Participatory theatre
for personal and social transformation, with a focus on China’s migrant worker population.
Consulting programmes
for multinationals and other NGOs.
13 years of love, not fear
Hua Dan was founded in 2004 through participatory theatre workshops held at the Migrant Women’s Club in downtown Beijing. Our first workshops explored issues that rural women experienced moving into Beijing and touched on marital relationships, family dynamics and challenges in the workplace. The workshops provided a way for women to share their stories, come together with others, and build the self-confidence, leadership and self-esteem necessary to take advantage of and overcome the challenges of migration.
Later, we started training these women to use theatre with other women and children. Since our inception, we have trained ten women who have gone on to work with over 30,000 migrant workers across China. We are now expanding across China, as well as internationally through our sister organisation Scheherazade.
Hua Dan programmes
Children’s Education
Women’s Empowerment
Hand Made in China
Hua Dan programmes focus on three main areas. Our workshops for programmes such as Children’s Education and Women’s Empowerment run from one day to once a week for twelve weeks. Hand Made in China is Hua Dan’s theatre troupe which performs internationally.
Hua Dan helps
Hua Dan’s workshops are based on the pioneering work of Augusto Boal and his Forum Theatre techniques. We also incorporate Theatre-in-Education, Improvisation, Playback Theatre and many other participatory theatre forms.
Each workshop starts with theatre games designed to build trust and start developing confidence, creativity and teamwork. We then use ‘frozen pictures’ as a way to identify issues we will work on in the workshop, issues that participants themselves have identified as a need. We then turn these frozen pictures into scenes that enable participants to practise solutions to the problems they face and develop new skills to deal with those challenges. We seek not just awareness around a problem someone faces, but genuine and long-lasting behaviour change to empower people to take leadership in their lives and in the lives of their communities. We almost always finish each workshop or project with a performance in the community.
See more on Hua Dan’s impact here.
Help Hua Dan
Interested in contributing? Here are the ways you can help:
- Share more about Hua Dan with your friends. We will be launching a new blog soon and have a quarterly newsletter in English. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or find us on WeChat for updates in Chinese (scan the QR code to the right).
- Hire Hua Dan. Our corporate programmes stretch the imagination and allow for people and teams within organisations to better communicate and work more effectively. Hear what Mark Williams, Managing Partner of DLA Piper China had to say about their experience hiring Hua Dan.
- Donate to Hua Dan. We would not be where we are today without the generous support of foundations, corporates/organisations, and individuals.
- Volunteer with Hua Dan. We’ve worked with some fantastic volunteers over the years and are always eager to work with folks who believe in the transformational power of theatre. Please contact us and tell us how you see yourself contributing to Hua Dan in the time you have with the skills you have.
And of course we’d also love to hear from you if you have any inspiration to share, are keen to learn more about how to get involved in our work, or just to say hi. Please get in touch!
Hua Dan – using participatory theatre as a tool for personal and social transformation.
