2: BEYOND COMMUNITY THEATRE DEAD-END PRACTICE THROUGH THE AYE GBEDE TEMPLATE

Community Theatre remains an important participatory communication approach for grassroots development in Africa. However, a number of Theatre for Development (TfD) interventions terminate after theatrical performance and post-performance dialogue, limiting their capacity to translate community participation into sustainable development action. This paper examines how the integration of Participatory Learning and Action (PLA), Participatory Action Research (PAR), Community Theatre, and Community Action Planning (CAP) can extend TfD beyond awareness creation towards implementation, monitoring, and community ownership. Drawing on the thirteen-day Aye Gbede Community Theatre Workshop conducted in Kogi State, Nigeria, in January 2016, the study adopts a qualitative participatory case-study approach involving community entry, stakeholder engagement, social and resource mapping, transect walks, historical timelines, problem-tree analysis, pairwise ranking, theatrical performance, participatory dialogue, and Action Planning. Findings reveal that community members collectively identified and prioritised three development challenges, which include lack of a functional market, inadequate electricity supply, and poor road infrastructure. Beyond dramatising these concerns, participants developed Community Action Plans specifying implementation activities, stakeholder responsibilities, resource requirements, and monitoring mechanisms. Building on these findings, the paper conceptualises the Dead-End Phenomenon as the methodological discontinuity occurring when Community Theatre ends with dialogue without progressing to organised action. It consequently proposes the Beyond Dead-End Community Theatre (BDECT) Framework, which connects participatory research, dialogue, Action Planning, implementation, monitoring, and community ownership within a continuous development cycle. The paper argues that Community Theatre can transcend awareness creation to function as an implementation-oriented methodology for participatory governance and sustainable grassroots development.