Effective communication and TFD practice in Nigeria: The Unandu and Ketti experience

Abstract

The purpose of Theatre for Development (TfD) is to communicate effectively to bring about a change occasioned by the awareness on the part of the community of a ‘need’ and facilitated by theatre workers. For centuries, communication was described as the process through which information (data, message) that could be in a spoken or written form and sent through larynx, telephone or computer (channel) to a computer, robot or human being (receiver) who is expected to decode (understand, transcribe) and encode (give a feedback) which again could be written, spoken, a sign or silence and the whole process begins again. Basically, this form of communication assumes that the sender is literate and knowledgeable and the receiver is illiterate or completely ignorant. Thus, it is termed authoritative in nature and in most cases not ideal for an educative process or a development work. However, the democratic nature of TFD seeks to use the resources within the theatre framework to achieve an aim; which could be behavioural or developmental and to actualize this through active participation by the community in the play making process. This paper analyses two TFD projects carried out in two Communities: Unandu (Igbo- Etiti LGA) and Ketti (Kabusa Ward, AMAC) with a view to measuring the failure or success of the communication process used in data collection.