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"Theatre in communities"
The
Star (www.thestar.com.my)
(30/05/07)
JOE is 18 years old and he has a problem. His girlfriend wants to have sex
with him, but he wants to wait until they get married. What does he do? He’s
afraid she’ll leave him if he doesn’t have sex with her.
He says to himself: “I don’t want to lose her.”
So many things could happen next – depending on who is telling the story.
Lines like these are triggers in actor-trainer Chris Ng’s method of using
theatre to engage teenagers in discussions.
Ng has been developing and working with this methodology in Youth-To-Youth,
a Malaysian AIDS Council (MAC) community project which uses theatre to
educate the young about HIV/AIDS. Ng initiated the project back in 1999,
when Kuala Lumpur hosted the 5th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and
the Pacific (ICAAP).
Since then, Ng has introduced Youth-To-Youth around the country, from urban
KL to conservative Kelantan.
“I use theatre as a vehicle for young people to connect to the issue,” says
Ng.
What Ng hopes to do is to get young people to speak from their experiences,
or tell stories about their friends.
“I use the ‘first line’ method as a trigger. If they are talking about a
fictional character, or about a ‘friend’, they will be more open to sharing
their thoughts,” Ng explains.
Joe may decide, perhaps after discussion with friends, that he will sleep
with her.
“He will have sex with his girlfriend,” the second trigger line may go.
Then the girl is brought in and other issues arise. Does Joe and his
girlfriend have safe or unsafe sex? After some discussion, they agree to go
safe. And so the story continues.
Youth-To-Youth may work towards a performance – the participants usually put
on a show at the end of the workshop – but the aim is to get young people to
process their thoughts and empower them to negotiate for their ideas to be
discussed. In Ng’s workshops, the topic is usually on HIV/AIDS.
However, he does not expect them to be experts on the disease by the end of
the workshop.
“They cannot learn about HIV/AIDS overnight, but they can always refer back
to us,” Ng says. “Generally, once we’ve sowed the seed, these youths will
have HIV in their mindset.”
Youth-To-Youth is not only about educating the participants of the workshop,
but also about getting them to reach out to their peers.
Some of the plays from Ng’s workshops have been performed at various public
spaces such as during World AIDS Day celebrations or in schools.
Ng uses theatre for HIV/AIDS education, but it is a tool that can also be
used for other purposes. People are beginning to recognise the effectiveness
of community-based arts programmes in reaching out to young people.
Actor Mark Teh, 26, helmed the KL-based Taman Medan Community Arts Project
with fellow young arts practitioners Lim Chung Wei, Imri Nasution, Jerrica
Lai, Tan Sei Hon and Gan Siong King in 2002.
The project started initially as a six-month programme. Teh and his friends
went into the Taman Medan community every weekend to work with children
ranging from 10 to 17 years old, teaching them art skills like theatre,
photography and filmmaking. Unlike Ng, Teh’s approach wasn’t to push an
issue but rather to expose young people to the arts.
In the process, however, this exposure gave the youths a platform to express
themselves and talk about things they normally cannot talk about. Teh's
method is simple – enter their community and engage them in a setting and
with tools they are familiar with.
But young people don’t warm up so easily, especially to strangers. So, Teh
and his group have to inject a lot of fun elements, or as he puts it, “a
sense of play”.
“We don’t use theatre vocabulary,” Teh shares, adding that instead they use
more common lingo like sports. “We tell them that the relationship between
the audience and a performer is like that of a player and a fan.”
Then there is also the context in which they are most comfortable with.
“In the beginning, when we played games and exercises, we didn’t know why it
didn’t work,” Teh says.
“Then we realised that it was a problem with cultural context, so we threw
out things like Santa Claus and used local legends like Hang Tuah and Hang
Jebat.”
Teh’s Taman Medan project ran for almost four years. Each week, they worked
with about 30 youths and half the participants were usually regulars.
The first phase of the project saw a public screening of videos the youths
had created over the course of the programme. Besides the youths, their
parents and other young people from the community watched various stories
participants had to share – touching on the topics of truancy, rape and
abuse.
These days, Teh has been spending more time engaging an older crowd –
tertiary students. Last year, he directed a production called Baling (Membaling)
– based on the 1955 peace talks between then Prime Minister of Malaysia
Tunku Abdul Rahman and Chin Peng, secretary-general of the Communist Party
of Malaysia in Baling, Kedah.
Armed with three non-actor performers, and a simple set, Baling toured
several tertiary institutions and futsal centres in the Klang Valley.
“We were interested to see how students might respond to our play which,
let’s face it, is not the most obvious thing to interest young people –
Malaysian history, physical theatre, performers with no acting experience,”
Teh says.
His intention was to help young people get ownership of their history, and
he did this not only by piecing together the play but also by holding a
discussion after every show.
This week, Teh again fulfils his promise of bringing the arts to the public
through his new production – Dua, Tiga, Dalang Berlari.
Similarly, Janet Pillai’s project Anak-Anak Kota (AAK) has been steadily
making waves in Penang since it was initiated in 2001. Pillai has long
worked in children’s theatre and was one of the key persons behind Five Arts
Centre’s Teater Muda.
Like Ng and Teh, Pillai also uses the arts to engage with young people – in
her case, to get them interested in heritage.
Pillai wanted to open the children's eyes to other interpretations of
heritage, to move beyond merely looking at old buildings. For example, they
went to a nutmeg juice shop and learnt to see it as part of their heritage –
if the children do not learn how to make juice, they won’t know how to do it
in the future.
Through the years, AAK participants have presented their findings and
thoughts, in different ways. In the My Balik Pulau project, 20 children from
the small rural district in Penang captured the essence of the town and
presented it in an exhibition. Last year, they re-staged the Penang street
festival Heritage Heboh! with shows using wayang kulit, rap and dance.
“In arts, you use your senses a lot – your hands, body and intelligence for
example. Children find it more interesting and natural. It is a tool; we
don’t push them into the artistic realm. Also, it covers more scope than
chalk and talk,” says Pillai.
Ng, Teh and Pillai are theatre practitioners who have been involved over the
years in many professional productions. There is little money to be made in
community arts, but they are all dedicated to bringing arts to the ground to
introduce our youngsters to different ways of expressing themselves.
n Chris Ng has written a book on the Youth-to-Youth method. Although it is
meant for HIV/AIDS education, the book Youth Speak: Issues On HIV/Aids
Through Drama can be used to address other issues. Youth organisations can
approach MAC for a copy of the book by contacting Shalina Azhar at 03-4045
1033.
Notes: STF - : Actors and theatre coaches are making their craft accessible
to the young through community-based programmes in schools and
neighbourhoods.
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