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Magazine
The Phakama way
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Mumbai's Prithvi Theatre recently facilitated a workshop in Pune based on the Phakama way, or community-based intercultural learning to promote understanding and combat conflict in society. GOWRI RAMNARAYAN on this South African concept.
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At the workshop in Pune.
"PHAKAMA". The staccato Zulu word is almost a command ; Stand Up! Rise! But what does a South African slogan have to do with a three weeks theatre workshop in India this year? Why is the large compound of the Garware Bal Bhavan, opposite Pune's historic Saras Bagh, humming with excited students all day long? One group declaims dialogues, another makes music with plastic cans, a third is bubbling with gymnastics. Children are up on branches decorating the "Tree of Life", and painting motifs on its trunk. Someone is converting a carton into a glittering television box. He sticks his head in and bursts into speech, jumbling news, soaps and ads! And what are those boys doing with a plywood crescent? Why, it's a blue moon with silver spangles!
The aim of Mumbai-based Prithvi Theatre's workshop in Pune may sound complex: the launch of the Phakama Way, or community-based intercultural learning to promote understanding and combat conflict in society. The process however, is a jamboree for the young participants.
Their exercises and activities have evolved into the last day's "Who Am I?", an open air show. "The audience will have to move from spot to spot, to watch the scenes enacted in different parts of the compound," the children chirp in glee. The spectators arrive at 9 p.m., and are divided into four groups, each with a leader holding a torch-strung, colour-coded pole to be followed. Moving from spot to spot, the audience is constantly surprised by the show's simplicity in structure, its sweep of imagination. A highlight is a globe with red streamers for wars, and yellow for pollution, swinging between the trees, as children use image, mime and movement to invoke peace sans religious strife. Finally, a huge bird (crafted with wood strips and paper) arrives. Viewers are asked to attach their "wish notes" to its wings before it "flies" off (on strings pulled from the school roof). The children burst into a "Thank You" dance. You feel the magic in the night air.
For the 60 youngsters (age 13-22) and 30 adult guides, the project goes beyond entertainment. It is a means of enquiry into the self, and the self in its relationship with the world. Local organiser Prasad Vanarase explains that eight experienced Co-ordinators (South Africa, India, Britain), worked for a week with 25 theatre worker/activist facilitators from many parts of India, before the young participants joined them for the next two. "The process is thinking about "we", not "I". No following the leader, everyone creates together. No muddles, because, for child and adult, freedom comes with responsibility. Co-ordinator Mira Oke shows you the Give-n-Gain Phakama Sun, a chart on whose rays members specify what they can offer, and what they hope to receive from the enterprise.
This two-way process stimulates youngsters to open up with exercises like this one: write a word and pass it on until it comes back with words written by everyone in the circle; the next step is to write a verse using all the words, to be distributed to the audience at the fair on the last day, along with balloons, peanuts and fortune cards. "It gave us confidence on day one," the children said. "Such a thrill to know we could write a poem!" At the final show young Mayuri clambered up a tree to recite her own Marathi verse ("Life has ups and downs, though I go down I have the guts to come up again, don't give me advice, I am my own support"). Another sings from a flower-twined swing, "When I was young my mother pushed the swing. Now I have to do it myself." She knew though that looking back was important for getting ahead. Teenager Tanvi found that getting to know herself at the workshop had given her the assurance to know others.
Participants choose two work areas from acting, direction; movement, dance; technical design, support; creative text; PR and administration. "We had to explore ourselves to discover what we were capable of," smiled Sayaali. You saw the same concept in the evening meetings of the adults as they debated on the logistics of a multi-segment show, which also demanded moving the audience back and forth.
Phakama was born in 1996 when teachers from the different provinces of South Africa interacted with a LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre) team of artistes and arts educators in a skills exchange programme. The network branched out to introduce young people to the participatory ethos of site-specific projects ; local, national and international. Phakama believes that developing collective creativity breeds responsibility, and inspires hope for a shared future. Residencies maximise the gains as they take people out of the routine, put them in a new setting where their social skills and self esteem are bolstered in a therapeutic rite of passage.
Site specific? Sara Matchett (South Africa) explains, "We discovered that we didn't need theatres for our shows, they could happen in community spaces ; parks, streets, even houses."
"Call Me Not a Woman" (2000) arose out of improvisations of skits, songs and dances during a residency in Mmabatho. It was based on the interactions of the youngsters with the local women. The performance led the audience through an archway of singers to the houses of the people in the area to witness scenes and images of women caught in a moment of time. En route were episodes of begging girls, harassed women, rape and mistreatment. The drums beat out a telling score.
Phaka audiences cannot be mere spectators. Here they were asked to scrub clean a sheet with a list of violations against women written on it; urged to write their impressions; provided with torches to read the multilingual poems hung on washing lines; invited to spot woman-connected objects on the trees; read paper fliers fluttering on bushes. The effort, discussion and teamwork behind the inventive layering of every Phakama show amazed audiences everywhere.
"The world is crowded, but the young lead lonely lives. Schools are becoming more individualistic," says Tony Fegan (LIFT, Britain). "Children say `Leave me alone' when what they actually mean is `Understand me'. They look for a collective life involving emotional, intellectual and physical inputs in some purposive activity. Phaka tries to fill that need, create that collective space where they discover the joy in being gregarious and generous through intercultural learning."
Whether in Cape Town or London, Phaka attracts children from deprived rather than privileged backgrounds. "We get very few white kids," says Sara. "Parents say that they have already been signed up for piano or horse riding. The real reason is that they carry the legacy of apartheid much more than the kids do. In fact when we do get mixed groups it is healing for adults to see the children way ahead of us in working together, in wanting to move on. They talk about racial prejudices more easily." But White or Coloured, after the free, liberal ambience of a Phakama residency the children encounter problems of reintegration in their milieu of barriers and prejudices. This needs working with the community too, so that the children don't become misfits. Sara adds that the most culturally and geographically isolated communities in South Africa are Asian. Brown Phakama participants are a rarity in her country.
Mbothwe explains that youngsters in the South African townships are invariably involved in crime, with gangsters in posh cars for role models. Phakama shows them the delights of creativity, of teamwork. It makes them think and enquire about other goals, other possibilities. The process goes beyond the arts to life skills, asking ; what are you now? Where do you want to be? "We must get over the apartheid hangover, and the feeling that somehow the White man is superior to the Black." For Mbothwe Phakama is also a means of breeding unity among the feuding African tribes.
"We are creating a new project for street kids and young refugees sent to London to escape war atrocities," says Fegan. "These kids have seen their families hacked to death, or toted rifles in paramilitary organisations. They are housed in hostels, left to grapple with the new climate, language and culture, and no adult contact except for the weekly visits of social workers." Fegan has no quarrel with the educated upper-class participants at the Pune workshop. "Learning to share is important for privileged children too. Later they become decision makers influencing the nation."
"When I attended my first Phakama residency in Cape Town, I realised that India and South Africa face many similar problems," says Sanjna Kapoor, Prithvi Theatre, Mumbai. "Phakama brought cross arts practices together with young people as the centre of creativity. I saw that empowerment is not an overnight achievement, but a steady process over a period of time."
Kapoor is clear that after the pilot project initiated by Prithvi Theatre, Phakama must put out its own roots to survive in India. It was up to the facilitators to continue the outreach process in their hometowns. National projects were important, but Kapoor knows that genuine, sustained empowerment depends on the strength of local achievements. And to remember that the success of Phakama in Africa and Britain has been the engendering of pride in the self and respect for the team ; in youngsters deprived, disadvantaged, and delinquent. What a challenge for India!
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