Paula Lindo – Our histories, stories, present, future.

Artistic Program Manager of the Applied Creative Arts program, Arts-in-Action (AiA), Brendon Lacaille, said the program will be going out into communities in 2017 to offer their services in dealing with issues of gender-based violence (GBV) and violence against women (VAW) where there is a need.

The resolve comes following a year of intense training on these issues with UN Women, which the organization has been working with for many years.
The organization will be focusing on conducting Interactive Performance Workshops, using a forum theatre approach. “In forum theatre, you create a scenario dealing with a particular problem or oppression that a community may be facing where the scene ends in a conflict. It usually ends with one of the characters being oppressed, having no rights or losing their rights and needing assistance. Basically after the scene is shared, we ask the audience to help us help the characters. During the interactive process, solutions and approaches to the problems are shared among the group, and we create an open forum for discussion of the issues using theatre techniques,” he said.
Lacaille said this work is a continuation of what the program has been doing since its inception, when AiA was founded by Dr. Dani Lyndersay in 1994 in response to a spate of domestic violence incidents. “We’ve been liaising with Ministries, different NGOs, dealing with community outreach, community empowerment and community education programs, and always on approaching issues of violence against women, gender-based violence, etc., so with the advocacy and the advocacy training, we thought putting Arts in Action there in the middle of it was another move which supported our commitment to the cause.” AiA has also partnered with UNDP and UN Women to do training workshops throughout the Caribbean, including Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Dominica and St. Kitts.
He paid special tribute to Dr. Lyndersay, playwright Rawle Gibbons, who was the head of the then Centre for the Creative and Festival Arts when the program was started, and Gabrielle Henderson, currently Senior Programme Specialist at UN Women. He said Henderson’s work with AiA during their partnership in the Break the Silence campaign had influenced the training and education being done at UN Women now.
Lacaiile said AiA is reviewing and redesigning its programs to determine how the training received can play into a larger fight against these issues, especially with regards to information sharing within communities and methodologies. “There are always instances of gender equality that can be approached, especially in youth development, how young men feel about themselves, how young women feel about themselves, how they negotiate in terms of how society sets up their roles and how gender plays a part in it. So there’s a realization on our part that it’s a broader way of dealing with the problem, and not just have a GBV campaign at one point or in one community, but make a curriculum that speaks to a whole cross-section of issues.”
Lacaille said the company will also be initiating programs in communities, in contrast to what they have been doing over the years, where they have been approached by community organizations, NGO’s, Ministries, etc. “We’re looking to create new kinds of work and new kinds of opportunities for communities. We’re no longer waiting to be approached, but we are going in and asking organizations to partner with us to find new avenues and new approaches we think will be beneficial to them to see this is what we can do things differently.”
He stressed that AiA is not proposing to be a saviour for any community. “It’s about us helping the audience and communities to help themselves and it’s us learning as well. We never have a kind of attitude where “we come to save you, we come to help you with your problem” or when we go into a school “you know how allyuh like to fight.” We basically present the issue and try and create an open forum for the discussion of the issues that we share.”
For more information on this and other AiA programs, call 289-(4AIA) or email: email@artsinaction.org.