Kaliyeka, a township on the outskirts of Lilongwe, Malawi, may be economically impoverished but it boasts other riches. When we began working here in 2009, we saw creative potential in the children we served and slowly began to develop their talents.
We started with dance – an art form that is part of their culture and second nature to them. Next, we visited a roadside market and purchased huge soap barrels to use as drums. We sawed off mop handles to make drumsticks and bought plastic buckets for hand drums. We started by teaching easy rhythms and simple movements. The turning point came when we showed them a STOMP video from the US. From then on everything became a possible percussion instrument – plastic bags, iron bars, metal bottle caps – and their creativity began to blossom.
Next, we added music and performing arts. We taught them stage directions and introduced them to their favorite thing – spike tape in bright neon colors. Artists from Elu Dance Company in Cleveland traveled to Malawi twice to teach technique and choreography. They inspired the kids by performing some of their own works, encouraging them to think outside the box and try new things.
By 2016, the arts group was 45 members strong and ready for a challenge – which we brought in the form of our stage show, The Story of Love. We had performed it with US artists in several nations, and once with a blended cast of US and a few Malawian artists, but never had we trained an all-national cast. And these were young people between the ages of 12-19 who had never attempted anything like this before.
But they were ready to accept the challenge. After months of long rehearsals and hard work, they were ready to perform The Story of Love. They first learned it in Chichewa, but later also learned the show in English and Swahili. Singing, dancing, acting, drumming – these talented young people performed in churches, schoolyards, soccer grounds, villages, and in the center of Dzaleka Refugee Camp. Audiences found it hard to believe children from a township could be disciplined enough to produce an artistic work with such excellence. These young performers made believers out of them.
Now they are training up the younger generation and creating their own performances. We look forward to what comes next!