Drama out of a crisis

As we pull up outside the offices of the British Council in Lilongwe, Malawi, a cheerful huddle of sex workers wave and welcome us to their workshop. It's an extraordinary moment, as the women down their babies and link us into their circle to begin the session. Samuel Atiemo and Eric Saforo, our two Ghanaian facilitators, introduce Natasha Freedman and I as new collaborators from Complicite, "a theatre company in England". The women nod and smile at us respectfully, but the workshop sparks into life when they break into song and we are dancing, clapping and improvising for the next three hours.

Encouraged to share their experiences with each other, the invisible lives of these women gradually takes fragile theatrical shape in their weekly meetings. When one of the women enacts the silent suicide of her character on discovering her diagnosis as HIV positive, the women cluck, tut and chuckle their recognition at the veracity of the improvisation. "How could her situation have been changed?" asks Atiemo, inviting us to unpick the events leading up to the suicide. "Who needs our help?"

These questions echo throughout the 10-day trip to Malawi. We are here as the guests of Theatre for a Change (TfaC), a company dedicated to promoting behaviour change and self-advocacy via the theatre-making process. Like Complicite, Theatre for a Change devise their stories using games, music and improvisation. Patrick Young, the director of TfaC, set up the charity five years ago in Ghana as a response to that country's fight against HIV/Aids. Using theatre he has been able to reach audiences normally excluded from the decision-making process and allow them to understand the dynamics of their daily lives: "Performance opens up a space where roles can be shifted, where the audience can see how things may have ended differently. The audience find their own solutions by considering the questions the drama provokes."

Now Young has decamped to Lilongwe with Atiemo and Saforo to begin their process here. The Aids crisis in Malawi is even more grave. The statistics are mind-boggling. According to the Malawian health minister, the country loses 10 people to Aids every hour. The disease continues to jeopardise the fragile infrastructure of the country by robbing it of its key workers. USAID cites a ratio of one doctor per 117,647 citizens - the worst ratio in the world. The World Bank estimates that in some urban areas up to 40% of teachers have died of Aids-related illnesses, two a day in some areas. It is one of the tragic ironies of the Aids crisis in Malawi that the very teachers who might promote changes in sexual behaviour are often themselves at greatest risk. Like soldiers, the police and truck drivers, teachers in Malawi are part of a mobile workforce disconnected from their homes and the community framework that might stabilise their sexual behaviour.

TfaC are addressing this education crisis at its root. In September they began a seeding project which will deliver 18 facilitators trained to use theatre and open debate to address ignorance and prejudice. Two facilitators will be assigned to each of Malawi's nine teacher-training colleges, so by this time next year the facilitators will have begun training 700 teachers each. When they graduate, the impact of those teachers will be exponential across the country. The facilitators will continue to monitor their graduates' practice in much the same way as they themselves are currently monitored by Atiemo and Saforo. The strategy is to spawn a counter virus of clear, permanent and self-sustainable "behaviour change " across the nation. If those teachers can reach children between the ages of eight and 12, the so-called "window of hope", then there will be a widespread change in the health and behaviour of the country as a whole. Young is convinced that a major shift in the sexual behaviour of Malawi's next generation of teachers is three years away.

As I proceeded to work with this group of facilitators, I began to share Young's confidence. Under the inspirational leadership of Atiemo and Saforo, the current group of 22 trainees has begun to undergo the same transformative process that they will subsequently take into the colleges. Few of them had ever performed before September yet already they have acquired the ability to assert themselves vocally and physically. These performance skills will enable them to both facilitate their meetings and the theatre they have begun to create. The rampant spread of HIV has several causes, and the gap between information and behaviour change plays a crucial part. The crucial area of change has been in their gender behaviour.

"Here in Malawi, we are bombarded with information. People aren't ignorant but they choose not to pay attention," explains trainee Villa Ezala. Change will only come about if there is a shift in gender behaviour, a shift that is particularly urgent in sub-Saharan Africa. Women's rights to determine what happens to their bodies, the right to negotiate on use of a condom or to say no to sex can only be asserted once they have learned to assert themselves. Villa believes theatre helps her to "put a face on" the realities of Malawi's struggle with HIV and Aids. Furthermore the men in the group openly confront their own prejudices - Chifatso Ulaya smiles ruefully as he admits he used to assume that women were ignorant and without opinion.

The theatre that they have devised reveals the challenge of their mission. All the stories are rooted in the trainees' own direct experience of HIV. They are stories of casual rape, of enforced prostitution, of betrayal and ignorance. The authenticity of the content is unquestionable and the trainees' emotional engagement with the material is startling. The aim is to match this content with innovative and engaging theatrical form. Here the work of TfaC overlaps with the theatre of Complicite. I spend the week encouraging the trainees to open their stories out to the audience, to complement the grim fates of their characters with the optimism of their voice and movement.

No one underestimates the scale of the challenge that faces TfaC. It is a simple fact that one or two of these trainees may not survive to complete their work. Yet the quality of this project lies in its emphasis on the empowerment of its audience. Natasha Freedman, director of education at Complicite, envisages a long-term relationship with TfaC through ongoing training and exchange of ideas. At Theatre for a Change, the audience is invited to get involved in the performance, to change the story for the better. To use Augusto Boal's phrase, "it is a rehearsal for reality". If that reality is to change, then these teachers and the theatre they are creating need our urgent support.