Theatre for Development and it's Discontents: in search of a sustainable practice

Abstract

From its embryonic stage, Theatre for Development (TfD) has promised to give voice to the voiceless and equip communities to transform their own conditions. Yet beneath this emancipatory rhetoric lies an uncomfortable reality: the field is haunted by recurrent failures. Projects generate enthusiasm, provoke dialogue, and then terminate, leaving communities without structures to sustain the change they initiated. Drawing on three Nigerian cases spanning five decades—the Samaru project at Ahmadu Bello University (1970s–present), the Agwan Rogo peacebuilding initiative (2012), and the Bwarak Institutional Based Research project (2024). This paper argues that these failures are not aberrations but structural pathologies embedded in how TfD is conceived, funded, and institutionalized. It identifies three persistent discontents: the sustainability problem (interventions end, impact fades), the institutional gap (universities extract rather than partner), and the facilitator deficit (practitioners trained as copyists rather than critical reflexive agents). Diagnosing these discontents reveals three interconnected roots: the project temporality, the participation trap, and the logic of institutional self-reproduction. The paper proposes principles for sustainable practice: structural embeddedness, community governance, facilitator critical reflexivity, temporal adequacy, and evaluative reciprocity. The paper argues that the search for sustainability is not merely technical but deeply ethical. It concludes with a question that must haunt every practitioner: After we leave, what remains?