Theatre for Development – Village Theatre Projects (Tanzania)

• Originating in the post-colonial climate of Tanzania and later across Africa, Theatre for Development (TfD) involves participatory, often improvised performance works staged in rural villages. These performances aim not at entertainment but at social education: issues such as sanitation, gender relations, agricultural methods, and civic rights are explored in public, collaborative performances. They often include songs, dances, and interactive audience dialogue.

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

At the heart of Foucault’s late philosophy lies the idea that subjectivity is not given, but crafted. In The Care of the Self, he writes that ethical life depends not on universal rules but on how individuals engage in practices that form their relation to truth, power, and others. TfD is a model of such practices—not through private meditation, but through public, embodied, communal dialogue.

In TfD, villagers become co-creators of knowledge. They do not merely receive information from experts, but dramatize the ethical tensions of their own lives—such as choosing between traditional customs and new health practices. Foucault’s concept of “technologies of the self” is thus lived through role-play, debate, and collective improvisation. The body is no longer a passive receptor; it becomes a site of agency, a stage for re-inscribing power relations.

Moreover, TfD exemplifies what Foucault calls “counter-conduct”—forms of resistance that do not destroy power, but redirect it through care, education, and reflexivity. Theatrical space becomes an open agora, where subjects question the norms inscribed into daily life, such as gender hierarchies, economic dependency, or inherited taboos.

Foucault also emphasizes parrhesia—truth-telling as a courageous act. In TfD, this is not the lone voice of the intellectual, but the courageous speech of the community, embodied in laughter, irony, questions, and songs. The play becomes an act of democratic subjectivation—a rehearsal for freedom, not through ideology, but through enacted critique and ethical experimentation.

Thus, TfD is not merely theatre for the people—it is theatre by and as the people’s aesthetics of existence.