Community Theatre at
Chiang Mai University, Thailand2005
This was my first experience of teaching what I had learned as a socially engaged theatre-maker to a group of university students in Thailand. I lead this course (2005-2006) under the supervision of a Thai professor and ran the course with my Thai friend Oh.
Oh was a great storyteller, she loved theatre and had translated at workshops I had run in Chiang Mai some years earlier. With her, I put together a course for eight third and fourth year university students. We gave them practical introductions to socially engaged theatre, encouraging them to think about how to apply that practice to different social situations. We then developed a relationship with a local government school, which had students from lots of different social and ethnic backgrounds.
After talking with teachers and the school’s guidance counsellor, we learned that lots of girls were under pressure to leave school before they matriculated; to help their families they were going out to work full-time, before completing high school. This meant there was a limit to the types of work they could access and closed the door on them taking higher studies or training for the jobs they most wanted to do.
A play was then made about a teenage girl who faced this problem. She had to find a way to get her parents to understand why she wanted to finish school (she had already had a lot more time at school than they had). After finding a way to persuade her mother to come to the school to talk with a teacher, a deal is struck where she can continue her studies, if she works part-time to also support her family who are struggling financially. This was based on a reality many of the girl students at that school were facing. After the play, the Chiang Mai University students ran discussion workshops with the audience of school pupils, to find out the impact of the play.
They also made sure the pupils knew that the school guidance counsellor was there to help them plan for their futures, and work with their families too, not just help with immediate study problems etc. Later, the course participants had to each develop proposals for a new theatre project and pitch it!
Though I don’t teach this course every year, from time-to-time I return to help facilitate parts of it. It’s important that university courses have practitioners and professors working together in this way.
