Playing it out: Why theatre matters for conservation on the Managalas Plateau

The Managalas Kuaefienami Theatre Group is a collection of local actors from across the Plateau performing a play. Photo by CIFOR-ICRAF

It’s a sunny September afternoon on Papua New Guinea (PNG)’s Managalas Plateau and the residents of Joivi Village crowd the grassy field that marks the settlement’s centre. Kids giggle and chase each other; adults chat and chew betel nut, the fruit of the areca palm (Areca catechu) that surrounds Joivi’s sago palm-thatched homes.

These natural resources are also the focus of today’s performance, which is delivered in a mixture of Tok Pisin (a form of Melanesian Pidgin English that is spoken throughout PNG) and the Tok Ples (local language) of this part of the Plateau. During the play, the actors ‘plant’ tree branches into the ground, and later chop them down with bush knives (machetes). They play out the ways in which unsustainable logging and agriculture can lead to short-term gains but ultimately compromise long-term well-being, especially for future generations.

The show is received with lots of laughter and applause, but the performance is not just entertainment. It’s a critical communication tool in a place that has five distinct local languages, as well as low literacy rates.

The Managalas Kuaefienami Theatre Group is a collection of local actors from across the Plateau who are performing a play. Photo by CIFOR-ICRAF

Today, the theatre group is ‘warming people up’ for a workshop to start developing land-use rules. It’s a much-awaited process. The Plateau, which spans 214,696 hectares and is home to 22,000 people, was gazetted as the Managalas Conservation Area (MCA) in 2017. Yet, to date, a management plan for the MCA has not been developed, and people across the area are impatient for progress – particularly about livelihood development possibilities. Now, the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), with funding from the European Union Forestry, Climate Change and Biodiversity (EU-FCCB) programme, is supporting the development of such a plan.

“The show is incredibly helpful for people to understand the management plan. Many of them cannot because they can’t read and sometimes we don’t even speak the same language. But through theatre, we can help them to grasp”, says Alking Fufus, the group’s leader. He has been involved in the theatre group since its inception in 2010, supported by the local NGO Partners with Melanesians (PwM), which backed the development of the conservation area from the early 1990s until 2022.

The Managalas Kuaefienami Theatre Group is a collection of local actors from across the Plateau performing a play. Photo by CIFOR-ICRAF

Although the current group benefited from external inputs, community theatre is not new to Managalas. According to Greg Murphy, an expatriate Australian who helped establish PNG’s first theatre company, Raun Raun Theatre, in 1975, popular theatre has always been a part of Papua New Guinean culture. People have long performed plays to convey origin stories, share information and explore their own challenges.

Before the formation of the Managalas Kuaefienami Theatre Group, some local cultural groups were already using theatre to critique the conservation area development process, as they felt they were seeing little benefit at the time. In a 2010 evaluation of the project, lead author Nancy Sullivan cites William Asare, a member of one such cultural group, who said:

“One drama that we performed [for the project partners] goes like this: A bird goes looking for prey to feed and eventually discovers a snail, picks it up with its beak and flies to a tree branch. It sits there and starts calling other birds to come. When other birds arrive, it breaks the shell and eats the meat himself and flies away. The others feed on the left shell. This drama and song convey the message that everything is done in our name, but only you benefit. Partners receive funds in our name but misuse them, enriching themselves while doing nothing for us. We performed this drama to make the partners aware.”

Around that time, PwM had been using printed materials and a radio programme to spread the word about the conservation area proposal. However, according to Lillian Bago, who worked for PwM as a programme officer from 2006-2010, the printed materials “became too costly to produce, and the cost of transporting [them] from Port Moresby to Managalas was increasing each year.”

Moreover, Bago noted, “From the informal evaluations I conducted during my visits, I found that people are no longer interested in or using the print materials. According to them, printing these materials is a waste of money because they don’t have time to read—among other reasons.” The radio programme also had limited impact, as not everyone owned a radio and the broadcasts were not always delivered in languages the locals could understand.

In 2010, the theatre group launched with training from an expert from the University of Papua New Guinea and staged its first production that same year. Today, it remains the most important and far-reaching method of raising awareness and disseminating information across the Plateau. As such, it plays a critical role in the efforts of local, regional, and international partners to develop and implement the MCAa management plan—building trust, enhancing transparency, and fulfilling commitments. Both onstage and off, the drama of the MCA’s development continues to unfold.

For more information on this project, please contact William Unsworth (CIFOR-ICRAF): w.unsworth@cifor-icraf.org