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The theatre of half-told stories

 
 

I worked with a team of Kenyan theatre artists in 2002 to develop Magnet Theatre as a tool for promoting critical reflection on HIV risk and prevention among mobile, out-of-school people. Magnet Theatre is performed at fixed times in fixed venues that require audiences to make a small effort to reach there. This ensures a committed audience, and over time, a loyal one.

The enactment used half-told stories that freeze at a typical behavioral dilemma. The audience is invited to develop alternative endings for the story by stepping into the acting area and acting or ‘talking to’ the actors. This non-prescriptive approach raised both levels of understanding and quality of questions over time, creating many cases of community-verified behavior change. Many of those individuals then were ‘magnified‘ through local radio to empower their communities. Some of them, of their own accord, became champions of  behavioral change.

Magnet Theatre was most recently introduced in South Africa’s poorest province, Eastern Cape, where it is performed by a team of HIV positive women and men (see picture on the right) working to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child.

 

Countries where Magnet Theatre is performed

  1. Eritrea

  2. Ethiopia

  3. Uganda

  4. Kenya

  5. Tanzania

  6. Rwanda

  7. South Africa

  8. India

  9. Vietnam

When it works

Specially useful for discussions of taboo health subjects marked by stigma, low knowledge and public discussion, and which require sustained introspection, such as family planning, HIV/AIDS, TB,  and domestic violence.  


Why it works

High ownership of knowledge received. Magnet Theatre improves the quality of community enquiry helping them step into the shoes of people at risk.

 

At age 19, I worked as a shoeshine boy on Delhi streets to write about their hardships. My impersonation stories won me a national award by the time I was 22.

MICKEY is a Minimally Invasive Curriculum for HIV driven by self-learning through translation.

As a Macarthur Population Fellow in India, I developed a non-verbal, sign-language independent reproductive health curriculum for deaf Indian youth.

I wrote a monograph on how people’s questions change as their perception of HIV risk deepens

HarperCollins published Travels with the Fish, my first book in 1998, a collection of my travel stories.

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