For my fellow DRED heads at home...

Being at once a development worker, and a drama student, coming to a completely different culture sparked my interest in the performance art that culture breeds. It took me some time to find some examples of Ghanaian drama to experience firsthand; nothing up here is affluent enough to fund luxuries like theatres, and the school curriculums under-emphasize it, if it's present at all. But I finally found some—in the capital city of the Northern Region, and here in my home village. This is what I've figured out so far.

Drama here starts in dance--tribal storytelling of myths, or loosely improvised interactions between people dressed as chiefs and old gods at festivals. There is much more dance in these than drama, and the traditional drummers narrate the stories with a sort of morse-code with the drums. All traditional dance-dramas are non-speaking, although sometimes they sing. However, in high schools and through NGOs, western drama is being adapted to serve the needs of people here.

In NGOs, role playing is being utilized as a means of community outreach and social justice work. Role-playing modules that look suspiciously like Boal work are brought into rural communities and used to address issues like women's rights, HIV/AIDS stigmatization, pollution and bush burning, and to explain intervention projects for everything from water and sanitation to the installation of teak plantations. In rural and urban areas alike, Ghanaians have embraced the "energizer"--warm-up drama games that break up the monotony of the myriad workshops and long discussions that occur in the development community. I dont know who introduced it, but I think it's wonderful--it's great to see proud, well-dressed Ghanaian professionals clapping their arms together like crocodiles and still retaining their dignity with their peers.

In high schools, drama clubs and theatre projects are an after-school activity. They occur both in the local language of the school and in English, and more often than not, are written by the students or staff themselves. It is most common for the plays to be moralistic and educational in theme and tone, trying to teach good practices such as hand-washing, respect for women, and using latrines. That being said, I've found that excretion humour--the poop joke--is a universal standard, and is wholeheartedly embraced by Ghanaian high school populations in their drama. Technically, high school dramas in Ghana happen a lot like high school dramas in Canada: simple sets of furniture and props are used, and changed for a change in setting; students wear costumes that are easily recognizable to help to identify the roles they play, and they tailor language, speech patterns and accents to reinforce character. The structure of the plays is often simple, chronological, and familiar to me from my own high school. The difference is they're usually performed outside.

From my understanding, famous African playwrights such as Wole Soyinka are more often produced in the south of the country than here in the Northern Regions. There are also African stories that are the cultural equivalent of Oedipus Rex (adaptations of the original? I dont know--the people I've talked to think it's an African tale), possible evidence that drama that is too contentious to be put onstage here is shifted into literature.

Film, through the influences of Bollywood (India), Nollywood (the booming Nigerian film industry) and Hollywood, has crept into the popular culture of Ghana. Movies written and filmed in the Dagbani language are readily available in the large cities in the North--I'm bringing one home, although I'll barely be able to understand what's being said. These movies show the merger between traditional Dagomba culture and contemporary culture in Ghana fairly well--and the language barrier almost recreates the feeling I had getting off the plane.

Almost.