Role Play and Drama

Theatre, puppets, dance and music are firmly rooted in the traditional cultural and artistic expressions of many communities in poorer countries. Along with drama, these forms of collective participation and entertainment can be used to develop and impart messages oriented towards livestock development. Drama and role play have things in common. Both involve two or more people playing a role in a story, in which they portray a situation that is fictional but resembles situations that those watching and taking part might easily find themselves in. But there are also important differences.

Drama Role Play References and Further Reading

A drama is prepared beforehand and usually has a storyline with a clear beginning and end. A group of actors present the drama to an audience. The words spoken by the actors may have been written down in detail, in the form of a script; and the actors will have rehearsed the drama before presenting it to an audience. Those presenting the drama may be professional actors or may have been selected from among the audience who will see the drama.

A drama can be used for two main purposes:

1. To get a message across to an audience in an entertaining way which clearly links the message to the lives and environment of the audience.
   
2. To stimulate discussion among the audience, or between the audience and those presenting the drama. In this case, the drama may have no clear ending: the actors may ask the audience to suggest how the drama might end and then act out several alternative endings. This would bring the drama close to a role play.

An example of the first would be a drama to show the importance of hygiene in milking goats. The drama could focus on a family in which the children become sick after drinking milk from the family’s goat. A neighbour calls by and, in discussion with the parents, it becomes clear that the person who milked the goats did not wash the udder or his hands before milking. The advantage of drama in this case is that it can engage the emotions of the audience by showing the anguish of the parents of the sick children, and their happiness when they become well again.

An example of a drama to stimulate discussion could focus on the issue of how the money from a smallstock enterprise is spent. It might show a family in which the wife takes care of the animals, feeding and milking them each day. There could then be an argument between her and the husband who has been using the cash from selling the milk to drink beer with his friends. The actors can then ask the audience how they think the story should proceed. Drama can raise sensitive issues like this, in an entertaining and non-threatening way and create an atmosphere in which people want to express their own views.

As with all communication media, a drama is most effective when the storyline reflects an issue that is real and important to the audience.

In addition to a live audience, drama can of course also be used on radio (see rural radio or farm radio), in which case the audience is both significantly larger as well as not being physically present. Whilst these differences will have an impact on the storyline and perhaps the ways in which it is developed, the functions of drama remain essentially the same. Similarly, drama forms an important part of the content of television, and can be used along with video technology to present a story and get a message across to an audience.

A role play usually takes place in the context of a training session. The "actors" do very little, if any, preparation beforehand. They are selected, or volunteer, from among the participants in the training. They are told by the trainers what role they will play and will be given an outline of the situation to be portrayed. There is no script. In some cases, all the participants in the training may have a chance to play a role; in other cases, some participants will remain as an audience. Role play can be filmed by video camera and then re-played to those community members who are interested to watch it - serving as a focus for and stimulating further discussion.

In a training context, the two main purposes of a role play are:

To reinforce what has been learned during the training. For example, after a session in which farmers have learned about the management of sick animals, the instructor might ask some of the participants to act out a situation in which a farmer finds one of his or her goats is sick. See the photograph on the left: this is from northern Ghana and shows farmers role playing the management of a sick animal.

2. Alternatively, role play may be designed to stimulate discussion.

This is very similar to the second use of drama, the main difference being that there is no preparation or writing of a script beforehand. The trainer or facilitator, however, will have prepared descriptions of the situation that will be portrayed, and of the various roles which people will be invited to play.

An example comes from a CARE project in Bangladesh where role play was used as part of farmer training on environmental impacts of gher farming (training of trainers). Gher is a bangla word meaning "perimeter" and used to refer to ponds used for shrimp or prawn cultivation. The objectives were to improve the participants' understanding of threats to the long-term sustainability of gher farming, and encourage the adoption of management practices ensuring increased and diversified production from gher farming. There are, for example, areas where the unplanned expansion of gher farming has resulted in poor drainage, water-logging, and threatens the sustainability of both gher and other types of farming, including livestock.

For an example of role play in use as part of a project, see the article by Annette Smith on "Role play in the Middle Hills of Nepal". Role-play has been used in a number of ways within communities formulating Village Action Plans, and facilitated by the Nepal Resource Management Project.