One-year project in four segments

Series of training workshops, onsite community work, performances and publications

“Reflection for arts, training and development” is the first Alexandria based NGO to focus on the performing arts and development. Its goals include community support through cultural events and the arts, promoting the awareness of social issues via theatre, providing artistic educational opportunities for the children and the youth and offering artistic events -through the year- that build towards the cultural and social development of unprivileged areas.

In this context, we have decided to begin our activities with a one-year project that includes four segments. The project is focused on the promotion and support of human rights via theatre, namely the rights of the freedom of expression linked with some personal rights, such as the freedom of opinion, and the rights of women, specifically to be protected from sexual harassment and domestic violence.

We believe that in order to serve our goal in development, we need to pay special attention to the situation of human rights in our society, the first rights we prefer to begin with are those very much linked to the specific issues of our society, and to the young generation and how to support their voices for change, especially young women. Therefore we chose to work on promoting young women’s right to have a different opinion and different social values compared to the status-quo, and even to the traditions that limit their roles and their creative opinion and power.

The right of the freedom of opinion goes hand in hand with the freedom of expression because the public expression is the only tool to voice opinions and take them to the level of social statement that is shared by the community and able to make a difference. Theatre is the best medium able to serve that purpose; it is the space of public participation and live encounter. Freedom of expression is also one human right that is organically related to the performing arts, performing one’s own opinion, experience and story is the ultimate representation of the freedom of the citizen’s expression in a society where the stage becomes a public forum.  

The first segment of our project is a one-month intensive “Forum theatre” training workshop for theatre artists and social activists. Forum theatre will be the methodology used for our community work, Nora Amin is the only Egyptian certified trainer of Forum theatre, from the Centre of the Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, CTO. She will conduct a one-month training workshop for 12 participants in order to prepare them to become future trainers and jokers serving our project. In this sense, we will be meeting one of the goals of our institution, which is to provide educational and training opportunities to young artists and activists in Alexandria, as well as employing them in our project. It will be the first time to create a Forum Theatre team in Alexandria, a method that is made specifically for dealing with social issues, community participation, democratic discussion and seeking change. Forum theatre events take place in public areas, in a popular community, not necessarily in a theatre venue. They involve representing a scene with a conflict situation, or including an issue that the community suffers from, or telling a personal story that is without end. The performers are people from the community with Forum theatre trainers & multipliers, the audience is invited at the end to make an intervention and suggest a way to deal with the issue or the situation by coming to the performance space and playing one role in the scene to try and change the events. This way we can provide live suggestion form the people to their own issues, through representation, as well as public discussion.

The workshop will teach the full course on the techniques and strategies that create a Forum theatre event as taught by Augusto Boal, and how to implement such performances within the community, engaging the audience to actively participate and bring their issues to the surface.

The second segment is a two months workshop for young women. The workshop will be implemented in a community space in partnership with a feminist NGO, inviting 20 young women between the ages of 16 to 22. The workshop will use the Forum Theatre technique in order to represent situations which the participants live, suffer from, aspire to or oppose to. The trainers of the project will guide the participants into exploring their stories, experiences, opinions and dreams, then they will work together on representing them in the format of Forum theatre in order to examine the difficulties facing those opinions, the influence of tradition or the status-quo on the individual paths of the participants and whether their opinions and dreams can change reality or not, and how to support their realization for the sake of change.

The end of the workshop will include 3 nights of Forum theatre public events, where the participants will work with the trainers to perform the stories/situations and ask the audience for their opinion, and how to find better ways to manage the difficult situations or experiences of those young women when they are faced by social values oppressing them. The aim of the workshop is not to reach the public events only, though it will be the culmination of the whole process and the real test of how this work can relate to the community and produce dialogue leading to change, but the aim is also to provoke discussions and give voice to young women who do not usually express themselves. The workshop will function as an open space for the participants to speak out, to gain self-confidence, to break the usual social hypocrisy and to acquire new skills of expression and of creative positive thinking, which could support their future roles in society as potential community leaders.

The third segment of the project is a workshop with women between the ages of 30 to 50, to be held at a different community space and in partnership with a feminist NGO, for 2 months. The theme is domestic violence, one of the most sensitive and unspoken issues in Egypt. Domestic violence is a theme that will require a lot of care and sensitivity when it comes to community work. It will be our responsibility to respect the social borders surrounding this issue, while raising the awareness of the participants of their rights to be secure, respected and protected in their own homes and families. Forum Theatre techniques will be taught to the participants and used to structure scenes about situations of domestic violence that the participants suggest. The task of the group will be to find out how to prevent those situations, how to deal with them and how to protect the women who are suffering in those situations. Special attention will be given to traditional values as well as legal views, in order to analyze the reasons behind this phenomenon and to find out how to support and empower women to speak out and seek help.

The workshop will end in two months with 3 nights of Forum Theatre open to the public. The presentation will include the scenes, which the participants structured with the help of the trainers, and will approach the audience for intervention, discussion, and solutions or for simple opinions about the scenes they have seen. It will be the first time in Alexandria to bring such an issue to the surface, and invite the public to discuss it openly. One of the aims of this workshop is to break the silence around this issue, but in a way that does not offend the society and the privacy of the participants’ lives.

The fourth segment of the project will take 3 months; it will use storytelling techniques and dramatic theatre to represent the real stories of sexual harassment in Egypt. For this segment we will not use Forum Theatre, in order to reach a wider public (that of theatre venues) and add a component of dramatic stage performance to the project. In this sense, this segment will start by collecting real stories from the community, re-working on them dramatically, then bringing female participants from the previous workshops or from the theatre scene of Alexandria, train them to act the stories out, and present them as the first theatre production in Alexandria based on true stories of harassment. We will respect confidentiality as well as the social borders of such issue, but we will reach as far as we can for reality and for the sincere representation of reality that would touch the audiences, and would make the women among them feel that their issues are spoken out and embraced by the society. The production will be programmed for 7 nights of performance in Alexandria, Cairo and Upper Egypt.

Each workshop will be followed by a printed publication documenting for the workshop and the experiences of the participants. The publications will also serve as future reference for NGO’s or theatre groups in Alexandria interested in similar initiatives.

The project will run for the whole year of 2008. It will begin in January with the first segment, and will continue with one-month interval between each two segments to prepare and produce the publication, and to get ready to the next segment, at the end one month is given to evaluation and reports. It will be the policy of the project to follow up on all operations, continue working with participants from completed workshops in other activities and employ efficient participants trained under the project to become assistants and future trainers in this project and future projects, as well as provide consultancy and guidance for all our groups and partners.

Goals

• To promote awareness on human rights: Freedom of expression, freedom of opinion, the right to security at home, and self-protection, the right to be respected and not discriminated against, and all related women’s rights.
• To create a public form of participation in the dissemination of those rights via Forum theatre
• To use this public form to represent real issues and stories of the community
• To allow democratic discussion and management of those issues via Forum theatre
• To empower young women’s thinking and provide social skills of self-expression
• To teach all participants how to bring personal experiences to the light and share them with the community and the group of work
• To present public events that integrate average women as performers of their own work
• In order to develop the relation between theatre/performance and the community
• To create new ways combining arts/theatre and development and social work
• To Train participants into becoming multipliers and future trainers in other NGO’s, therefore providing training and educational opportunities to potential young leaders
• To reach a different audience via the final theatre production
• To empower exchange on women’s stories and performance with the cooperation with a Swedish dramaturge for the production
• To provide excellent acting and theatre skills for the participants of the production
• To collect real stories of sexual harassment and disseminate them
• To bring sensitive issues to the surface in a creative and sensitive way, such as domestic violence
• To create an exchange and cooperation between average women of the project and theatre actresses in Alexandria via the production
• To present publications that document the work and strengthen the dissemination of the goals, as well expand the beneficiaries of the project
• To publish a final book in English and Arabic to present the work to European NGO’s and cultural institution for future exchange
• To create a long term base for on-going theatre and development projects

Strategies

• To create a workshop to train trainers as a pioneer workshop in Alexandria on Forum theatre
• To produce publications on each following workshop to diffuse the knowledge
• To include the experiences of the participant in those publications as a different medium of expression than live performance
• To create a website to better diffuse the experience and share the transparency with other similar or interested partners and audiences
• To lead workshops that integrate personal experiences with theatre skills with teaching on women’s rights
• To divide the projects into segments of different age range and different issues: Domestic violence, sexual harassment and freedom of expression
• To allow multipliers from the first workshop to assist in the following workshops
• To allow efficient participants to work in following segments of the project
• To allow different participants from different segments to cooperate together in the final production, bringing to the light what they have learnt and developed, as well as bringing others’ stories to the stage.