Projects
Center for Non-Violence | Projects | Partners
Environment | Health | Human Rights | Women
Environment
Jagruti-I:
This 3 year project in 10 Municipal Schools in Ahmedabad aimed at making young children from the slums into environmental activists. Tackling issues like garbage, safe drinking water, contaminated food, high cost and polluting energy, the actor activists introduced each subject with a performance and then spent two months getting the group to take initiatives in finding out solutions to their everyday problems. The project was funded by ETC, India, and ran from 1991 to 1993.
Jagruti-2:
The success of the first project lead to an invitation by the Municipal School System for a training of teachers from all the 500 schools to teach them how to carry the project to the 2 lakh students in these schools. This was done through a series of workshops over one year. Teachers were trained in the use of performance to initiate activism and new thoughts in the field of environmental action. This project was also funded by ETC, India and ran through the year 1994.
Chokhe Chokhi Vaat:
This was a performance on the importance of clean water, of garbage clearance and of sanitation and hygiene commissioned by CARE India for Kutchch after the earthquake. The Darpana actors performed 30 times in the areas where post earthquake work was on.
Environmental Awareness For Children:
Funded by UNDP, this project involved the recreation of a traditional Bhavai play in light of environmental degradation. The play went around 30 Municipal schools and encouraged children to think about solutions and to put plans for these into action themselves. The project ran through 2002.
Three plays on Biodependence:
For the Gir Foundation, Gujarat Forest Department, a series of three plays on wild animals and birds and their crucial role in the eco system were created and performed for schools all around Gandhinagar, in the Gandhinagar nature reserve in the year 2003
Health
The "Acting Healthy" Project supported by Art Venture
The Tribal Academy in Tejgadh, Chhota Udaipur, helped identify health workers in the region who could act in these plays. These health workers were invited to Darpana for a seven-day workshop to be trained in acting for street plays. Damini Mehta, Gujarat's first female Bhavai artist, was invited to conduct the workshop.
The performances were then organised in the thirty most remote villages of Baroda district near Chhota Udaipur with the help of the health department of Bhasha Academy Tejgadh.
To attract villagers to come for the performances, the team played a local form of music called Timli, loudly on the speakers interspersing these with an invitation to the show. They also went from house to house inviting people. The people of this region don't have many sources of entertainment, so they always seem very eager to watch performances like these. Many people turned up to watch the performances, especially women.
The Unicef Projects:
June to November 1999. This project dealt with the issues of maternal mortality and infant mortality and was conceived of with traditional Bhavai performers who toured 40 villages in the Mehsana district of Gujarat. The team worked closely with UNICEF doctors and local health workers.
The second phase of this successful project had the Darpana for Development team training two other groups of local performers in Visnagar and the Dangs with the same messages.
HIV and AIDS:
Darpana for Development has done several different projects on this subject for different agencies including the Gujarat AIDS Society and PSI. This has entailed working with doctors and health workers in developing many scripts tackling the medical and social impact of the disease for at risk populations including truck drivers, sex workers and their clients and port labour. Our own team was created and performed over 700 times with over 30 different performance pieces, all specially created and written.
Addiction:
Performances have been created and conducted for the Cancer Research Institute, Ahmedabad, on the health issues of alcohol and tobacco addiction. The venues have ranged from city streets to the railway stations.
Leprosy:
Government's anti-leprosy drive, a project was conceived and performed all over the State.
The UNICEF Anandshala
UNICEF is an active partner in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the National Programme for Universal Elementary Education, which aims to provide quality education for children between the ages of 6 and 14 years by 2010. UNICEF had been working in the remote villages of Valsad district with an objective to ensure that all children complete five years of school and have access to good quality education. After many years research on child development, they selected 3 main subjects for the tribal children of Valsad.
1) Cleanliness & Hygiene
2) Girls Education
3) HIV / AIDS
In order to achieve the goals and make the project a success, UNICEF had joined their hands with the expertise of Darpana Academy. Darpana’s experts trained volunteers from Valsad on developmental issues through folk plays. There were deputations from UNICEF also to supervise the training / workshop held in Darpana. This has become a movement in the interior areas of Valsad district for community development.
Human Rights
HUM:
2003-2004. In the aftermath of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 this project, funded by the Royal Netherlands Embassy, was launched in conjunction with Darpana Communication's 'Vaividhyotsav'. The project, aimed at confronting children and youth with the prejudice that leads to hatred and violence, and the futility of it, and aimed at involving them into rethinking prejudice, has gone into over 120 colleges and 200 schools. The group of 8 trained actor-activists also carries an exhibition of panels giving facts about the minority and majority communities in our country.
Women
Parivartan:
1995 to 1998 and 1998 to 2001. This long running project for tribal women covered a wide scope of issues that relate to their well being, health, education, social position, family welfare and more. Funded by the McArthur Foundation of Chicago this is Darpana for Development’s most path-breaking and well documented project with the most exciting statistically relevant results. By putting together a group from amongst the adivasi tribals of Banaskantha in Gujarat, for whom the project was created, and by training them as actor activists who intervened in their own societies, using their own beliefs and myths creatively, this project is a landmark in social communications through the arts. Even today the effects of the project are in evidence in their not having been a single case of witch hunting amongst the project villages; their being a consistently high enrolment of girl children in schools; their being no return to alcoholism in the concerned villages; their being a total ban on marriages during the monsoons, a ritual which used to waste a month of sowing pekriods.
