Vanuatu theatre group marks 25 years of work in the community

Transcript

One of the co-founders of a theatre group in Vanuatu which turns 25 this week, says performing arts have proved a powerful tool for spreading important messages.

Performers have come from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand for the anniversary festivities of Wan Smolbag, which began with a small band of actors 25 years ago.

The group produces plays, films, CDs, television and teaching resources that educate and entertain audiences across the Pacific.

It has also gone on to establish health clinics, a sports complex, youth centres, and a conservation network.

Bridget Tunnicliffe asked co-founder Jo Dorras how she and husband Peter Walker turned a small theatre group into an extensive community network.

JO DORRAS: We put on a play quite soon and got a little bit of funding from UNICEF to take a play on immunisation around within the first few months and really it just went on from there. And one of the volunteer, part-time members or whatever you want to call it from that time, he's still in the group 25 years later.

BRIDGET TUNNICLFFE: And it's amazing how many areas you've branched into as well.

JD: And in the sense that's because of the drama because we get many requests from different organisations who want to take a message to community level, ask for us to do a play in that area. Because people aren't necessarily massively literate and because some places are incredibly hard to get to, there's no electricity, it's quite hard to bring in other forms of information and people love stories. So we'll often get asked to take a play on and then that can become the focus of a whole, like our work over a long period of time, like the turtle play which we did back in 1994 which led to the creation of the turtle monitors and then that started with us going around the island of Efate and then a number of villages decided that because of the play that they would put taboos on the reefs and they would also have a turtle monitor to make sure people didn't take eggs from the turtles' nests on the beach. And that is now, that has spread all over the island and there's something like 400 turtle monitors throughout Vanuatu who all work on a voluntary basis. So people come to us with something they want and then we kind of get excited about it and think 'we want that too' and it becomes what we do for quite a long time.

BT: Can you see room for further growth for the theatre?

JD: Oh my gosh, what a terrifying thought. But I mean obviously as the population grows as different issues spring up you do tend to kind of find there are other things you want to do. I'm not sure we kind of plan it, it tends to be more organic and now I don't know if you are aware that we have a big youth centre in Vila, another youth centre in Luganville, and one on Pentecost. Youths come to the centre, there's like a 1,000 youths registered at the Smolbag Centre in Vila and different people come in and run different sessions with them. So out of that has come massive numbers of hip hop groups and bands and people making pottery and a nutrition centre, masses of sport that goes on, so all of that continues all the time.