Lessons on life and death

Vanuatu

WHEN Charlie Falau fell in love with Nora Gorden it seemed like the beginning of a fairytale romance. Nora was a nurse and Falau, young and promising, had a good job in the bank. Falau smiled a lot. Life, he thought, was going to be good.

But things changed a few weeks later when he asked Nora for sex. The nurse said no. Falau asked again . . . and again.

Nora instead asked for an

AIDS test. “Why an AIDS test?” asked Falau, angry.

“I don’t have AIDS!” But Nora stood her ground: no test, no sex.

When Falau finally did have his test, it was positive, the result of a casual sexual encounter some years earlier during a drunken night out with friends. The love story that had started out so sweetly turned sour.

Falau lost his job, his friends, and broke up with Nora. In the end he lost everything and died.

This story- of love and death was played out on the

stage at Malapoa College

on the outskirts of the Vanuatu capital of Port Vila. The message was powerful. It was produced and presented by Wan Smolbag Theatre , Vanuatu’s first fulltime theatre company.

Wan Smolbag was founded in February 1989. Initially, it was an escape route for young jobless men and women and was the brainchild of Englishman Peter Walker and his wife Jo Doris who teaches

English at Malapoa. Walker has had acting experience in London and, later, Zimbabwe where he helped run a community theatre for school children. It was from his Zimbabwe’s Kanyama Productions that Walker “pinched” Wan Smolbag’s theme for their first production, a short play based on the goodness of

boiling drinking water.

As in the AIDS play, Wan Smolbag does not perform in fancy studios with fancy lighting and expensive backdrops. The group draws its strength from performing in unlikely locations; under the bread

fruit tree in the village at dusk or in the village square where the whole world is a stage. Their message is always educational; why people should boil drinking water, why a condom can prevent the spread of AIDS, the environ ment, Their longest play is an environmental pantomime for pri mary schools which was com missioned by the South Pacific Regional Environmental Pro gramme (SPREP). This often involves children in the acting area, helping Mighty Hawk and Magic Fish fight Mr Kill-The- World and his robot assistant, Fosters.

With the absence of television in Vanuatu and the inaccessibility of expensive video facilities, Wan

Educational play: Mighty Hawk and Magic Fish fight Mr Kill-The-World and his robot assistant, Fosters, in an environmental battle

Smolbag plays a key role in the country’s visual education programme. Its im mediate objectives are to bring import ant issues to the attention of villagers and to act as an educational back-up service for the Health Department, the Depart ment of Community Development & Women’s Affairs, and Non-Govemment

Organisations,

“Wan Smolbag is not just a performance group,” said Walker, actor and group leader. “We also teach drama and the result is three or four drama groups in Abrym,” one of the bigger islands north of the capital Port Vila. Their biggest project now involves working on a cultural history play on Vanuatu to cover blackbirding, the history of plan tations which thrived before indepen dence in 1980, and traditional dances.

The five fulltime members of the group share a diverse background and joined to Wan Smolbag after having aimlessly wandered from job to job. The cast: • Charlie Falau is in his early 20s and is from the island of Ambrym. Falau did secondary education in Fiji and returned to Vanuatu to work for the Tagabe Agricultural Centre on the main island of Efate, taking blood samples from cows and bulls. He joined Wan Smolbag as a part-time and stayed on fulltime. • Jo Jeffred is also from Ambrym.

He attended University of the South Pacific in Suva for a year and left after failing his exam. He attended Futa Helu’s Atenisi Institute in Tonga and joined Wan Smolbag fulltime. He does a lot of the administration work and was in Melbourne recently for two months on the Beyond Borders cultural programme. • Pirre Lict is a francophone halfcaste who trained as an electrician but ended up not being able to keep a job. He joined Wan Smolbag in 1989 and is the group’s one-man band. • Nora Gorden is the only woman in the group and perhaps the most powerful performer. She is originally from Pangu village on the main island of Efate and speaks French and English fluently. She was born into an Anglophone family and leamt French enough to teach it at high school. She had no permanent work until joining Wan Smolbag last August.

All the members of the group work fulltime. Their salaries are paid by the Australian Community Aid Abroad. The World Health Organisation gives 54000 a year for works on AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. SPREP gave $3OOO for a play on environmental issues. Wan Smolbag is seeking sponsorship for a regional tour this year. With the power of their message they would be a hit abroad. □