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What is Kachahari Theater?

Kachahari Theater is a kind of interactive drama where the audience themselves direct a performance about their own lives. In the Nepali language, the word “Kachahari” means a village gathering or a place to seek justice. It refers to a traditional kind of people’s court where villagers gather to hear and resolve conflicts in their own community. Kachahari Theater attempts to create this kind of forum using drama. The first half of a play is presented by a group of actors. They go to a village ahead of the performance, observe and ask the locals questions about their lives and the kind of conflicts with which they are confronted. In our case the actors are from the local communities themselves, grass-roots activists who have learned some basic acting skills. They already know the broad basis of the conflicts, but through informal discussions with people they learn how such conflicts are seen and experienced locally.

Based on this reality, they put together the first few scenes of a play. The scenes incorporate aspects of daily life in the village in which the audience lives - the irrigation canal that runs through the settlement, the words and expressions that the locals use, the well from which only high-caste people are allowed to draw water, etc. The play builds up to a conflict that somehow embodies the social conflict in which local people are caught. For example, in one village “untouchable” low-caste people are denied access to certain water taps. The play might show an untouchable girl secretly taking water from the tap and getting caught. She is beaten. At this point the play stops.

An animator, or storyteller, who introduced the play, enters the stage and asks the audience what the girl should do now. As the audience comes with suggestions, the actors show them on the spot. Various ideas are tried out and their consequences shown. Often attempts to resolve the conflicts will lead to new conflicts - if the girl gets her brothers to chase down her assaulter, the police may become involved; if she ignores it she may be insulted again in another scene. Where both parties of a conflict are present in the audience, their suggestions to the evolving story may take the shape of response-counter response. A conversation where the words are acted out. The stage provides a platform that is somehow safe to try out ideas. Consciously or subconsciously the audience knows that the play is really about themselves, but the world of drama creates a space where it is legal to see one’s imagination acted out. As the performance develops, the play and reality can no longer be separated. People speak freely about their own lives. They watch their struggles acted out before them on the stage, and at times join and act them out themselves.

Kachahari Theater is a Nepali adaptation of a theater method called Forum Theater, developed in the 1970s by a Brazilian dramatist named Augusto Boal. He believed that theater could be a “rehearsal for life.” That oppressed people could use theater as a place to explore strategies for resistance. Where other socially-engaged theater presents the problems of the oppressed and offers ways to break free, Forum Theater differs in that the oppressed are asked to imagine their response within the play itself. It takes authority away from the director and places it in the hands of the audience. Underlying the performance is an idea that everyone can be a director, both in the play and in his or her own life.

Though Nepal has a strong tradition of street-drama, most of this theater suffers from the same constraints as other socially-engaged theater. The often lively and provocative performances are quite popular. In a country where many cannot read, street drama has earned a reputation of being a great way of “getting the message across.” However, precisely this tendency to present the “right message” has meant that street drama often takes the shape of morality tales. The drama presents simple solutions: people who accept caste discrimination will suffer from it themselves, etc. The full weight of reality - the reasons why people do what they are not “supposed to” - are usually left undeveloped.

No easy solutions

The Kachahari Theater presented by MS and its partners confronts audiences with conflicts they are involved in and ask them to react to them themselves. There are no easy solutions. Serious social conflicts have long histories. If resolving them were easy, the people involved would have done so themselves a long time ago. But factors such as power, vulnerability, resources, violence, mistrust, and fear all prevent the oppressed from acting freely. Faced with this reality, people develop survival skills, ways of resisting oppression and maintaining their dignity while at the same time paying what dues they have to. Kachahari Theater allows them to explore these strategies. What does an “untouchable” girl do when a high caste man assaults her? The plays offer an opportunity to try out different courses of action and see where they lead.

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