Ola Johansson

Community theatre and AIDS

HIV/AIDS is the most serious health issue in the world today. Beyond information and medical campaigns the breakthrough of an effective social prevention is still challenging aid workers and researchers in Africa. Through a series of case studies and analyses, this book argues that participatory and interactive modes of community-based theatre may be the most auspicious mode of HIV prevention for the most susceptible groups in Tanzania today, namely young, poverty-stricken people, especially young rural women, and yet the latter groups and individuals prove to be the most knowledgeable social agents when it comes to identifying, organizing, and implementing taboo-breaching public counteractions against the pandemic. But when will the findings be acknowledged by the ones who have deployed the young people as artistic researchers? Not until young people are assigned a political mandate will they be able to make real changes in the ravaging pandemic.

The Lives and Deaths of Zakia: How AIDS Changed African Community Theatre and Vice Versa

This article discusses the functions of African community theatre in general, and its preventive capacity in the HIV/AIDS epidemic in particular. By delineating the parallel developments of community theatre and HIV prevention, the reciprocal needs of the practices are assessed in light of certain cases in Tanzania. This country has taken a leading position in the implementation of sustainable and locally owned theatre projects, but the challenges of the AIDS epidemic have proven so vast that the previously assumed purposes of community theatre must be called into question. Rather than being viewed as a means in itself, or a means for rapid change, community theatre is viewed as a relational means in coordinated programmes against AIDS. However, in spite of functioning as an exceptional relational agency for the most exposed cohort in the epidemic (women aged between fifteen and twenty-four), the social, gender and epidemic predicaments will persist as long as policy-makers do not fully recognize the status of young people and the capacity of community theatre.

The Limits of Community-Based Theatre: Performance and HIV Prevention in Tanzania

A research project on community-based theatre in Tanzania questions the efficacy of the genre in combating the AIDS epidemic. If performances are well attended, and participants are informed on the causes of the virus, why is it still rampant? Efficacy will be possible only when gender inequities and taboos are openly confronted.

Prefigurative performance in the age of political deception

Prefigurative interventions and occupations comprise a form of activism comparable to theatrical performance—embodying, situating, and performing hypothetical scenarios. These open-ended, horizontal performance practices employ site-sensitive interventions, tactical media, applied theatre, and cognate modes of interactivity.

Prefigurative Performance in American and African AIDS Activism

The essay compares responses to HIV and AIDS in the USA and sub-Saharan Africa in reference to performance practices, activism and documentary films. In both geopolitical spheres the epidemic onslaught was so acute whilst no effective antiretroviral treatment was accessible that performers created prefigurative actions, which not only impelled and expedited policy, cultural and medical responses to AIDS but also activist tactics used in future social and political crises. Groups like ACT UP in New York, the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa and community-based theatre groups in East Africa provided previously uncharted contact zones between governments and communities, which have, in effect, contributed to an intensified civil society and democratisation in these parts of the world today.

The Performativity of Community-Based Theatre

The romantic notion of a pre-colonial Africa, where rites and ceremonies guided communities into harmonious lifestyles and infused a democratic spirit before democracy existed, needs to be put into slightly more realistic perspectives through an examination of the conditions and functions of ritual-like performances today. Along with further empirical case studies, there is a concept which advances the discussion of efficacy in Chapter 1 but also offers a means of typological comparison between theatre and ritual regimes, namely performativity. Performativity indicates (the study of) possibilities to instantiate notions and rules through intersubjective actions. Even if the concept of performativity is not always used in anthropological studies on ritual, the latter set of cultural practices is regularly ascribed functions and meanings that meet the criteria of performative acts. The dichotomy that will be thrashed out in this chapter cuts between ritual and theatre like a diachronic fault line between practices that may have conflated in function but always exemplified different meanings and values, at least for the ones assessing their roles in various cultures. Concisely, the dichotomy can be spelled out as a postulation: ritual does things with social relations while theatre merely comments on them (cf. Rappaport’s stance below).

The Social Drama of Backstage Discourse and Performance

In the conclusion of Chapter 2 it was argued that CBT has the capacity to reveal conflicts that loom in the backstage world of ritual. The performative merits of CBT as HIV prevention has primarily to do with its task of bringing domestic or furtive behaviours into the broad daylight of public accountability. In order to investigate the correspondences and discrepancies between HIV prevention schemes, community performances, and potential outcomes, it is valuable to direct attention to discourses and practices between private and public events. In this chapter I will consider different kinds of discourses (group interviews, focus group discussions, and informal talks), which will eventually reach a point of an inverted theatrical and performative reality where confidential backstage talks allow for comparisons with official accounts of the epidemic and performances about the epidemic in the public sphere. As in the other chapters, this chapter is inductively piloted by an example of a community performance, which generates questions about the modal relation between the public and the private. A community group in north-western Tanzania, which could epitomize any manual with examples of best practices with regard to theatre as HIV prevention, turns out to be quite steered by the religious organization that backs their activities.

A Deadly Paradox: Assessing the Success/Failure of Community-Based Theatre against AIDS

Assessing the efficacy of community-based theatre as HIV prevention entails what could be called a deadly paradox: in the previous three chapters, one case after another shows that the ultimate accomplishment of this art of survival may be tantamount to failure. It may also be the case, imutatis mutandis, that many HIV prevention projects in Africa have succeeded in fulfilling their own stated goals and yet had no effect whatsoever on the epidemic. These inferences hinge on two pivotal and potentially contentious notions: first, the communicative routes of the epidemic and, second, the capability of theatre to identify and disrupt such routes. At face value, theatre iought to be the most auspicious mode of HIV prevention since its instantiation is so similar to the social situations whereby the virus is acquired. This was the hypothesis of the research project in the light of a number of stipulations. And if it is possible to identify the ghostly virus and its intersubjective communication, then it also ought to be possible to show and tell how it is possible to counteract the HIV incidences. With a retrospective through the previous chapters, the assessment of theatre has been broadened to consider its culture-specific pertinence and democratic potential as HIV prevention; CBT has, moreover, been recognized as a mode of intervention in a crises, with methods adaptable according to social predicaments rather than an invariable ritual regulation; furthermore, it has been distinguished as a form of performance that brings out backstage issues of the most susceptible epidemic cohorts to deal with them in dialogue with the general public in local circumstances.

HIV Prevention as Community-Based Theatre

AIDS became known in the Kagera region in 1983 and in this geographical location it is fair to assume, in virtue of correlations between outreach projects and statistical data, that travelling theatre troupes in conjunction with community-based theatre groups have had a certain impact on declining mortality rates, from a devastating quarter of the population in parts of the region some twenty years ago to a few odd per cent of the general population today.1 In this chapter, I will discuss the capacity of theatre to counter the epidemic challenges by offering a culture-historical retrospective of the epidemic as perceived in performances, and later by approaching contemporary quests for HIV prevention through a discussion of efficacious CBT. In order to show what HIV prevention and community-based theatre are up against, it is important to avoid a simple narrative about ‘AIDS in Africa’ and instead identify by way of concrete examples the many AIDS epidemics in the region and indeed in Tanzania as well as other parts of the world.