Theatre to run project

 By Memo Hauke 
The Moresby Arts Theatre (MAT)  will be conducting a programme called Pride for secondary school students studying theatre, arts and music.
The programme will focus on teenage issues such as texting, bullying, cyber-bullying and others that teenagers face today.
The University of Goroka will be working with MAT for the first time this year to lend their community theatre expertise to the programme.
Moresby Arts Theatre president Maya Peipul said the Pride Youth Arts Programme would have an estimated 600 Grade 9 students,  who will receive intensive theatrical training on social messaging over a six-week period from July 25.
UOG Communication and Creative Arts lecturer Dr Jane Awi, who teaches drama, has chosen to work with MAT to increase awareness on the UOG Communication and Creative Arts programme to students and schools in NCDC and network with them to further strengthen arts subjects and curriculum in schools especially drama, theatre and music.
“I teach a course called Process Drama to third-year drama students which is designed to give them an opportunity to select a social, health or development issue, research it, design a process drama workshop and conduct it in a classroom or a community.”
Awi added that this semester, students had designed a number of workshops for assessment and they would be sharing selected components of this workshop with students participating in the MAT project.
Process drama is participatory, shared and interactive where both the participants or students and the teacher work together to investigate a problem and solve it.
Process drama is often employed as a teaching method in classrooms to deliver subject content.
Some of the topics covered in the past Pride programmes in the early 2000 were bullying, girlfriends, gossiping, generation names, dealing with tough conditions, HIV and AIDS, competition at school and others which is of interest to children these days.