Promoting Healthy Living and Safe Environment Through Community Theatre - The Eke Nibo Market Experience

Abstract

Conventional health campaigns have yielded minimal results in maintaining a safe and healthy environment. This has necessitated the use of Community Theatre to expose the dangers of a filthy environment. The experiment was carried out in Eke Nibo Market, Awka South, by the third-year students of Theatre and Film Studies, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. The project combined an Igbo drama presentation detailing the traders’ unhealthy practices with a health talk delivered by Mrs Joy Nwachukwu, a matron at the university medical centre. The experiment, which was hinged on Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, used the market's space as a stage and co-opted the traders as co-actors, thus transforming from spectators to actors in their own sanitation story. The health lecture centred on handwashing, exercise, and sleep, while the drama covered the insubordinate food seller, police intervention, the consequences of unsanitary surroundings, and a forced market cleanup. Relying on Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (SLT), data from performance observation and a post-performance Focus Group Discussion reveal how attention turned to retention, and retention to public pledges of action leading to behavioural shift/social change; an acceptance by community members to turn their unhealthy and unsanitary environment into a safe and healthy environment. The study recommends sustained partnerships between artists and health workers, and for government-backed drama skits on airwaves and social media to project the lesson beyond Eke Nibo market and environs.