Since its creation two years ago (March 27th, 2018), Scène Egale Théâtre-Forum is a theatre company researching, creating and producing of plays, shows and theatre work. Its approach uses typical African techniques, leveraging the principle of participation and with the final target of contributing through artistic expression to increased awareness and behavioural changes for a participative development.
We consider that artistic expression roots its meaning in reaching the hearts and the minds of people. Therefore, we give great importance to theatre research inspired from our cultures and for people, be it from cities or villages, from the wealthy ones to the more humble, so that they can change their lives, and then change the living together.
Looking at the content, our theatre uses real facts from our society, leveraging its diversity, its difficulties, its drifts, its hopes, its struggles for a better life. The artistic emotion, the laughs, the tears, the enchantments of the theatre performance are inspired by the transmuted energy and its impact on the audience through the magic mirror, theatre. Author theatre, forum-theatre, trial theatre and community theatre are all approaches that we use to translate the eagerness for change and a better living together of everybody into theatrical images.
Announcement
If you are looking for a way of using participative communication to sustain an information or awareness campaign for a target audience in western Africa and beyond.
Don’t hesitate: hire our company Scène Egale Théâtre-Forum (SETFO) and its technique.
Forum-theatre is an interactive and participative theatre which releases gestures and speech of the spectators and enables immediate feedback.
Our technique
Community theatre (process rather than product)
Suppose forum-theatre allows the spectator to be an actor, as said by Augusto Boal. Why not transform the actor, to the actor of its destiny, benefiting the community which uses theatre as it’s a tool?
SETFO is here to go this step further, and root a new approach to forum theatre in our culture and our sociocultural reality.
In Anglophone Africa (Zambia, Nigeria, Tanzania TUSEME approach, etc.), we know that there us this community approach. But there is no standard, even less for forum-theatre: relying on theatre or role-plays is one of the most relevant characteristics.
Community theatre should not be confused with communitarian theatre, which is a kind of theatre used only by some community groups focused on themselves to preserve some identity. By community, we mean the village, the members of an association, the inhabitants of a rural/urban/periurban community or any group.
The goal is to ensure that the community, a village or a specific group, can organise itself to build its development using theatre as a tool for diagnostic.
In community theatre, the process is more important than the product. The person who acted is ready to fight for his character, to explain his motivation, and eventually to listen better to the point of views of others. At the end of the process, men together, women together, young men or young girls between themselves, kids together and each group will speak, laugh, wonder, feel emotions in response to some facts or significant events of the community. They will discover the others in a new way.
Process
- The first step of the work is the theatrical diagnostic
- The second step is the writing of the play and the production of the final performance
- The third step is the rehearsals, then the performance of the best scenes of the work
Our project
This project is about starting a centre for arts and agroecology in the village of Sare Diatta to create a laboratory for research and artistic practice. We hope to boost dialogue and promote cultural and community theatre techniques. Two hectares of land is available to welcome seven huts to serve as double bedrooms, one shed for collective activities and one building for a library. There will also be an open-air theatre and an area for gardening and agroforestry.
The facilitator
SAMBA MBALO
Samba is a young actor and director, from Senegal and the Ivory Coast, aged 34. He is an animator in his community with 12 years of experience with social interventions strategies. After studies in sociology then journalism, he contributed to developing forum-theatre in Senegal via the Senegalese federation for popular theatre, a group of 2000 actors, whose general secretary is Samba. He collaborated with African technicians and all over the world for exchange and experiences sharing projects.
Samba is a certified community mediator, the artistic director of Scène Egale théâtre-forum and the leader of the project for the African Center for theatrical and artistic research (Centre Africain de Recherche Théâtrale et Artistique) in Casamance, Senegal. Samba Mbalo leads workshops in Senegal, Africa and Europe.
