Dakar, Oct 3 (APS) – Cultural professionals proposed, Thursday, possible solutions linked to training, financing and dissemination to resolve the crisis that Senegalese theater has been going through for several years.
”The theater crisis is not new in the world,” said the director and playwright, Mamadou Seyba Traoré, who believes that the problem of this sector can be summarized in the triptych ”training, creation and dissemination ”.
Speaking at the second edition of the Dakar international theater and humor festival (from October 3 to 6) opened with the panel entitled ”What outcome to the crisis of Senegalese theater”, the director of the play ”Les bouts de bois de Dieu” advocates teaching dramatic arts to children from a young age so that they grow up with the desire to go to the theater and read a play.
He recalled that in the past, ‘the theater was the voice of negritude throughout the world and of the spoiled child of artistic disciplines during the reign of Léopold Sédar Senghor’.
Today, he believes, the public makes a lot of effort and encounters enormous constraints to access theater venues concentrated in downtown Dakar. There is also television which has taken over with TV films and filmed theater.
Mamadou Seyba Traoré advises the construction of equipped open-air theaters in the regions to provide venues for broadcasting.
The director Abdou Karim Sadji of Kaolack, who agrees with the same sentiment, calls for ”to build venues adapted to theater especially in regions lacking public infrastructure and to review the training curricula in dramatic art and above all to leave elitist theater”.
”We must improve theater governance, highlight school theater and help with teacher training,” he further suggested.
”Should we continue to perform theater as before in a context of change with television and digital?”, asked the former director of the Douta Seck cultural center Awa Cheikh Diouf.
According to the arts director, Ndèye Khoudia Diagne, a good part of the recommended solutions are contained in the strategic theater development plan worked with the actors.
”We talked about funding which is essential. And whatever its form, patronage or the State, it is necessary for creation and dissemination,” indicated the director who announced that the strategic plan was shared with the new authorities who find that ”it is not “It’s not fair that certain sub-sectors do not have funding.”
”They said that urban cultures have funding, cinema, books and reading and ultimately only the visual and performing arts are the poor relations. Fortunately they are aware of it today and want to correct this injustice and that is reassuring, because whatever happens, this situation will be corrected,” said Ndèye Khoudia Diagne.
Around financing, there is the value chain that must be strengthened through training, she said.
The strategic plan also provides for the structuring of companies and troupes and an interministerial framework to talk about theater policy, because dramatic art is split between four ministerial departments, namely Culture, National Education, Higher Education and Professional training, according to the director.
On the infrastructure side, she notes, ”another problem arises, it is the fact that the actors are not associated upstream of the projects and we also only have cultural centers at the regional level, it is something to be to correct”.
Ndèye Khoudia Diagne declares that she is reassured when she hears the authorities say that they will build local infrastructure at the level of each commune according to the specificity of the localities.
FKS/OID/SKS/AB
