Merchants of Madness has organised a workshop that brings together community leaders, social workers and students looking to be community activators. It focuses on introducing skills to help individuals start drama processes within their communities to collect stories, create safe spaces and build performances for mental well-being.
The Merchants of Madness Community Theatre Workshop, a residential theatre workshop, has been given a seed grant by the Association For Women’s Rights In Development (AWID) NGO. It aims at building strategies for community mental health with the tools of performance and expressive arts. It has been designed by a collaboration between The Red Door, a leading mental health advocacy platform and Orchestrated Q’Works, a community theatre and live art collective based in Pune.
Hina Siddiqui of Orchestrated Q’Works and theatre artist, says that the project uses performance and drama processes to address mental well-being. The idea for this started with Reshma Valliappan’s thesis. Also known as Val Resh, Valliappan is an artist-activist for a number of issues related to mental health, disability, sexuality and human rights. Valliappan’s thesis was written in the form of a play with three scenes where each scene is a conversation between the character of the schizophrenic and an archetypal being. The latter take the form of Shakespeare, Goddess Kali and an imaginary friend. The conversations address mental health, schizophrenia, hearing voices, psychosis, imaginary friends, nudity and identity among other things.
Says Siddiqui, “We want to use the themes and characters to work with students, artists, actors, community workers, mental health professionals and anyone else interested in community mental health. This is called process-based drama (community drama). It is something that Orchestrated Q’Works uses extensively. The performance that results through this will be based on the experiences, stories and inclinations of the participants.”
Merchants of Madness project has three parts — residential workshop, drama process and a video series. The residential workshop which will start on December 11, is a community theatre which will use tools like collecting stories of mental health and devising performance with them, creating characters, playing with imaginary friends and voices in the head, working with objects, puppets and materials to design scenes, dance movement, visual arts, expressive arts, and facilitation skills.
Giving us a peek into the techniques used during the workshop, Siddiqui says that performers will be living there for seven days during the course of the workshop because they want people to become a community. “Community theatre is a very established form and it takes various styles of the community that you are working with. It takes into account elements like playback theatre, physical theatre, image theatre — all these are different forms of theatre having different formats and exercises associated with them,” she adds.
It has often been observed that theatre artists are using various forms of theatre to talk about issues that are usually swept under the carpet, including mental illness and well-being. Speaking about the importance of theatre and its role in creating human connections and healing, Siddiqui points out that there are researches all over the world which say how the lack of human connection in our contemporary life is creating stress and loneliness. “Theatre’s very essence is human collaboration and connection, so allowing people to come together and create something, is somewhat like a therapy in itself. Community theatre allows you to take a moment of reality from our life and process it out yourself and not process it which lets that moment be witnessed by those around you. This is considered as a very big step in healing because your pain and story has been witnessed,” she quips, adding, “However, the focus is not mental illness, but mental well-being.”
Further stressing upon the role of theatre as a tool to bring communities together, Siddiqui feels that the biggest reason why our lives are messed up is because we do not get to tell our stories. Despite we being so vocal about our thoughts and opinions on social media, we do not get to see ourselves fully being witnessed. “You don’t even get to see people’s physical reaction when they are listening to you nor do they get to see your reaction while you are narrating your story. That’s when theatre becomes important because the human connections that we form, we practise it through observation and understanding each other’s reactions, faces, body language etc in theatre which can’t happen online. And not just theatre but even in various forms of art, the idea of creating something is all about tapping into deeper resources and letting it flow,” says Siddiqui.
She doesn’t believe in the line between the stage and audience and has been using alternative theatre and community theatre in her work. She says that because theatre is alive and is relevant to the time and culture, the boundaries between the audience and stage are diminishing. “We cannot afford to be divided right now - there’s too much of division in this world and I think as an artist, the desire to bring the wold together and create spaces where people can come together and connect is central to theatre,” she concludes
ST READER SERVICE
Merchants of Madness workshop will be held between December 11 and 17 at The Gud Mud, Mulshi. Food and transport will be provided throughout the workshop. To register, write to hinaqui@gmail.com
