Theatre For Development

Theatre for Development, or TfD, means live performance, or theater used as a development tool—as in international development. TfD encompasses the following in-person activities, with people or "puppets", before an audience:

• a spoken-word drama or comedy
• a music, singing and/or dance production
• a production with movement but no sound (mime)
• participatory or improvisational techniques using any or all of these

Theater for development can also be defined as a progression from less interactive theatre forms to a more dialogical process, where theatre is practiced with the people or by the people as a way of empowering communities, listening to their concerns, and then encouraging them to voice and solve their own problems.

For Kabaso Sydney (2013) as reflected in "Theatre for Development in Zambia" is defined as “modes of theatre whose objective is to disseminate messages, or to conscientize communities about their objective social political situation” (1993:48). And Penina Mlama, referring to the enterprise as Popular Theatre, describes its aims briefly as follows: …it aims to make the people not only aware of but also active participants in the development process by expressing their viewpoints and acting to better their conditions. Popular theatre is intended to empower the common man with a critical consciousness crucial to the struggle against the forces responsible for his poverty. (1991:67)

Theatre for Development can be a kind of participatory theatre, that encourages improvisation and audience members to take roles in the performance, or can be fully scripted and staged, with the audience observing. Many TfD productions are a mix of the two. "Theatre of the Oppressed" (TO), a technique created by Augusto Boal is a form of community-based theatre.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations and initiatives have used theatre as a development tool: for education or propaganda, as therapy, as a participatory tool, or as an exploratory tool in development. An account of an early use of TfD is the thesis Theater as a Means of Moral Education and Socialization in the Development of Nauvoo, Illinois, 1839-1845, which recounts how theater was used to promote ideological and civil development in a religious community in the US (Hurd 2004).