Welcome to Scheherazade 2!
It has been such a joy to witness the beginnings of scaling the work of Hua Dan into new markets through the application of technology. Prior to the pandemic, there had been no obvious push to consider the opportunities of the virtual world but, during lockdown, like so many around the world, we began to deliver our workshops through Zoom and saw the potential of using technology to scale our impact.
Theatre is often thought to be the ultimate ‘in-person’ live experience, difficult to replicate through technological means. It’s true that nothing beats the experience of coming together in a physical space to create meaning and story with others. But what if we could use technology as a support to sharing the tools and experiences of impacting 32,000 women and children migrants across China into something that could impact the lives of millions more? And what if we could harness women’s innate leadership skills to do that? That is essentially the question that we have been grappling with in recent years and that the pandemic brought to light.
During our time in China, we had trained just 10 migrant women who had gone on to lead workshops with over 32,000 women and children across the country. If we could harness the leadership capabilities of more migrant and refugee women around the world, we could have an outsized impact in using the arts to address social problems.
Lockdown was spent in the creation of video documentation of Hua Dan’s model, meticulously uploading short 3-minute bursts that introduced core tools and concepts that have been the hallmark of Hua Dan’s work using participatory theatre as a tool to the life skills and personal leadership competencies of migrant women and children around China. We wanted to build out the model of what we had done in China to impact more populations around the world and believed the key was in the leadership of the women themselves.
Fast forward to 2023 and we were ready to launch our first pilot. With funding generously provided by the US State Department, Tenacre Foundation and LVMH, we launched with a full cohort of women from China and Afghanistan, all poised to learn how to use our techniques in their communities.
The format of the programme is simple: the women meet for a Masterclass workshop on Zoom on a Monday, and are then given access to materials through our micro-learning partner Gnowbe that reinforce and deepen the learning from the Masterclass. Masterclass workshops focus on the tools we use in our theatre workshops – Frozen Pictures, Forum Theatre, Improvisation, Games and creative exercises, as well as lessons in leadership, project management and fundraising. The women then have to use the lessons learned to lead their own workshops which have been started with our support and through the support of those in their own communities. The programme lasts for a year and encompasses foundational learning in theatre techniques, as well as leadership and management. It also helps women to develop their own practise in being community artists, whether that’s in a purely educational context, or improving their performing art skills too. That way, technology is a support to encourage human development, not the other way around. It is a sort of ‘business in a box’ for micro-businesses using the arts in emerging markets and we see ourselves as the ‘Grameen of participatory theatre’.
We believe we are pioneering something extraordinary that has never been done before. Through empowering leaders with the tools to lead their own workshops in communities, and giving them access to those tools through technology, we can develop ways to radically scale up arts-based approaches to social change and create a generation of women entrepreneurial leaders solving their community’s problems through the arts. Our world needs more human-centered approaches to development and in as much as technology can help us get the word out to support the real-life development of these incredible women, we can change the world!