Lately I've been thinking it would be fascinating to get a group of applied/social theatre people together in a room and to just talk, openly, about failure. Maybe a time when an exercise has gone disastrously wrong and set the whole workshop back several steps. Personally, one of my worst experiences was a fight breaking out at a Youth Offending Team. I think there were many contributing factors - in particular the two participants had a history that the YOT were not aware of. But, my own failure to intervene effectively before the first punch was thrown is something I'll always regret. It is also something I learnt from. And this is why I think conversations about failure are so important. Applied theatre is wrapped in a rhetoric of engaging those hardest to reach, of tapping in to a range of different styles of learning, giving voice (a phrase I really hate) etc. etc. We feel the need to please and to prove what drama (and ourselves) can do - to funders, employers, friends, acquaintances, the organisations we work in partnership with. The problem is is that by doing this we lose a real opportunity to be honest with each other and to learn from each others failures. Also, it's sometimes in moments of failure that the really great stuff happens...which brings another example to mind.
In September 2015 I travelled to Uganda to spend a month delivering training with the Ugandan branch of Act4Africa, and to research and devise new material with the team for a new handbook on using Theatre for Development that I'm writing for the charity.
It is Thursday morning. Yesterday we travelled to a village in Mayuge district to run a Direct Delivery session exploring HIV/AIDS prevention and stigma reduction. We're reflecting together, thinking about how to build on the current session. It is decided that we should devise a piece of theatre to provoke discussion around the stigma those living with HIV/AIDS encounter, since this is a difficult aspect of the current session to discuss with communities. To get going I fall back on some old devising tricks I've used countless times before - they fall flat. Our struggle to get going also means I become acutely aware of my own lack of local knowledge and understanding of gender inequalities and HIV/AIDS. I feel like I have failed to do my job, and when you're working in the charity sector where there is very little money and you've been sent abroad, that feels pretty crushing.
There is a danger that, after a while, working with different communities leads us to feel that we might have developed an approach that works. That we might somehow be in possession of specialist knowledge that if implemented can have a wide-reaching impact, and that we have a certain methodology that can be universally applied. Certainly this view is deeply entrenched within the international development sector - often we see development professionals travel from country to country to implement projects with groups based on some new specialist research. Whether these new approaches do much to improve the lives of the intended beneficiaries is open to debate...and also outside the scope of this blog! But most worryingly, such approaches might mean communities feel the skills needed to address the issues they are facing are outside of their grasp, that they are the preserve of 'experts'. This is something I've tried to resist wherever I've worked, but my moment of failure has refreshed my thinking in terms of the powerful role theatre can play in development.
I think my failure highlighted the fact that I'm not an 'expert' - or that I might have some expertise sometimes, but not all of the time. Finding our way out of not knowing where to go next meant rallying together as a team. Over the course of an afternoon different members of the team took hold of the process at different times to suggest, create and draw on their local insights and huge wealth of understanding and practical knowledge of addressing the issues. Whilst I had a rough idea of what the piece would look like in my mind, something much stronger and visually interesting rose out of the ashes of my 'moment of failure'. This was a powerful reminder to me: I don't have to have all the answers, I don't need to have a set 'approach' or 'methodology'. Being open about my lack of specialist knowledge, just suggesting a few tools for the job, and responding to each group and context I work in individually has far more interesting results. It's got me thinking that things shouldn't go smoothly - making drama should be hard and a struggle, and if it's too easy we're probably not digging in the right places. When everything goes to plan, we also need to think who's plan is it? And is my plan silencing what others might want to do?
In September 2015 I travelled to Uganda to spend a month delivering training with the Ugandan branch of Act4Africa, and to research and devise new material with the team for a new handbook on using Theatre for Development that I'm writing for the charity.
It is Thursday morning. Yesterday we travelled to a village in Mayuge district to run a Direct Delivery session exploring HIV/AIDS prevention and stigma reduction. We're reflecting together, thinking about how to build on the current session. It is decided that we should devise a piece of theatre to provoke discussion around the stigma those living with HIV/AIDS encounter, since this is a difficult aspect of the current session to discuss with communities. To get going I fall back on some old devising tricks I've used countless times before - they fall flat. Our struggle to get going also means I become acutely aware of my own lack of local knowledge and understanding of gender inequalities and HIV/AIDS. I feel like I have failed to do my job, and when you're working in the charity sector where there is very little money and you've been sent abroad, that feels pretty crushing.
There is a danger that, after a while, working with different communities leads us to feel that we might have developed an approach that works. That we might somehow be in possession of specialist knowledge that if implemented can have a wide-reaching impact, and that we have a certain methodology that can be universally applied. Certainly this view is deeply entrenched within the international development sector - often we see development professionals travel from country to country to implement projects with groups based on some new specialist research. Whether these new approaches do much to improve the lives of the intended beneficiaries is open to debate...and also outside the scope of this blog! But most worryingly, such approaches might mean communities feel the skills needed to address the issues they are facing are outside of their grasp, that they are the preserve of 'experts'. This is something I've tried to resist wherever I've worked, but my moment of failure has refreshed my thinking in terms of the powerful role theatre can play in development.
I think my failure highlighted the fact that I'm not an 'expert' - or that I might have some expertise sometimes, but not all of the time. Finding our way out of not knowing where to go next meant rallying together as a team. Over the course of an afternoon different members of the team took hold of the process at different times to suggest, create and draw on their local insights and huge wealth of understanding and practical knowledge of addressing the issues. Whilst I had a rough idea of what the piece would look like in my mind, something much stronger and visually interesting rose out of the ashes of my 'moment of failure'. This was a powerful reminder to me: I don't have to have all the answers, I don't need to have a set 'approach' or 'methodology'. Being open about my lack of specialist knowledge, just suggesting a few tools for the job, and responding to each group and context I work in individually has far more interesting results. It's got me thinking that things shouldn't go smoothly - making drama should be hard and a struggle, and if it's too easy we're probably not digging in the right places. When everything goes to plan, we also need to think who's plan is it? And is my plan silencing what others might want to do?