The African Research and Educational Puppetry Programme, now The arepp:Theatre for Life Trust, was founded in 1987 by Maishe Maponya, Oupa Mthimkulu, Ann Wanless and Gary Friedman as a community based educational trust, with the aim of using theatre and puppetry to provide social life-skills education to disadvantaged communities. Recognising at that time, that HIV and AIDS posed a substantial threat that had not fully been realised, arepp:Theatre for Life took to the road in 1988 after an eight month preparatory research period with its first long-term project Puppets Against AIDS, an educational puppet show about HIV and AIDS, with the aim of taking the HIV/AIDS message to the people in the street - quite literally.

In the early days, Puppets Agianst AIDS used giant grey puppets to tell its story. Later, glove puppets replaced the giant puppets for ease of transport and performance.

The phenomenal success of, need and demand for this type of social education in South Africa soon created a demand bigger than just the one show, and arepp:Theatre for Life became synonymous with Puppets Against AIDS - the performance of travelling, thirty-five minute, adult-AIDS puppet shows, with a condom demonstration and a facilitated Question and Answer discussion.

"Dr. Mike" explains how to use a condom after a performance of "Puppets Against AIDS". 1989

arepp:Theatre for Life was unique in its approach, in the way that it travelled to the communities, and in the belief that simple dissemination of information about the disease was insufficient to bring the statistics under control. Attitudes and beliefs had to be changed regarding the key personal issues that AIDS highlights - the notions of relationships, sex, gender and sexuality - and the theatre approach allowed these very personal issues to be addressed and examined without shame, stigma, condemnation or taboo.

arepp:Theatre for Life soon built a reputation for good quality, alternative supplementary education, and the demand caused the Puppets Against AIDS shows to expand in content and focus - into schools and youth focussed community organisations, and into other, similar areas of social concern, focussing primarily on the broad areas of life-skills education and sexuality in the home languages of the community and audience.

arepp:Theatre for Life's early work in high schools used life sized puppets. "Look Before You Leap". Soweto 1994

In 1994 arepp:Theatre for Life opened its first touring High Schools HIV/AIDS show in the Look Before You Leap series aimed at 14 – 23 year olds, and began work on developing and expanding the Adult show, now called the Check Your Mate series, to deal with domestic violence, abuse, gender issues, living with HIV and rape.

arepp:Theatre for Life has since branched into life-skills education for all age groups in schools, with three other series’ of shows - About Us series aimed at the 11 - 13 year olds in 1996, and the No Monkey Business and Monkey Tales series for the 6 - 10 year olds, and the 3- 5 year olds respectively in 1997.

The content of the shows has also been expanded to focus on other issues of social concern besides HIV/AIDS; the central and crucial issues of sexuality, life-skills, empowerment, self-image, gender perception and self-esteem. There are now between three and seven different shows dealing with the different aspects of sexuality - abuse, rape, pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, STI’s, relationships, homosexuality, sex, protection, and choice - in each of the age-group focuses - some 16 different plays in all.