Transcript

African Songlines: Warren Nebe at TEDxWitsUniversity

we're told that Africa is alive with possibility but we also know that there's a shadow and that that shadow is often not spoken to is often not confronted it takes prince charles to come to Africa to warn us that major global corporations are buying up massive tracts of agricultural land we know that poverty is pandemic we know that HIV and AIDS has certainly not been solved and by no means has reached a plateau we know that there countless problems and here in South Africa right now we're sitting with a crisis 34 people were killed last week our leaders are bickering and fighting and asking who's responsible blaming who who takes responsibility and where do we sit in this what are we going to do about it today what I'd like to do is as proposed that in this country first and foremost what we need to do is go back to the principle of ubuntu the notion of I am Who I am because of you and we need to find ways in which to install that in embodied ways in our learning systems I'm a drama therapist I'm a drama educator I'm someone who loves making theatre so my talk is framed by that love and passion but the question of how can we get to that place where we can really embrace a Bunter so that we can begin to grieve the grieving that needs to be done in this country so that we can move on the challenge the people like Desmond Tutu man paler and paler many others have have proposed to us so a few years ago I was living in Botswana and I was about to come here to Bert's University and I was invited to a dinner by a couple who involved in a development work and they they were from Germany and had spent many years in Africa and they really believed that theatre could change people's attitudes and they proposed to me could I make a piece of theatre about HIV and AIDS and let that work around the static region and I laughed at them and I said people have been doing that for years and it hasn't worked nothing's changed and out of that conversation grew an idea and that idea began with an appraisal mission in which we traveled across Africa to a number of countries and entered research in other countries through surveys in that what we were looking at was how theatre was surviving in those countries what what what were people doing and how was theater being used to communicate this this major crisis that we were facing what we didn't know is that drama is the most extensively used medium across Africa particularly in rural areas in order to convey these messages what we did discover however was this extraordinary poverty of ideas an extraordinary poverty of ideas and an exploitation of artists that was really very difficult to confront so governments were only too happy and NGOs and donor organizations to use artists we need a little play and we would like you to make sure that the message is right and if the money comes from the George Bush administration well then the message needs to be ABC around HIV and AIDS or if it's this stoner this is what that needs to be done you will perform before we begin the work the messaging was simplistic it didn't engage the audience the symbolism if there was any revolved around this idea that HIV and AIDS once this demon I don't know how many of you grew up with that idea of this really evil bad thing that was happening circling your parents would have grown up or would have been would have known about that because in the early days of the HIV and AIDS pandemic the kind of imagery used by artists and government departments and that had everything to do with fear driving this unbelievable fear into people but not changing anything and all it did was exacerbate extraordinary stigma and discrimination I remember one drama in Swaziland um first of all we'd been told by the group don't talk to those people those artists don't do this don't do that and it was all about who was getting money and who wasn't getting money because artists live on so little because they disrespected but in this drama HIV was painted as this demon in dressed in red and Along Came everybody to heck HIV to death or we know what happened in South Africa and I'm of woman was stoned to death but we continued and communities continue and don't have a space to grieve so we were presented with a few problems the material poverty of people the physical poverty the poverty of imagination of how to even begin to address a problem so great the poverty of a relationship and the poverty of soul in every respect and really what we were confronted with was how could we address this in a way that which change people's attitudes and would change the way we relate to one another and so it required some kind of extraordinary leap of faith and so we began this program called drama for life yeah that's University and the idea was to bring many students from all over Africa to come and study together our idea was to try and source the vision the African African wisdom asks us to awake to the dreams visitor to us in our sleep by our ancestors the question was what was the dream that we were not listening to I'd like to share a dream here that I had when I went on a journey to go and study and it's only as it's a dream that's come back to me because of TEDx and it's made me reconsider what I've been doing in the last few years it was at the time that Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa and I share the stream because TEDx says you must make yourself vulnerable to your audience but also because this dream has collective memory that it's not just my dream I dreamt just before I left South Africa to go and study in New York that I was in this picture this air beautiful rolling green lawns phone bushes rocks stones lots of young people your age and younger sitting around standing around talking engaging with one another in the most relaxed atmosphere big open African landscape sky sky blue and I was standing there and Nelson Mandela was standing next to me and he took me by the hand and I still remember I remember in my body what that feeling was like in that dream of my hand being held by someone else of that caliber and strength and he led me through this landscape and it was easy and it was light and we were talking and then he took me into this building of rock stone and it was the sacred space but empty filled with beautiful light and the dream ended there and I struggled for a long time personally what that dream was about but for me that dream today really is about what kind of education do we need to create in order to address the 21st century here in Africa what kind of education what kind of space and spaces will allow us to reimagine who we are because what is happening right now is not working it's not working in the private schools because that's a very particular education that produces a very particular student who has an individual sensibility and sees no real relationship to the larger context and who often sees the ultimate destiny of leaving this continent and it's certainly not working in our government schools and I don't need to talk about that so we began to create this program and of course our passion is about drama and it our exploration was around exploring the relationship between applied drama drama in education and drama therapy and our interest was in creating dialogue for social transformation purposes so we're not talking just about theater but actually just using our imaginations in relationship to reality that that notion of just imagine if it was you who Nelson Mandela was leading through those grounds and he took you into your space and he said yeah create begin imagine it's as simple as that really and our program is also based on the principle of an engagement of the intrapersonal the self and the interpersonal the engagement between me and you and for us that is absolutely essential and it's about creating context context of meaning and what about what do I mean by that that there's all it's about relationships the relationship to me you our community our University our country and other countries on this continent and one of the that I I believe one of the things that will help us begin to shift out of this this space that really is about a traumatized space where we're constantly fixed if people keep on saying is I frega we keep on getting locked into a position well you know what you'll discover the rest of the world if you begin to engage with the rest of africa and that's what we try to do with over that's what we are trying to do with our program so some basic principles our classes cannot consist of more than fifty percent of South Africans we have to engage the rest of the world and we need to acknowledge that Africa has an extraordinary rich history that we can learn from and it's in that bringing everybody together and particularly all the mature people that we can learn from one another while HIV and AIDS represents so much more than just a medical illness it's about confronting gender sexual relationships sexual identities religion race class there's so many sides to this problem that we need to engage with I'm going to tell you another story because this may symbolize the kind of work that we're beginning to engage with and it will speak to the problems that we need to engage in terms of discrimination and stigma we have a theatre company that we've developed one of our graduates developed and was an experiment called playback theatre so you have a group of four actors you have a musician and you have someone called a conductor and you work with an audience and we did this in pietermaritzburg it was part of a big festival and which is what we're trying to create these spaces where people feel comfortable to come together in order to really penetrate the discrimination and stigma that exists and the idea is that you the audience member tells your story and we perform your story back immediately and we do it in a symbolic process obviously with deep care and there was a young woman that day who came forward and told her story she was 14 years old she had been 14 years old and her mother worked out of tongue during the week so she would be away and then she came home of the weekends her partner brought multiple partners into the home during the week one of her mother was away now for some of you because of your cultural and class position you'd say well if it was me I would tell my mother or for her because of her position her culture her gender she said nothing all the while knowing that her mother was at risk her mother contracted HIV and AIDS and blamed her when she began to understand the full context of what took place the story was performed out very carefully but she became overwhelmed at the end and she got up and she walked out and we had someone else there who called her and stayed with her and worked through and obviously something like this is not all it happened and and it raises issues about ethics and safety and all sorts of things but she came back into the room and by that time the audience had started kind of talking and processing what had happened and they applauded and they supported her and it was in that moment an extraordinary transformation took place because there's a sense of a community being able to say you do not have to carry the shame this is not your fault you can be who you are and if you can begin to start doing that in our work where we witness and we validate one another's experiences may be some changes or beginning to take place so there are many principles that we work with and I'm not going to mention them all but ethics is really important the ethics of what we do and it has to do with fundamental human rights and there's another part that I'd want to just mention and that is super vision that really what we need to start doing is cultivating spaces where there is supervision support spaces to reflect regardless of whether you are the teacher or the learner regardless of whether it's on an individual or group basis but that any work that one is engaging with is absolutely essential the other part of the work for me that is essential is that breaking the boundary down between the academic institution and what is called community in South Africa community is often used with all sorts of values under pending it's almost like a lowest status comment our students are working and engaging with community so that they're learning is embodied and at the same time engaging with intellectual ideas around the work that has been done so we're interested in the reflective practitioner are we educating theatre people yes we are but you know what we're not just educating theatre people many of our graduates are now working in migration studies development studies public health a range of areas education and what's really important is this notion of the reflective practitioner the ability to look through someone's else's eyes and the ability to stand in their shoes and look back at you and know your position and so in closing I want to end with a production that is going to be moving in here as soon as TEDx is finished here today it's called through positive eyes and it's it's a what we've done is as a group of actors we've worked very closely with a group of adults who are all hiv-positive they all open about their status they're activists and we have worked with their stories so imagine one-to-one someone comes to you and says I'm going to tell your story I'm going to tell all of your story I'm going to get to know everything about you and I am going to then stand on the stage and I'm going to witness you through this performance and it started with a process of Gideon Mendel and David gear from UCLA taking photographs and teaching them to take photographs of their lives and then us the performance coming in and working with their stories and some of these images are of the storytellers not the actors the HIV activists this is lunghi see this is Lindy it's her self-portrait two years later and I would like to leave you with that the idea that perhaps what we all needing to do is regardless of our background of our religious beliefs spiritual beliefs we have to find ways in which to reconnect and understand one another thank you