Through the eyes of a child

At the Grahamstown festival in the Eastern Cape in July, an audience gathered in the pale late afternoon winter sunlight to watch a piece of street theatre.

The self-confident young performers enacted a familiar story: some VIPS had promised change to the impoverished community of Rhini township. But life for its 90 000 residents remains the same, leaving them feeling ‘short changed”.

Short Changed is the second festival offering created by the Art of the Street team, born of a partnership between Ubom! Eastern Cape Drama Company, Rhodes University drama department, and young people from the Grahamstown Eluxolweni Shelter for Street Children.

Alex Sutherland, project director and lecturer in the Rhodes drama department, believes all teachers can learn from their Arts and Culture colleagues. Even those educators without formal drama training can use the methods employed by the Art of the Street team to create meaningful learning experiences for their students.

Sutherland says her decision to create the project was motivated in part by her realisation that children living on the street are usually ignored by society. ‘Children who work in and from the streets [begging] ask us to address their experience when we walk past them, but their identities are often framed in terms of victimhood,” she says. ‘I wanted to create this small project so that they weren’t all seen as victims.”

Sutherland believes that learning happens both during the process of theatre-making and the performance itself.

‘Drama allows us not only to see but to become other ways of being and relating in the world,” she says. ‘The audience gets to see young people from situations of poverty in a different way. It is at that point that the journey of people re-conceptualising what future role those children might have begins.”

So how can ordinary teachers use this powerful kind of experiential learning in the classroom? Sutherland suggests a simple workshop method, based on creating short impromptu dramatic scenes devised around a central theme.

She gives an example: ‘Choose a theme to work with, say drug abuse. The less interesting approach is, ‘Don’t do drugs’. The more interesting approach is, ‘What are the situations that give rise to people taking their first drug?’ There are lots of characters one could develop around that situation. Before you know it, you’re developing a scene – and that’s the power of drama.”

Play-making is a powerful teaching tool. ‘If you enrich the process by allowing the students to swap roles, then that dialogue comes from understanding point of view A as well as point of view B.”

OBE techniques have always been an inherent part of drama teaching. Says Sutherland, ‘Drama is a problem-solving methodology. In doing a role-play we’ve got to solve this problem – I’ve got my need, you’ve got your need, now how are we going to develop this? And we deal with challenges when we create a character. You have to ask difficult questions, like, ‘How do you represent this person from this place?’.

There’s all sorts of conceptual, language and other creative skills that are being employed in that kind of process.”

Many of the young performers in the Art of the Street group show they are mastering developmental skills like communicating and socialising effectively with others. One of them said, ‘When I joined [The Art of the Street] I became someone important amongst people and I had something to do. I learnt things that I never knew through drama— Even if you are a street kid, you still have to believe in yourself.”

The value of drama lies also in how it can make students’ self-esteem and confidence soar. As Sutherland says, ‘Through theatre they’re experiencing success, and success influences how children develop. If you’re coming from situations of disadvantage you don’t often experience success, so creating a piece that speaks to their experiences, and having people watching and clapping, means a great deal.”

Most of all though, says Sutherland, all teachers can use theatre quite simply: to play.

‘Play is also an enriching, empowering problem-solving activity. It is a space where I leave the baggage of being a white English-speaking drama lecturer, they leave the baggage of being disadvantaged kids, and we play games, and we improvise and we laugh, and find ways to communicate. That is what the power of drama is, and that’s why I always come back to it.”