Trickster in Africa
In 2007 Trickster Theatre Directors David and Sheryl Chantler travelled to Africa.
In the village of Biwindi, in the mountain regions of Uganda, they worked with the Biwindi orphans performance group.
This group of children have all lost their parents due to HIV Aids. The vilage helped organize them into a performance ensemble - a life changing act that has given them a focus, some great training and most of all, given them a way to make a living.
Biwindi is a beautiful village near some of the last mountain gorilla habitat in the world. The orphans perform some exciting dances and stories daily for the tourists who have come to visit the gorilla's up in the mountains.
We were very impressed with the orphans performance skills and felt that the overall style of Trickster's work would be very complimentary to what the orphans group was currently doing.
We worked with the group to create some new dance/stories. We also gave out lots of clown noses - that was a big hit! We saw them being worn everywhere in the village.
Going Back to Africa
We are currently working on plans to go back to Biwindi to create a full show with the orphans, as well as to create another orphans/performance troupe in a different part of Africa.
The Trickster performance style is well suited to the creation of original shows using local props and stories as the starting points. Giving groups of orphans a way to get out of the street poverty that they often end up in after losing their parents, is a project that we have taken on as an outreach program for the company. We are interested to see if what we found In Biwindi is a model that can be adapted to other locations.
More to come on this project. If you, or your school, are interested in our work in Africa and would like to get involved - give us a call and we'd be happy to discuss how you could participate.
