The Sunday News
Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
FOR the first time in a long and storied career, veteran playwright, TV and radio director Raisedon Baya had to force his actors to “play by the book” while on set.
Baya was in the middle of shooting four radio skits about gender-based violence, child abuse and access to contraceptives and healthcare for women when he noticed that his actors were not following the rules about social distancing.
“Normally when you’re working with artistes it’s a bunch of people that know each other. For them it’s now difficult to enforce the rules of social distancing because they will get there and suddenly want to touch each other and greet each other because they haven’t seen each other in a while,” he told Sunday Life.
While most artistes are not working around the world because of the shutdown, Baya and a few others found their skills needed last week when they were commissioned by a Non-Governmental Organisation and the Ministry of Health and Child Care for the skits.
“Once on set, they found that the rules of acting that they know have changed. For the actors, it all did not make sense.
“We got off the wrong foot because people think that touching with a part of your arm or feet is acceptable. All forms of contact are wrong and that was a difficulty we had impressing on the artistes.
“If you say don’t touch me, they take it as an insult, yet you’ll be following the rules. So, I was moving around with hand sanitiser and all of them thought it was a joke.
“I think the problem with the coronavirus right now is that we haven’t seen the face of it and most people think that it will go away once the lockdown is over. I think maybe weeks from now we will realise how serious this is and by that time it may be too late,” he said.
For Baya, what he saw on set was not as alarming as what he had seen when he collected his cast around their households.
“The artistes the moment they met they were sitting together and holding each other’s phones and whatnot. I think this is a microcosm of what is happening out there right now.
“If you call certain relatives, they’ll tell you that they’re busy visiting so and so and when you ask why they’re doing so they’ll tell you this is my relative.
“But the virus doesn’t care about all that so it’s a problem.
We had to collect our actors from various points in the townships and what I saw outside there shocked me. People are interacting as they are in normal times. It’s pretty scary,” he said.
