Radio Drama: Episode one

This week we have plotted the scenes and came up with characters for the first three episodes of the drama series.

We have given each episode a theme and the first episode’s overall theme is “young & sexually active”. What we hope to achieve with this episode is to create a general awareness of the struggles and issues that sexually active young people go through. It is important to understand that we got these story ideas from the real experiences of our group and the experiences of the group members’ friends and family members. Often there appeared to be a lot of stereotyping such as “girls are gold diggers and have multiple partners to pay for material possessions” or “it’s not a fathers place to talk about sex with their daughters or sons”. We’ve had to debate and edit out some of these stereotypes.

Second Blog: Further and deeper insight to community issues

We met with the Egazini theatre group for the second time last week. The workshop was held at the Africa Media Matrix building (AMM). The exercises included a listening session; we played a locally produced radio drama titled “Beauty & the beats”.

First Work Shop

A brief look at Grahamstown (Introduction)

Grahamstown is a small Eastern Cape student town that is reflective of South Africa at large, in terms of large racial inequalities. The town’s citizens, like everywhere in South Africa are racially divided in terms of their residential areas and wealth. You find black people in the largely poor townships and then not too far from there, you find the coloured areas which are also largely poor. There isn’t much of an Indian community here, however the little number there is, can be closely associated with the white community of Grahamstown. There is also a small but growing black middle class community; this community is made up of professional teachers, nurses and police officers. The white community in Grahamstown lives a very different life from the black and coloured communities. The white people in this town are more financially secure and are able to lead middle class lives, where as the black and coloured communities are characterised by large unemployment and poverty. The Egazini theatre group we are working with is located with in the largely poor areas of Grahamstown.