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All the world is a stage…
 Interview with Tim
Whyte. Tim has worked for three years as Training and Planning
Advisor for MS Nepal’s partner organization Backwards Society
Education, BASE, in Nepal. During this period, he participated in
the Conflict Theater and Democracy project. Tim is currently
assigned as short-term advisor for the ‘South - South Theatre for
the Poor cooperation & Images of Asia (IoA) Project’.
Q: Why forum theatre?
When
working with local people, you quickly discover that the tradition
of arranging hearings and meetings as we know it from a European
context originates from an education system that is very foreign
to most Nepalese people. Forum theatre has therefore been
developed in line with Nepalese Kachahari
traditions as a more appropriate way of fostering dialogue and
engagement at grass root level.
Let us
take the example of addressing the caste issue: Aarohan Theatre
Group once presented a play portraying a love story between a
low-caste man and a high-caste woman. When it was performed in the
villages, people ended up not wanting to let the actors leave the
stage until they had made a happy end to the play - that is,
letting the two lovers marry each other despite caste differences.
You can imagine how tremendously powerful such a play is to all
people participating in its development. In my opinion, this shows
that you don’t have to leave the power of agenda-setting and of
trend-setting to people who have enough money to influence the
mainstream media, but that it is possible to take up this power on
your own.
Q:
What are MS Nepal’s main intentions with its engagement with
Aarohan and the Images of Asia theatre project?
There are three main intentions: one is to raise awareness among
Danes of how street theatre is used in Asia - as opposed to its
use in Denmark. In Denmark today, street theatre is mostly related
to entertainment and fun. Moreover, forum theatre tends to be used
still more for income-generating purposes such as management
training, organizational capacity building etc. In Asia, there is
a long-time tradition of using street theatre socially and
politically. For instance, PETA, the Philippine theatre group that
we are working with, contributed actively to the overthrowing of
former president Marcos. In this regard, the Asian “poor man’s
theatre” may be closer to theatre as it was used in Denmark in the
1960s and 1970s with for instance performance groups like the
famous “Solvognen” (the Chariot of the Sun, ed.).
The second aim relates more directly to the Images of Asia
festival. We would like to break down the limits with regard to
how and where the festival is taking place. We do not want the
festival only to be something that takes place inside of tents, on
movie screens or in some other kind of closed room where people
come, watch and leave again. We want to bring the images of Asia
and the reflections that these images inspire onto the street and
into people’s everyday life. For instance we have thought of
making some kind of ‘invisible theatre’, which is theatre that is
performed in public spaces, but without people knowing that it is
actually a play and not something that is happening for real. This
kind of theatre somehow challenges the boundary between reality
and play and will therefore – hopefully – stimulate people’s
reflection in a different manner than traditional theater does.
The third aim is to establish a network between theatre groups in
the South in order to help creating alternative ways of handling
conflict resolution and conflict communication.
Q:
What do you consider to be the main challenge for the theatre
project and Images of Asia?
I believe that the main challenge to Images of Asia will be to
show the relevance of Asian theatre to a Danish audience, because
Danes are not used to seeing empowerment of the poor and
suppressed as central themes for theatre plays. Furthermore, I
find it important to stress that even though poverty in itself is
sad and harsh, the struggle against suppression and the methods
used to overcome poverty are very often amazingly creative and
inspiring.
Q: This project is a joint venture between three theatre groups
from Nepal, India and the Philippines, respectively. How have you
experienced the intercultural cooperation?
The three theatre groups that we are working with are very
different from each other. The Philippine theatre group, PETA, is
a well-experienced group with an impressive network and much
contact to other local and regional theatre groups. Furthermore,
PETA is cooperating with many schools. Aarohan has been able to
learn a lot from PETA’s way of organizing themselves as well as
from their training methods.
The Indian group, Alternative Living Theatre (ALT), is focusing on
using local resources and relating its plays to local culture. In
a way it is ironical that this focus - which describes the
mainstream living of most people in India – is called
“alternative”. But it is so, because the lifestyle of the upper
middle class is portrayed in almost all Bollywood productions and
is generally dominant in the media, regardless of the fact that
this lifestyle is probably only covering two per cent of reality.
Q:
What are the future prospects and challenges for Aarohan Theatre
Group?
The future of Aarohan as well as of other Nepalese and Asian
theatre groups is closely related to the questions of who defines
art and what this definition is. Globally, we are witnessing a
radical commercialization of art. There is much money in producing
one particular kind of art: the Hollywood kind. Therefore, the
urgent challenge for the theatres is that they must adjust to this
new reality. If they are to survive, they must somehow find a
response and a way of positioning themselves in the midst of this
development. The problem may be that rather than establishing a
proper and strong identity in this new situation, many theatres
simply just die out - leaving still less theatres for people to
chose between.
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