Radio drama for development: ARDA and the Rainbow City experience

Abstract

One of the areas of concern for theatre practitioners over the past decade has been the issue of development. There has therefore been a deliberate injection of a development agenda into the medium of drama, whether on stage, screen or radio. While radio drama cannot be considered to be a new practice in Nigeria, the systematic ‘hybridization’ of drama with other analytical tools of development is a more recent practice. The radio drama experience of the African Radio Drama Association (ARDA) encompasses theatre, dialogue and social discourse, in an attempt to bridge fiction and social reality. This paper is therefore an attempt to examine the contributions of the ARDA in their series Rainbow City through the medium of drama and the organized ‘Listeners Groups’ across the areas where the broadcast is received. The issues discussed and raised here try to answer the following questions. What is new? What are the prospects of using radio drama to address development issues? What bottlenecks exist and what is the way forward? The paper is written based on the experience of the writer as one of the group leaders in the radio drama listeners group.