Community theatre and public health in Malawi

Summary

This paper describes an experiment, intitiated in 1985, in linking performing arts with primary health care campaigns in Machinga and Zomba districts in Malawi. The groups participating were the Primary Health Care Unit of the Liwonde Agricultural Development Division and the University of Malawi's Theatre for Development. The theatre group had already established aesthetic and organisational strategies to ensure that the communities where they peformed not only had their interests genuinely reflected in the dramas but gained increasing control over the theatre process. The result was a series of performances where the debates about such matters as the siting of village wells or the performance of Village Health Committees took off in unplanned directions, drifting in and out of the frame of fantasy provided by the story and back into the ‘safety’ of the frame when it became too embarrassing to individual members of the audience. Over the next two years, other groups of actors, including at least one group of peasant women, began to imitate the performances they had witnessed to maintain the momentum of their demand for improved facilities. While it would be quite wrong to see such performances as having revolutionary potential, it is important to realise that even under dictatorships like Dr Banda's, one‐party hegemony is never monolithic.