Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Ugandan Theatre

Taking a closer look into storytelling, we started with an activity where we would tell a story to a partner then modifying it and then seeing what it ended up as. Here's how we did it:

Sofia and I were partners. I would have to tell a story to Sofia about a secret box. Then we would switch partners with Mei and Maria and Sofia would tell the story to Maria (and Mei would tell Maria's story to me), but they had to include a leopard. Then we switch partners again and I had to tell Sofia (and Maria had to tell Mei) the modified story, but changing it again, including an issue (like suicide, teen pregnancy, abortion, bullying etc).
When we finished, we shared the modified version and tried to show choose one and present it.
We even modified it even more, but adding more issues, and trying to make them clearer.
Our story (the last version) was a man named Anoop (Indian) and he was given a box of trinkets that were given to him by his grandmother. She told him not to let anyone else touch the contents of the box. He took care of the box. Then he had a party with some of his classmates, and when he went to the bathroom, his British classmates had tried to pull a prank on him and tried on the jewelry, and when they tried on the leopard necklace, it started to choke his classmates. Anoop then feels guilty and sulks away, until he dies.

Here we included the issues of bullying, racism, depression and suicide.

We tried to present issues because we started to look at Theatre for Development which is a theatre where it has an educational aim. Uganda has lots of these, especially to educate people about AIDS.
Which is why we started to look at videos of TFDs and here are the things I've noticed:

-includes chanting
-includes comedy
-there's minimal costumes and no make-up.
-there's no lighting but the natural lighting.
-open air theatre.
-includes singing
-includes dancing
-there is no audience area. The audience just stands or sits around. Generally in a round.

We could definately keep one of these concepts in our project that we are headed towards.

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