Nov 10, 2011

News

Teaching Rights in Pakistan Through Theatre

Pakistan’s Interactive Resource Centre (IRC) recently celebrated its Tenth Annual Interactive Theatre Festival, bringing performance groups from across the country to perform at the Multan Arts Council. The Lahore-based NGO uses theater and the arts to spark conversations about rights among people who have been marginalized in Pakistani society and has been a grantee of NED since 2005.

IRC Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language daily, provides a look at the Tenth Annual Interactive Theatre Festival, held Nov. 2011, with a slideshow of performance photographs.

IRC trains community groups to improvise and perform on the issues that face their communities, and the performances bring audiences actively into the stories, allowing them to make decisions about the challenges in the dramas – and allowing them to see outcomes and alternatives, thereby building a critical understanding of their own rights in the real-life situations mimicked on stage. In some cases, a short skit will be replayed, but with one lead actor replaced by an audience member, who improvises what he or she feels the character should have done.

In Sindh province, for instance, where there are over a million agricultural workers operating under slave labor conditions, an IRC-trained troop performed a story about bonded labor. By provoking audience interaction during and after the performance, the audience learned about the rights workers have in various situations.

One performance at the recent IRC festival focused on sexual harassment, with different scenes illustrating how woman can respond to it, particularly in light of Pakistan’s recently-passed law outlawing sexual harassment. Another performance tackled the ironies of water scarcity and floods, with particular relevance to the devastation of the 2011 Sindh floods.

Since its founding in 2000, IRC has established 80 theatre groups in 88 Pakistani cities, has a membership of some 800 theater and social activists, and has held more than 3,000 performances in Pakistan and abroad.

Read more about NED grantees in Pakistan. :: more