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Empatheatre as a Pedagogical Tool
End of year Empatheatre newsletter.
The three narratives and characters featured in Lalela uLwandle lent themselves beautifully to an audio reimagining, as did the evocative sound-design by Tristan Horton and score by Gary Thomas and Guy Buttery. If you haven’t yet listened to the Podcast of the play, please do so by clicking on the below link….
https://soundcloud.com/user-670708972/lalela_ulwandle
Obviously we've been heartsore to not be able to join together in our Empatheare circles this year. We’ve missed the interaction with our audiences, the intimate and tender acts of sharing and listening as well as the stimulating post-show discussions and debates which usually occur after every performance.
Still, the succession of obstacles 2020 has lobbed at us, have also allowed for some exciting new innovations and developments to take place within our praxis, some of which have ushered us into unexpected new creative and pedagogical arenas.
Working with the Podcast format is one, we still believe, enables our audiences to engage in deep empathetic listening. One might ever consider the reception of these stories-- via earphones-- a deeper and even more involved listening experience. In this format, the listener is not spoon-fed visual clues as they are in a live performance. but rather encouraged to dream the stories to life in the auditoriums of their own beautiful and boundless imaginations.
Another exciting development that has occurred by working within aural arena’s such as the ones we are currently experimenting with, is that our Empatheatre stories and productions are now able to travel more easily and broadly enabling them to be used as resources readily and freely available online to teachers’ and lectures’ across the globe.
We were thrilled to recently receive news from Dr. Kevin Meehan from the University of Central Florida where course-work around our Empatheatre production of Lalela uLwandle was devised as the last of six curriculum modules in his class on Global Literature of Environmental Justice.
Using the Empatheatre Podcast as a pedagogical tool, Meehan created a stimulating course for his students. The below summary of questions raised and material covered, does not bring to light the full extent and complexity of Meehan’s course design but we’d love to quickly mention a few stimulating points he included and questions he raised whilst encouraging students to engage with the work.
After orienting his students in the methodology and performance history of Empatheatre, Meehan asked them to listen to the Lalela uLwandle podcast a few times and note key phrases and ideas mentioned by the three characters: Nolwandle, Faye and Niren.
In his contextualizing notes to the students, Meehan writes:
“As you listen to the play, the narrative spotlight passes back forth between the three characters. Please think about each one and how their relation to the sea is expressed. Possibly, each character may represent a different type of policy variable with Niren embodying economic concerns, Faye correlating with environmental issues, and Nolwandle voicing social and cultural aspects of community development. As each character relates a series of stories, try to understand their occupation, their historical trajectory, their dominant emotions, their ethnic heritage, and more. While recognizing each character's unique experience and voice, also think about commonalities they share. Please take time to reflect on the unique method of the Empatheatre group as well.”
After engaging with the play text (through the podcast format) Meehan asked his students to read a range of supplementary material around Lalela uLwandle published on the Empatheatre website, with a particular focus on a blogpost written by Empatheatre collaborator Dr Kira Erwin.
(https://www.empatheatre.com/a-theatre-project-explores-collective-solutions-to-saving-the-ocean-by-dr-kira-erwin)
Meehan built a range of stimulating questions into the study around how the different characters stories offer thinking around “knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe”. Students were then asked to enhance their understanding of intangible cultural heritage by reviewing a website on the topic developed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as well as think about Empatheatre and community theatre spaces in a broader African context by unpacking an essay written by Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
Meehan’s course framework and guidelines encouraged students to investigate a variety of related genres and literary forms and contextualise many of their earlier findings within these frameworks and contexts. Some of the questions he posed at this stage in the study include asking students to think through how Empatheatre as a multidisciplinary collaboration compares to other literary forms, and the “strengths of this type of literary production for engaging the challenges of environmental justice--intellectually, politically, aesthetically, or otherwise”.
It’s so energising to see our work and methodology being interrogated and taught in contexts both in South Africa and beyond. As storytellers and educators, reading Meehan’s course framework and questions around Lalela uLwandle affords us the chance to reflect more deeply on the efficacy and impacts of our work as theatre- makers, activists and academics. Several months ago, we were equally delighted to receive news that a filmed recording of our play The Last Country was being used by Jocelyn Alexander from Oxford University as a teaching resource.
As we move towards further Covid-19 restrictions and frustrations into 2021, our Empatheatre team plan to continue with adapting and disseminating our stories through online platforms and digital-formats and forging further pathways into having them included in classrooms and curriculums both here and abroad.
Already we have scripted and performed our first live theatrical Zoom performance titled The Shorebreak Sessions which opened a recent conference and was used to stimulate debate and discussion amongst the attendees.
In early 2021 we will be launching and distributing our first animated short (in collaboration with Shells & Spells) titled Indela Yokuphila (The Soul’s Journey) which builds on aspects of research gleaned from the devising of Lalela uLwandle. Indela Yokuphila explores isiZulu ancestral beliefs that after death, the soul journeys through the oceans to meet one's ancestors only to be born again ,and returned to the land and human form through the imbibing of a rain drop…. a belief that is remarkably similar to the scientific ideas around the lifecycle of water. We are also currently in the process of recording The Last Country as Podcast/radio-play which will be made freely available in early 2021.
So watch this space and thank you for your continued support.
Empatheatre with support from the Bertha House, is excited to be hosting a screening and post-film discussion around Complicite’s film Can I Live? at the Bertha House cinema in Cape Town on the 12th of October from 16:00 - 19:30.
Empatheatre and Mbazwana Creative Arts (MCA)in association with Amehlo Productions are proud to present a short documentary film centring on the devising of their acclaimed musical theatrical production Umkhosi Wenala .
How do we make sense of the violent histories that mark our past? This play, Isidlamlilo, forces us to engage seriously with this question. Depending on your own relationship with our violent history, this play awakens a profound and at times unsettling realization that history is a living breathing force in all our lives. Isidlamlilo is set in the dying days of Apartheid, and in the present democratic South Africa.