability.9 Hence, with its own design of monitoring and evaluation, DramAidE reached its aims to ‘provide young people with the information and skills to make healthy lifestyle choices’, based on ‘education and information’ that ‘prompt young people to take action thus bringing about social change’.10 Dalrymple’s article addressed the conditions and methodology of evaluating but also, implicitly, served to validate applied theatre as a participatory HIV preventive practice for stakeholders and target groups. The DramAidE projects were about preparing young people for vital decisions on the basis of action research and thus contributing with ‘small changes’ in ‘a joint effort by both government and civil society to make an impact’.11 Applied theatre can indeed be effective on such terms, but the preparation of young people to stand up for themselves and take decisive actions in critical situations is also valuable in and of itself. Dalrymple’s conclusions are perhaps too modest. Applied theatre can do more than merely provide information and skills and prompt people to take action. DramAidE is an example of a group which not only prepares and urges people to act, but which facilitates direct action by target groups in complex and critical public situations.
When I visited Dalrymple at the University of Zululand in 2004, we discussed a dramatically straightforward and yet culturally complex school intervention. (This came before the monitoring and evaluation methods discussed in her article two years later.) I particularly remember an exercise facilitated by DramAidE in a secondary school in KwaZulu Natal, involving the characters Sipho and Hazel, where the male student (Sipho) asks the female student (Hazel) out for a date. I later wrote about this exercise.12 To see the young woman exercise her right to decline Sipho’s proposal in front of the entire school population is to witness a speech act that ought to be legitimate as a full rehearsal for similar public situations outside of the school.
For a full appreciation of the application of the speech act to real life situations, it is necessary to go beyond the cognitive and linguistic information, education and communication, and take account of the situational, embodied, behavioural, attitudinal and, not least, the prefigurative qualities of the exercise. The pressure was on. Stepping into the middle of the schoolyard in the AIDS workshop, and implying that the after-school relations between students can lead to sexually transmitted infections takes a lot of courage and determination by the actors as well as the school leadership. Applied theatre of this kind is not merely holding up a mirror to the world as it is, let alone as it used to be, but prefigures a world as participants want it to be(come), a situation in which social agents, in the words of Carl Boggs, enact ‘the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’.13
David Graeber extends Boggs’ definition of prefigurative politics in reference to ‘the idea that the organizational form that an activist group takes should embody the kind of society we wish to create’.14 The impact of a prospective exercise such as the negotiation between Sipho and Hazel does not only hinge on a personal awareness of risk factors behind HIV transmissions, or changes in eventual health statistics, but also on the potential of the exercise as a speech act and prefigurative action to be applied amongst the involved target groups, including students and teachers in the secondary school as well as the viewers of the DVD which was produced and distributed by DramAidE at the time. Applied theatre is not a mass medium, and therefore it is unrealistic to expect a wide-scale impact.15 To demand a clear-cut impact, or to ‘prove a change’, in attitudes or behaviour is also besides the point. Applied theatre is primarily about preparing participants for taking action when faced with particular situations – or determinants in health related contexts – in public, at home, at work or indeed at school.
Building on this example, I suggest an alternative approach to the validation of efficacy in applied theatre, which has less to do with evidencing changes in society, or monitoring and evaluating discrete projects, but more to do with the agency of and direct engagement by social agents in interventions which are analogous to the process of participatory democracy. The basic affinity between applied theatre and democracy become apparent when their definitions are juxtaposed. Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston’s definition of applied theatre identifies a ‘theatre “for” a community…theatre “with” a community [and] theatre “by” a community’; this characterization is co-extensive with Abraham Lincoln’s classic definition of democracy as a government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’.16 In recent political science, the direct participation of citizens in public decision-making has been explored in the area of participatory democracy, as is made clear in Enriqueta Aragonès and Santiago Sánchez-Pagés’ definition:
Participatory democracy is a process of collective decision making that combines elements from both direct and representative democracy: Citizens have the power to decide on policy proposals and politicians assume the role of policy implementation. The electorate can monitor politicians’ performance simply by comparing citizens’ proposals with the policies actually implemented.17
To flesh out the political/theatrical analogy, participation in applied theatre projects usually involves both proposals for change (collective creation of scripts, a practice-based research process called devising), and implementation of the proposals (dramatic performance of the scripts), whilst the monitoring function is delegated in post-performance discussions with the audience (cf. the ‘electorate’ in the quote above). The analogy with Aragonès and Sánchez- Pagés’ definition of participatory democracy is spelled out in Rebecca Herrington’s definition of ‘Participatory Theatre for Change’ which she describes as:
a creative approach used with and by communities and groups to collectively research and critically analyse their own situation, develop and perform artistic and cultural content that reflects their reality, and actively engage participants in dialogue, analysis, planning, and action towards positive social transformation.18
Hence, the combination of deliberative and direct democracy in participatory democracy corresponds quite pertinently to the combination of practice-as-research and prefigurative action in applied theatre.19 The research component is necessary without a given political mandate in theatre projects and provides an operational framework, including the social mobilization of participants, and the probing into the issues at stake, as well as the audience interaction, whilst the prefiguration is about the direct action of proposed reforms through public performance. The research and prefiguration is, then, triangulated by the input of the audience. I am suggesting that these are the three validating cornerstones of applied theatre.
Two examples of this framework in action demonstrate the participatory and democratic challenges in theatre projects. I emphasize their integral and applicable qualities rather than merely their estimated external impact or anecdotal internal change.
At the beginning of my research in East Africa (2005–10), I approached various organisations about my intentions to investigate the efficacy of community theatre (also labelled theatre for development, popular theatre and, more recently, applied theatre) in the fight against AIDS.20 In an early meeting with UNAIDS Program Coordinator Henry Meena in Dar es Salaam he told me he had good news and that he wanted to show me something. We sat down in the conference room and looked at a circular chart with about ten interconnected boxes with labels, of which one said ‘Community Mapping and Theatre against AIDS’ (COMATAA).21 The chart outlined a three-year District Response Initiative (DRI) and for the first time theatre qualified as a best practice in an internationally rolled out HIV prevention scheme. This meant that a number of community-based theatre groups would not only receive funding for their work, but also be properly evaluated alongside other prevention models, such as home-based care, training of leaders, capacity building of health facilities, and so forth.
There were two rationales behind the need to validate community theatre as a best practice in the AIDS pandemic at the time. One had to do with its applied capacity to serve HIV preventive purposes, and the other had to do with the concept of community-based theatre. The former rationale pertain to the public performances whilst the latter rationale corresponds to the above-mentioned research component which frames projects by means of social mobilization, analysis of issues, the facilitation of theatre activities and the audience interaction. I will discuss the first rationale first.
When Meena broke the news about the DRI in 2003, Tanzania, along with most other sub-Saharan countries, still lacked life-saving antiretroviral treatment, despite the fact that it had been available for six years in the global North.22 Therefore, the basic research that had brought about a biomedical breakthrough in 1996 was worthless for HIV-positive people in Africa, due to the pharmaceutical patent that made the treatment astronomically expensive.23
Consequently, the control of AIDS became a matter of applying social and cultural strategies for HIV preventive purposes. In its most basic form, HIV prevention was about promoting the so-called ABC model: Abstaining from sex, Being faithful, and using Condoms. However, the model was only marginally successful, especially with a widespread faith-based emphasis on the A and B options. In many places HIV incidence and prevalence rates continued to rise unabated. The determinants behind the epidemic turned out to be more complex than was assumed in the individualised rational belief models and involved cultural and structural challenges that had been around for longer than the pandemic, such as poverty, gender inequality, and postcolonial social disintegration.24 This is where the concept of community theatre emerged as an option for various organisations and agencies.
The video clip/screen shot #1 shows a domestic conflict between two spouses in Masasi, Tanzania. The wife has just become aware of the fact that her husband has taken a second wife – a so-called nyumba ndogo, meaning a ‘small house’ in Swahili – whilst she is left behind with nearly no money to support herself and their children. The implication in the context of AIDS is that extramarital affairs increase the risk of infecting spouses with HIV. The clip is from 2003 when no affordable antiretroviral treatment was available to Tanzanians. The theatre group in Masasi was supported by UNICEF and the local council.
African community theatre evolved across the continent after the independence of the former colonies, and has always involved more than the act of performing theatre. Instantiating liberation and societal change involves a set of interconnected activities: projects are initiated with social mobilization to start up a community centre or at least a theatre group, followed by a collective community analysis/mapping, which hones in on key epidemiological scenarios, which are then enacted and rehearsed, followed by public performances, which are, in turn, deliberated in post-performance discussions. All these steps finally provide the basis for recommendations of countermeasures to the crisis in reference to follow-up programmes. By the time international organisations such as UNAIDS turned their attention to community theatre in the 1990s, artistic researchers like Penina Mlama in Tanzania had already facilitated long-term projects about crucial epidemic determinants, even before AIDS became known by its Swahili name Ukimwi in the mid 1980s.
The seminal ‘Malya popular theatre project’, which was about schoolgirl pregnancies, lasted for eighteen months in 1982-83 and epitomized what Penina Mlama calls the ‘Tanzanian model’ of popular theatre.26 What made the project unique was that community members participated in all stages of the project, from the social mobilization to the creation and performance of theatre to the recommendations for follow-up programmes. The elements of the project emanated from local modes of discourse and performance, enhanced by post-independence types of dance and theatre in Tanzania.
Video clip/screen shot #2 shows a court scene in Likokona, Tanzania (2004). The plaintiff is a woman who is taking her own brother to court over an inheritance dispute after her husband’s death. In the matrilineal part of southern Tanzania the brother/maternal uncle is traditionally expected to safeguard his sister’s household economy, but as the ethnic customs – in this case among the Makua population – have been compromised after colonial violations of cultural and demographic communities along with postcolonial nationalism, the brother finds himself in a situation where he decides to keep the inheritance for himself. The sister goes to court arguing that she needs the money for her children’s education, unaware of – or unable to follow – the routine of bribing the judge. The latter deems the woman’s story unreliable and thus rules in favour of the brother. The blatant corruption stirs up protests in the court but to no avail. The scene finishes with a song that marks the end of the drama and the beginning of the post-performance deliberation. However, in Likokona there was no audience discussion as the council building (the red house in the background) was situated at hearing distance from the performance. Hopefully the politicians picked up the urgency of the dramatic action. Just as in Masasi, the dramatic action did not refer directly to ‘Ukimwi’ as the spectators are more than aware about the risk of destitute women having to engage in transactional sex to cover their family’s living costs – hence the link to contracting the HIV virus.
Before countries in sub-Saharan Africa had access to antiretroviral medicines, the application of models such as community theatre qualified as best practices in HIV-prevention.27 In the end, however, UNAIDS excluded COMATAA from its DRI programme, most likely due to the difficulty of quantifying an evidence-based evaluation scheme of the implementation of community theatre. A complex participatory practice like community theatre does not easily fit the UN-established monitoring and evaluation models, which will be addressed in the conclusion of this article. What is required of an adequate validation of community theatre is to acknowledge its research framework and its direct action, including the self-valuating public deliberation, and then correlate this with qualitative and quantitative data and recorded changes in macro-contexts.28 This points to the democratic analogy mentioned earlier in this paper. A proper validation, whether it is of an election or an outreach project on HIV-prevention, requires a comparison of, on the one hand, an inclusive concept of participation for, with and by people affected by a particular state of affairs. On the other hand, it needs the performance of the issues at stake. The data and results of such a validation needs to be sourced and analysed by both quantitative and qualitative means, preferably by combining monitoring and evaluation, participatory self-evaluation and consideration of macro-contextual data. I will return to this idea following another example of the conditions of validating applied theatre.
The third case of validation is taken from The Freedom Theatre (TFT) in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. With an arsenal of applied theatre practices, TFT is engaging in outreach projects in the local refugee camp, in villages and towns across the West Bank, as well as on international tours. There is only one significant place the theatre does not visit: Israel.29 In my view, this strategy means that the cultural activism of the organization should not be seen primarily as a mode of resistance, but as prefigurative and democratic counter- occupation.30 My use of these terms attempts to characterise TFT’s multi-layered counteractions against ‘the Occupation’. Israel is the most conspicuous occupying force which impacts the theatre organisation, but not the only one. Other powers are exerted on the TFT by the Palestinian Authority, as well as international aid organizations such as UNRWA and USAID.31
To come to grips with this multi-layered and complicated political experience, TFT has recently used playback theatre in connection to their ‘Freedom Bus tours’.32 The concept of playback theatre is as follows: individual members of a target group volunteer to tell a story, which is then dramatised by actors and musicians for a wider community to see and discuss. This circular course of actions took on a wider remit in 2016, when TFT decided to use the stories from playback theatre sessions as a dramaturgical backbone for the production Return to Palestine (2016), which toured the communities from which the original stories were sourced. The play is about Jad, an American-born Palestinian, who travels to his ancestral land for the first time. Jad’s adventures start in Tel Aviv, where he is lucky to escape a rather hostile situation, and ends up in the Palestinian territories, where he gets to know a group of people who are engaged in the resistance against the Israeli occupation. In a scene with stone throwing protesters, Jad’s friend Malek gets hit by a bullet and dies in his arms. This moment marks a turning point in the play. Jad’s journey goes from being one of returning to Palestine to a point of no return from Palestine.
In video clip/screen shot #3, TFT actors are performing the street theatre piece Return to Palestine (2016) in central Nablus in the West Bank (Occupied Palestinian Territories) to the background sound of a prayer and gunshot sounds from a drum. The scene shows the moment when Malek is shot by an Israeli sniper (played by a fellow actor in a standing position to the right of the victim), followed by mourning and music from the string instrument Oud. After the show the audience discussed the performance for as long as the dramatic action lasted.
By touring Return to Palestine back to the towns, villages and refugee camps that contributed to the script of the performances, the people in these places get a chance to reflect on their own stories alongside personal stories from other West Bank and Gaza sites. In that way, direct personal experiences from the ground get disseminated not only across local communities, but throughout the occupied territories as well as countries like Jordan and Portugal.33 The use of post-performance discussions is a form of participatory evaluation. However, unlike the self-validating deliberations of the Tanzanian community theatre in the example above, which were used to enhance and calibrate communal empowerment and advocacy for social, political or health reforms, the outcome of TFT’s community theatre is mainly conveyed between people on the ground and for international audiences, due to the multi-layered occupation.
The geopolitical isolation of TFT has turned the organization into a unique meeting point of local and global. In resistance to the Israeli occupation, and without economic support from the Palestinian Authority, the theatre largely relies on international funding alongside its local and regional projects. It is easy to view this as a suffocating situation, or even a futile resistance against hegemonic regimes that could not care less about theatre, but there is another way of recognizing the value of TFT’s mission. It is not only that TFT offers an international connection to the Jenin refugee camp. It also offers a range of professional provisions and social services to people in the West Bank: a fully equipped theatre which is used by students in a three-year education as well as children in the camp; offices, a kitchen and a kindergarten that employ a number of local residents; a guest house that accommodates a nonstop influx of international professionals and solidarity workers, and so on. Furthermore, the organization keeps a door open for local leaders and politicians who happen to take an interest in any of the TFT programmes.
Hence TFT goes beyond the remit of cultural resistance as it undertakes a multi-layered counter-occupation in a sphere of the civil society which operates, courtesy of mainly international funding, on a leasehold site within a UN-controlled refugee camp. The TFT site is, in turn, situated in the occupied de jure Palestinian territories. The links between the organization and the Palestinian Authorities are very weak, and the connections to Israel are completely absent. In other words, TFT is setting up a prefigurative regime with administrative, educational, creative, communal and outreach services that are enacting operational pockets of democracy before the egalitarian and judicial conditions for such regime are mandated. This is not to say that the organization is building a disinterested utopia. Rather, each of the forces above is counteracted by affirmative and prefigurative tactics.
Determining an impact of an outreach project requires monitoring and evaluation; optimizing the potential for such a change requires validation. Whilst an evaluation generally quantifies indications and evidence by quantifying data, a validation pursues qualitative criteria by formulating questions begging open-ended albeit pertinent responses. Once a conflict or crisis is identified and before a decision on intervention can be made, the following questions, at least, must be answered:
– Does the conflict or crisis lend itself to a local target group’s ability to intervene by posing problems related to the crisis, perform responses to the problems and, ultimately, prefigure potential solutions to the crisis?
– Is it possible to mobilize the relevant participants for the project?
– Is this the right time and place to intervene with applied theatre?
– Which concepts, techniques and methods of applied theatre are most suitable in this particular crisis and for this target group?
– Which research methods and performance practices can be adopted and/or contributed by the target group?
– How can applied theatre be implemented in this particular case in cooperation with, or juxtaposed to, other means of intervention?
– How can this project be enhanced by the audience in post-performance discussions and follow-up programmes? And which local and cultural features can be integrated into the project to encourage participatory audience feedback?
– How can the intellectual and material ownership of the project be transferred from the project facilitators and funders to the local target group?
– How can these questions help validate a project in reference to a report, an academic analysis or another kind of account in order to justify the means and ends of (in order of priority) target group, local audiences, theatre facilitators, stakeholders and project funders?
I propose these as an initial set of questions that can be used in the preliminary stages of applied theatre projects and arguably help validate its values and principles of participatory democracy. There is no doubt that it benefits from being combined with, for instance, a monitoring and evaluation scheme, like the ones discussed by Dalrymple, along with basic best practice criteria, such as the ones specified by UNAIDS as well as ethical and political principles vis-à-vis stakeholders, public offices and funding agencies, as exemplified by The Freedom Theatre. It is crucial that the initial questions relate to the specific conditions of a planned project, that the strengths and limitations of the intervention are acknowledged, and that quantitative or scientific evaluation models do not override the qualitative features of the key activities of the intervention.
A typical monitoring and evaluation procedure by UNDP, a slightly more elaborate guide to project management than the UNAIDS best practice criteria, involves factors such as outputs (tangible products or services of interventions), outcomes (changes in social conditions), impact (changes in human well-being), attributions (causes of social changes), contributions (changes caused by interventions), organizational effectiveness (measures of an organisation’s performance), and developmental effectiveness (effective agency of stakeholders). All these objectives are relevant to validate an intervention. However, to do justice to an arts-based intervention, at least two additional factors need to be taken into consideration, namely creativity (target audiences’ ability to comprehend and act on a project’s impact in independent ways), and participation (target audiences’ ability to apply creative ideas by direct action in shared social spaces and movements). These two factors return us to the cornerstones of applied theatre projects, namely practice-as-research and prefigurative action. A good way to integrate creativity and participation is to incentivize a sustainable progress of projects through participatory evaluation.34 This gives a target group an opportunity to take ownership of an intervention and its assessment by evaluating the process and outcomes of an accomplished project and, thus, calibrate it step-by-step according to their own needs, means, aptitude, and purposes, so that the end point of the project turns into a starting point for the next phase of the project.
The overarching design of applied theatre interventions is about researching and implementing efficacious outreach projects with an aim to bring about change. But that is just the stage setting. Performing applied theatre, whether it is a matter of disrupting a situation by visualising, protesting or altering a conflict or crisis, is about creating a more viable regime of direct action, immersive tactics, and prefigurative politics – for, with and by participating audiences. The South African, Tanzanian, and Palestinian cases in this article, alongside participatory modes of activism like Occupy and Tent embassies, aim to create a changed society: ‘social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’, in brief, ‘the kind of society we wish to create’ to reiterate Boggs’ and Graeber’s prefigurative viewpoints. I suggest it is important to perform direct democratic actions to the point where a woman can stand up to a man and enact a pro-choice stance about her own sexuality, or to her adulterous husband about matrimonial and economic equity, or take her own brother to court when her children’s education is under threat, or where an oppressed people can challenge a hegemonic force and a corrupt legal and political system with an extrajudicial democratic counteraction. These interventions are worth validating in their own right, as rehearsals on a public stage, with a present and responsive audience, and with participants who are ready to face any player from the repertory of life in the round.