Department of Ophthalmology, Head, Liberia Eye Center, L. V. Prasad Eye Institute Liberia Inc, John F. Kennedy Memorial Medical Center, Monrovia, Liberia.
Department of Communications, L. V. Prasad Eye Institute, Kallam Anji Reddy Campus, L. V. Prasad Marg, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad, India.
Indian J Ophthalmol. 2021 May;69(5):1298-1302. doi: 10.4103/ijo.IJO_1468_20.
Street plays are a popular traditional medium of communication and entertainment in India. The objective of this paper is to communicate our experience about using street plays to raise awareness about children's eye health in a South Indian setting. Based on our experience of the prevailing misconceptions about children's eye health in our community, we selected some topics and prepared a blueprint of the scripts. We hired professional troupes who further refined these scripts into traditional street play scenarios by adding traditional songs, humor, and dialogues in the local dialect, leaving adequate room for improvisation during actual play. After a few rehearsals, we finalized the actual plays. Then, these were enacted in different parts of the city on different occasions, over a span of 3 years. In this descriptive paper, we share our experience of this exercise so that others may try and replicate this initiative in their areas. We found that the street plays were well attended by the people indicating the popularity of this medium in local communities. At the end of the street plays, a sample audience was interviewed about what they understood from the sessions, and most of them could reproduce the key messages. We found that instead of training our own staff, hiring a professional troupe was a more practical choice. Overall, it was a fruitful exercise in terms of the number of people that our plays reached out to effectively. Thus street play is an effective and popular means of disseminating eye health messages in our communities.
街头戏剧是印度流行的传统传播和娱乐方式。本文旨在介绍我们在印度南部使用街头戏剧提高儿童眼健康意识的经验。根据我们对社区中儿童眼健康普遍存在的误解的经验，我们选择了一些主题，并为剧本编写了蓝图。我们聘请了专业剧团，他们用当地方言加入传统歌曲、幽默和对话，进一步将这些剧本改编成传统的街头戏剧场景，为实际表演留出了充分的即兴创作空间。经过几次排练，我们敲定了实际的剧本。然后，这些剧本在不同的场合、不同的地点在城市的不同地方上演，持续了 3 年。在这篇描述性论文中，我们分享了我们的经验，以便其他人可以在自己的领域尝试并复制这一举措。我们发现，人们非常喜欢街头戏剧，这表明这种媒体在当地社区很受欢迎。在街头戏剧结束时，我们对一些观众进行了采访，询问他们对这些戏剧的理解，他们中的大多数人能够复述关键信息。我们发现，聘请专业剧团比培训自己的员工更实际。总的来说，就我们的戏剧有效接触到的人数而言，这是一次富有成效的尝试。因此，街头戏剧是在我们的社区中传播眼健康信息的一种有效且受欢迎的方式。
