WARREN LINDS
Augusto Boal in Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) proposes that knowledge acquired aesthetically is already, in itself, the beginning of a transformation. In the past few years the author has been using this approach with high school students and teachers to address issues of racism. Interactive theatre presentations were developed in intensive week-long workshops, or in shorter workshops over longer periods of time. The workshops explored the inter-related aspects of the participants becoming aware of their bodies, enabling them to use the body as a vocabulary of expression, creating theatre through verbal and non-verbal language, and using theatre to activate audiences. This article includes a critique of the author's own adaptation of TO and the underlying assumptions of its methodology, structure, and form of transformative theatrical creation. In particular, the author explores TO in the context of anti-racist pedagogy and the development of critical theatre/drama practitioners to address issues raised.
Dans son livre, Le Théâtre de l'opprimé, Augusto Boal propse que le théâtre est une forme de connaissance et, en soi, est le début d'une transformation. Pendant ces dernières années, l'auteur utilisait cette approche avec des étudiants et des enseignants de l'école sécondaire pour s'adresser au sujet de racisme. Les représentations théâtrales et interactives étaient développées au cours des ateliers intensifs, soit d'une semaine, soit d'une durée plus courte. Ces ateliers avaient comme but l'intention de prendre, aux participants, conscience du corps, de trouver un vocabulaire expressif du corps, de créer des langues théâtrales aussi bien verbales que non-verbales et d'animer les spectateurs. Cette communication contient une critique du praxis de l'auteur et des concepts fondamentaux de TO portant sur la méthodologie, la structure et la forme d'une création transformative théâtrale. L'auteur propose d'explorer deux contextes de TO particuliers: du côté de la pédagogie anti-raciste et du côté du développement des practiciens/animateurs du théâtre qui doivent s'adresser aux résultats soulevés.
There is change unfolding all around us -- always. It is the role of a Power Play to challenge the status quo -- to help us get through those barriers, both internal and external, that stop us from being happy. (Diamond 5)
In the last seven years I have been adapting the work of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) ("Theatre"). I learned about these methods as part of Power Plays workshops on using Forum Theatre, in a Canada-wide education program on racism in schools, organized by Headlines Theatre of Vancouver. I then worked alongside a Regina high school drama teacher facilitating week-long workshops with groups of high school students who reflected the diverse nature of the Regina community. I also gave several in-service and professional development workshops to teachers, and trained several of them in the use of the method in schools.
In this article I will examine the poetics of TO through the lens of my own training and application of the work with teachers and students in schools in Regina, Saskatchewan. This critique must, as Roman says, operate in a dialectic between critical theorizing and my own praxis of theatre addressing the issue of racism ("On the Ground"). In that way, I will re-interpret my own work in Power Plays and test that interpretation in the changes I would make to the process.
Roger Simon ("Pedagogy") points out that cultural tools provide us with ways to open up knowledge about the world and ourselves. He would evaluate a particular set of techniques by asking how they may challenge us to renew the prospect for our collective future.
I would like to examine the claims and actions of TO by addressing several questions in the context of anti-racism pedagogy:
This will mean examining the structure, form, and content of the theatrical process, including the workshop that often includes a Forum Theatre performance.
Theatre of the Oppressed/Power Plays
Headlines Theatre of Vancouver developed Power Plays, which is an integration of techniques of TO with a number of practitioners' discoveries using the work in a North American context. Power Plays is a journey that leads a group of people from not knowing one another to creating short plays about whatever concerns them as a group.
TO proposes that knowledge acquired aesthetically is already, in itself, the beginning of a transformation. Theatre is developed in intensive week-long workshops or in shorter workshops over longer periods of time. The workshops explore the inter-related aspects of becoming aware of our bodies, enabling us to use the body as vocabulary of expression, creating theatre through verbal and non-verbal language, and using theatre to activate audiences.
The books of Boal, books about Power Plays, and the workshop outlines are guidelines. Rules are meant to be broken and, as Boal has said in workshops I have attended, "anything that is not expressly forbidden is, by definition, possible." Thus the workshop process that culminates with a Forum Play is a series of judgement calls and intuitive choices.
Boal has classified workshop exercises in his books (based on a rekindling of the senses -- eg. seeing what we look at, listening to what we hear, etc.). The core of the drama workshop process includes developing an awareness of the body, demechanizing daily rituals, exploring the nature of theatre, investigating the nature of power, and the particular theme of the workshop. For example, using images or tableaux, participants might share a story of an experience that evokes certain themes or issues in other participants who are observing. We return to these recorded ideas in subsequent days of a workshop and ensure that they are part of the process of building the final play to be performed for participants' peers. We endeavour to build a deepened analysis of racism through letting images, feelings, and ideas "accumulate" inside the group. One day's work will affect the choices they make in focussing on the next day's work. In this way, collective understanding of an issue is built. These understandings are the participants' told through their own vocabulary.
An understanding of the complexity of the theme is developed. This will then be used in creating a play to be performed for participants' peers. Sometimes it is only at the end of a workshop process with the selection of a story and the performance of a Forum Play that one sees the connection of all this to the day-to-day life of the participants.
The Circle of Reality -- Developing and Using Forum Theatre
| Basis of Play ------------ | Rehearsal ----------- | Play developed for forum |
| ^ ^ | ^ ^ | |
| One story that symbolizes group's stories | Forum Theatre | |
| ^ ^ | ^ ^ | |
| Individual Stories | Action in the world | |
| ^ | ||
| Individual lives |
Power Plays workshops often end with a Forum Theatre performance. Forum Theatre is a short play in which a problem is shown in an unsolved form, to which the audience is invited to suggest and enact alternative ways of dealing with it. In trying to find solutions, we begin to have a better understanding of the problem, its causes, and its ramifications.
Audience members in a Forum Play are called "spect-actors"1 (spect -- to watch; actor -- to act). The problem is always the symptom of an oppression and generally involves visible oppressors and a protagonist who is oppressed. In its purest form, both actors and spect-actors will be people who are victims of the oppression under consideration; that is why they are able to offer alternative solutions, because they themselves are personally acquainted with the oppression. After one showing of the scene, it is shown again and follows exactly the same course until a member of the audience shouts "stop!", takes the place of the oppressed person, and tries to defeat the oppressors.
This is a very simplified description of Forum Theatre and, as befits a form of theatre which is now over twenty years old, there are many different manifestations of it in operation all over the world. It is used in schools, factories, day centres, community centres, with tenants' groups, homeless people, disabled people, people in ethnic minorities, etc. -- anywhere where there is a community which shares an oppression. Its aim, again, is to stimulate debate (in the form of action, not just words), to show alternatives and options, and to enable people "to become protagonists of their own lives." Audience members, as well as the participants in the drama, can then try out the options in their daily lives to alter the reality of their world.
The play that is developed is what Boal calls a "microcosm" of the whole of society under examination, treating every relation as political, with structures that must be uncovered and challenged. The play is a contest between spect-actors trying to bring about a different end (in which the cycle of oppression is broken) and actors making every possible effort to bring about its original end (in which the oppressed is beaten and the oppressors are triumphant).
TO and Power Plays are constantly being adapted and changed to meet changing contexts. As Frances Babbage, an English TO practitioner says, "the work cannot remain static, cannot be unproblematically used here, there and everywhere, but must necessarily be re-invented in order to remain lively and relevant" (2). This relevancy must also include paying attention to the goals and structure of the theatrical process. This involves the audience, actors, and the community they are living/working in.
Building Analysis through a Workshop Process
There is a constant tension in the work between spontaneous cultural production based on personal experience and the need for a process that is politically self-reflective. The emphasis on building trust and community and on the crafting of a play that will "work" theatrically are in constant tension with the necessity for a "framing" of the Forum play by the development of a political perspective within it. This analysis can be developed through the workshop process and requires a clarity by the facilitators with regards to the goals of doing theatre.
Structural issues don't necessarily have to be addressed by debate and discussion alone. Theatre has provided us with other methods of dialogue. Principal among them is the use of non-verbal images (tableaux) which sometimes say more than words can.
An image is an opportunity to create a constant interplay between interpreting and re-presenting reality from often conflicting standpoints and, as a tool of German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht's complex seeing of analysis (Roman "On the Ground" 158), is a set of practices which builds on generative knowledge, with rich ramifications in the lives of learners. This knowledge is both of the world and of the individual and can alter people's own consciousness of their own relationships and practices. The process objectifies a complete experience and asks how we might generalize from the particular, learn from the experiences of others, and re-apply those lessons to produce different outcomes in our own lives. An implicit belief is conveyed that outcomes and futures are not predetermined; we are simultaneously the products and creators of our own history. In this way we can consider the concrete obstacles that prevent people from changing their circumstances even when they may be unhappy with them and want to achieve some "ideal dream."
This process was illustrated in one play developed by a high school student group I worked with in 1993. The result of the accumulation of images and stories from the workshop was a multi-levelled look at prejudice and harassment, showing the potential of the process to get beyond simple cause-and-effect theatre.
The story came from a young First Nations woman. She had been verbally and physically harassed by young white men in a car while waiting for a bus. Incorporating a white woman as a bystander and four whites in a car, the Forum play the students produced created a world of domination, linking the exploitation of the aboriginal with the exploitation of women. This was a world containing what audience members called a "cascade of oppression" with all sorts of put-downs by characters of each other in the car and the egging on of a particularly shy boy to go harass the aboriginal woman.
The Forum interventions were important in getting at some of the issues around sexual and racial harassment. Even more important were the comments shared by the actors after the play was finished, which pointed out how harassment becomes "normal" and how different forms of harassment for different things become "normal" so that racial harassment becomes permissible. They also recognized this form of harassment in their own families and were trying to do something about it. One of the problems this addresses is how, in a play about racism, white students can get involved, but from standpoints other than that of "colour."
Forum Theatre works best when there is a homogeneity within the audience and the actors come from the community for which they will perform. I saw a play in Ontario, facilitated by David Diamond of Headlines Theatre, where the audience and actors were composed primarily of residents of a public housing project. The Forum play was a powerful one to watch, as the links between why the residents were living there and issues of poverty, family violence, and unemployment were clearly made.
Often, in preparing and carrying out a play, we engage both ourselves and the audience in what I would call "ahistorical sympathy," which involves sympathy with a particular character without taking into account the historical and systemic nature of the oppressive relationships affecting that character.
I recently saw a poster which stated "Building harmony in diversity." This ignores the fact that our world is something that has been forged in history through conflict and that those outside the norm (non-Europeans, non-English speakers, non-males, non-heterosexuals, non-Christians, etc.) generally are the losers, the invisible, the "other," the different. "Celebrating Diversity" becomes tranquillizing medicine to those of us who haven't fit the images of the winners.
Although students from high school are a homogeneous population in terms of their place in the education system, they are heterogeneous in terms of race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and ability. Attention must be paid even more to these aspects in the development of plays and the workshop process itself to ensure that the politics of difference are taken into account. This calls, as South African academic Loren Kruger points out, "for the unflinching acknowledgement of difference not merely as diversity but as the differential relations of and to power" (160).
How can this analysis be incorporated into the theater workshop and Forum performance? One method I have found is to critique the characters in, and structure of, Forum Theatre plays in the context of anti-racist pedagogy.
The Cast of Characters in Forum Theatre
There are three basic types of characters in a Forum play who are in conflict with each other over a particular problem. The play is a series of events where these characters show the problem and take (or don't take) actions to resolve it. The goal of the play is to enable the audience to see other alternatives to choices made. What layers the play is seeing not only the protagonist (the oppressed) in struggle with the antagonist (the oppressor), but also the other characters (powerless observers) in connected conflicts.
The Oppressor
In my Power Plays work I emphasize the importance of playing the oppressor. Even in the problematic process of the emphasis on changing behaviours and attitudes which the workshop has concentrated on, the oppressor role can get at an understanding of white privilege. For the sake of safety we emphasize to the people playing the oppressor that they are not playing themselves (although there are elements within us that we must draw on to play these characters). We emphasize that the success of the process depends on the oppressors being real. If the oppressor isn't real then the investigation of ways to break the oppression isn't real.
One of the helpful metaphors Boal gave in a workshop I attended was that a character is like an iceberg or a shark. In performance, the oppressor shows only small elements of his/her character and then provides a means, in Forum interventions, to explore what is below the surface (the majority of the character). I would like to further explore, in my practice, what the structures behind the oppressor are and the historical reasons why they act this way. There are tremendous possibilities here to explore the idea that racism is not an aberration done by evil or ignorant people but that there is a whole structure supporting it. This means concentrating on what Roman calls "studying up" in order to understand racial privilege ("White" 78). In exploring these elements in a workshop, I feel the issue of racism can be probed more deeply than before.
The Oppressed
TO is based on the assumption that the oppressed are victims...(our) work is based on the belief that each and every one of us has capacity to effect social change. (Johnson 45, quoting Canadian theatre director Ruth Smillie's criticism of TO)
The entire foundation of TO and Forum Theatre is based on the idea of learning through theatre how to overcome oppression. This grew out of Boal's work performing before communities and groups with similar backgrounds represented by the actors. Boal makes the point that unless I, as an audience member, can really identify with your oppression, how can I replace you? In this case, if identification isn't there, any action becomes advice or moral teaching, not an exploration of liberation and empowerment.
The original work was developed in Latin America where the issues were posed, for example, in terms of landlords and peasants. Yet even in Brazil, with a definite power imbalance between white and black, the issue of race was never at the forefront. Multi-racial audiences will also change the dynamic.
Babbage asks us:
I was in a workshop in March 1996 where a story was told about the harassment of Chicano youth in a midwestern American city. The witness of the incident, a white Jewish Uruguayan woman, shared the story and then played the Chicano youth in the play we constructed. When I suggested to the facilitators that it would be far more useful, in this context, to explore the role of the witness/storyteller (especially since the participants in the workshop were almost all white), they responded that Boal always focusses on the oppressed and this participant defined the oppressed as the Chicano youth. In our work in Regina high schools we don't place such restrictions, and explore the role of the witness or observer and why they did or did not act. This "powerless observer" has often connected with a large number of audience members.
"Powerless" Observers
The idea of the "powerless observer" came up in implementing TO in Canada. In workshops with high school students across the country, facilitator David Diamond said that there was a constant -- the person who watched an incident occur and did nothing. This is what he came to call "powerless or passive observer." Using exercises of standing beside characters in an image that participants identify with, we have found that this usually (at least, in terms of the starting point of what students admit) represents the majority of the white students in the workshop group. This is because, Diamond proposes:
often Caucasian participants have not been direct victims of racism. How do they do this work if they sense that within the working rules we lay out they have never been oppressed? The answer came from the students themselves. Many times participants have been present in a moment of oppression involving race and for any number of reasons (peer pressure and fear being big ones) did nothing although they knew that what was happening was wrong. They became "powerless observers" and we allow them to use this status as oppressed in the Power Play work. We have found that including their experiences has been of great value in opening the issue up in what is very often a silenced atmosphere. (30)
It is significant that the term has been called "powerless" observer when in fact, through Forum, we discovered that this is where "power" to change lies. These characters are the ones with the most potential to explore and disrupt the simplicity of good and bad, powerful and powerless. This opens up the process to more complexity and uncertainty.
Boal, in his diagrams of theatre forum construction, called this character an ally of the powerful and/or the powerless. We can combine the idea of acting through the powerless observer and the idea of the allies of power to explore more deeply structural change and transformation. There seems to me to be a possibility here to explore questions of why we do or don't act. This is made all the more possible through Boal's development of the Rainbow of Desire 2 work, which moves from individual stories to a group story. But instead of using the exercises to explore collective wills and desires as he does, I would like to use them to explore the origins and perpetuation of structural racism.
The Role of Whites as "Powerless Observers"
As a "white" facilitator, I am interested in the role of whites in dealing with racism. A white high school drama teacher in Regina, with whom I worked in Power Plays, reported to me in 1995 that often his students would wait for aboriginal students or students of colour to share an instance of racism. There is an inherent assumption here that only those subjected to racism know about it. When racism's victims don't offer a story, the issue is dropped.
This not only perpetuates looking at them as victims who must be helped, but also leads to defensiveness and silencing of the roles of whites. Even if we acknowledge that racism is present in society and its structures, as well as in individual acts, we get into the bind of questioning what we/I, as whites/as a white man, can do. There is vacillation between cynicism about the potential for change and guilt about whites' own role.
Ellison quotes Gayetri Spivak addressing what she calls the need for her students to choose between liberal guilt and "curative labour":
I will have in an undergraduate class, let's say a young, white male student, politically-correct, who will say: "I am only a bourgeois white male, I can't speak." I say to them: "Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?" Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very deterministic position -- since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak. (370)
Roman also raises important questions about what educators ought to do with that moment when white students not only recognize that racism exists at levels deeper than the expression of individual prejudices but also feel ashamed to be implicated in its structural practice. These moments are opportunities where it is appropriate to explore what it means to be "advantaged" with respect to "race" and to find out how we might act together in confronting our privilege. The initial questions are how are we privileged now, how we have been privileged over time, and why haven't we acted to do anything about it?
I recognize that whites benefit from white privilege, "an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cashing in each day" (McIntosh 8). I also know from experience that there are differences in the amount of privilege among whites. In fact, different groups of whites at times in the past have been designated "black" (eg. Jews, Irish). There are also differences in treatment based on gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, etc.
In the workshop process everything is directed towards finding stories that are representative of the participants. Within the exercises we ask for summary images, we try to find stories that resonate with everyone, stories that symbolize, as much as possible, people's experience. With a heterogenous group, it quickly becomes evident that each person's location within the stories is different. And these differences are not all on an equal footing. There is a dominant, white male, middle class voice that is expressed through stories. This voice is often privileged and rarely questioned.
I feel practitioners haven't concentrated enough on difference as a source of learning about inequalities of power, or haven't acknowledged difference as the initial basis for working together. How can we take the fact of difference as the underpinning of anti-racist practice? How can we enable the body to express difference through drama? We need to move towards the idea of what Cameron McCarthy calls non-synchronous identity. Non-synchrony locates our individual and collective interests by race, class, and gender which are in constant movement with one another. To only talk about dealing with racism as a problem related to our identities as white, black, or whatever, doesn't deal with the other parts of our identities; it leads us away from the possibility of forging alliances and maintaining a separation of ourselves from each other based on unresolvable difference.
An exploration of Peter Taubman's idea of "registers of identity" could add to an understanding of a different approach. According to Taubman, these registers (autobiographical, fictional, and communal), "exist in dialectical tension with each other. They supplement and elaborate on one another and at the same time problematize one another" (298). We need to include ourselves as teachers in stories of racism along with the idea of differentiated histories of whites; we need to get beyond prejudice reduction as the primary goal of anti-racism work. As Roman says, we need to look at how we benefit from "conferred racial privilege" ("White" 84), as well as from what is invisible in the workings of racism.
Confronting our own white privilege can lead to discovering ways to work in alliance with the victims of racism. As Roman points out:
we are in these stories as whites so learning when to move over to permit the speech of those who have been silenced and when to speak against racism in alliance with others would mark a profoundly postcolonial rupture in the text of curriculum theorizing and pedagogy. ("White" 84-85)
One way is to use white privilege as the subject of an analysis of racism so that white students begin to look at actions they can take. This shift in perspective would help the Power Play process immensely, as the analysis shifts from how can we help those who are suffering, to examining how our own position benefits from this suffering, and finally to how we can address this.
Julie Salverson and Lib Spry are Canadian women who have been TO practitioners for over 10 years. In two separate chapters of Playing Boal, an examination of the techniques and application of TO, they describe the reaction of white community workers and educators. Both facilitators noticed that when the task was to examine participants' own lives in terms of oppression, they were either unable or unwilling to share or to identify what might be oppressing them. Participants defined the oppressed as the "other," the victims, the passive receivers, the people that must be helped. Salverson calls these participants "enablers" who, she says, are fighting their own oppression through someone else's struggle.
Spry found a duality around oppression in her work, with some people saying they were never oppressed, and others defining everything that happened to them as oppressive. They made no attempt to define their own particular place in a power structure. Nor did this happen in the Power Plays training program I participated in (also described by Salverson 1994). When it became clear that the group could not function because of the effect of its diversity and differences, the people of colour asked to split the group for a couple of days. Some of the white participants and facilitators objected saying, "how can we work on racism here or in our own communities if racism's "victims" aren't present to tell us about it?" Hidden within that comment was resistance to, and fear about, the idea that whites could work on issues of racism as whites. Eventually there was some challenging of attitudes amongst the white participants. By that time, though, the emotional toll of the problem in the group meant that people had little energy to deal with it.
And...Who's Invisible(d)?
Two years ago I was part of a theatre production on issues of abuse of older adults in institutional care. When we did our research, we observed that the people directly implicated were nurses, administrators, family members, and nurse's aides. When we constructed the play, which was designed along a Forum Theatre structure, these were the only characters we used. However, in our research we had noticed that the nurse's aides, the lowest end of the staff hierarchy, were almost all women of colour (mostly from Africa). One member of our group, an immigrant from Turkey, played the newest nurse in the play. This was more coincidence (because of the type of role required and the capability of the particular actors) than planned, and the play certainly didn't delve into issues of the lack of power and the perspectives of the immigrant workers in the system. We had noticed, though, the problem faced by the women of colour who were aides and the treatment they faced by the higher staff, residents, and families alike, with one instance of a resident refusing care from a Ghanaian nurse's aide because of her "difference."
There were many parts of the system that were invisible -- doctors, the government bureaucracy, etc. The lack of facilities to provide appropriate services for seniors from outside the Euro-Canadian world was also left out.
I share this example because I was able to reflect on these things through my examination of the issues of race, identity, and location, and my own experiences with the system as the family member of an elderly resident in care. Not all of these issues could be included in a play, which was about the abuse of residents through neglect or through the way in which the institutional system operates. But in developing a workshop plan for using the video of the play that we produced, I have included these often hidden and ignored questions.
The above example illustrates how particular issues can be linked to the idea of multiple identities within a particular character. This can also be done through looking at the dramatic form Forum takes in addressing issues of power by playing with tension and conflict.
Lights!...Styles!...Conflict!
The thing that prompts us to go to the theatre is conflict, combat; we want to see mad people and fanatics, thieves and murderers. And, I accept, a smattering of good souls, just enough to set off the evil in all its glory. We hunger for the strange, the abnormal....If the actor can become a sick person, the sick person can in turn become a healthy actor. (Boal "Rainbow" 36-37)
There is a need to incorporate the idea of different identities and locations in theatre about these issues. One way is to move away from the idea of "one voice." Alan Hancock, an Australian drama professor, has described his dissatisfaction with a lot of youth and community theatre he has seen over the last few years. Such theatre "glosses over disharmony, suppresses tensions, ambiguity and complexity and blands out differences in order to present a tightly ordered and unified whole" (19). A polyphony of voices is lost and avoided. Theatre becomes simplistic and contrived as scenes become something to be looked at, with the play calling up no imagination or involvement by the audience. Hancock could have been referring to a lot, but not all, of Forum Theatre I have seen.
James Howe takes a Buddhist approach to Shakespeare and, looking at the Merchant of Venice, comments that the play seems to encourage us to make choices between good and bad characters, and then makes these choices impossible by making the characters more complicated. In this process we are drawn:
into experiencing this dissolution (of normal beliefs) ourselves....We in the audience are forced to see, then, that any interpretation is merely wish-fulfilment. This radical shift in awareness, in turn, undermines our sense of ourselves; it is the prerequisite for any change in us that might evade habitual, socially induced patterns of thought. (23)
This involves moving away from the linear duality of "oppressor is bad; oppressed are good" and towards dialogical performance (Conquergood), which is a more complex portrayal of power, with conflict between people with different identities. Such a performative stance would involve workshop exercises that are multi-layered and multi-levelled ways of examining a theme through our bodies, our senses, our feelings, and our voices. There are ways to devise a theatre that helps the audience question what is the "norm" and what they can do about it. This doesn't mean that theatre has to be inaccessible and obscure, denying participants and audiences alike any engagement as they try to puzzle out what is happening on stage. It does mean that theatre must use tension to help us question the normative and dominant culture.
The tools are available to do this in the development of the Forum play through a workshop process that uses the concepts of disruptive (Simon) or interrogative (McCarthy) text. We can take an initial "draft" of the play, deconstruct and critique it, and then create a new play with new images and text. This would involve creating dialogical, multi-vocal and metaphoric text in drama that takes on stereotypes through style, image, and script. I saw one example of this in 1994 in a Forum performance of Fremd (Stranger/Foreigner) by Welt-Theatre of Cologne, Germany. The play was about Adam, a black man, being sent to Earth and facing difficulties in/on entering the planet. This enabled interactive theatre on racist immigration policies.
We could also use rehearsal exercises to question our own views and perceptions. For example, there is a set of techniques for preparation of the Forum play that enables the actors (and the director) to investigate their character and/or the style of the play. Some examples are Play to the Deaf (where the actors play out a scene without making a sound, yet not miming); Analytic Rehearsal of Style (where the actors play the piece in a different genre); Silence on Set -- Action! (any idea anyone, including observers, suggests must be tried in rehearsal without discussion); Zoom In/Zoom Out (where missing elements are added or focussed on). These rehearsal exercises are ways, theatrically and within the workshop process, of presenting these structures/people that could clarify without simplifying their power and reveal the hidden wiring of the system. They can deepen the analysis of the theme of the play and often have generated new material. However, usually due to time constraints, I have not always incorporated these exercises this consciously in an analytical development of the themes of the play.
How can this also be done within theatrical conventions such as plot and character? Mark Pizzato, a scholar on German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht, says that Boal defines just two possible reactions to oppression -- submission and subversion. Using this bipolar formula, his goal is to change submission to subversion by lighting a fire in the actor and the audience. Consequently all the tension and conflict in productions are designed to get the audience member to intervene on behalf of the oppressed.
If the objective of Forum Theatre is to develop alternative ways of dealing with situations off-stage, then those alternatives have to come out of some method of collaboration which must begin to be developed on-stage. I think there is a way for this to occur within the context of Boal's work.
Spry feels Boal uses, in his outline of TO, the very structure of Western forms of cathartic theatre that he critiques. His model has a simplistic use of conflict between protagonist and antagonist, with each central character having potential allies and supporters. She asks:
by using the TO model (which allows power-over to dominate all the relationships we present) am I not using the very system we are trying to change?....Are there ways to adapt this structure so that people who have mutual needs but are defined as antagonistic to one another, can find they could become allies? (183)
Spry is now trying to develop ways to use TO to "circumnavigate" the structures of power-over that hold people in place. She finds, as I do, the TO model as being a useful and effective way to identify structures of power, but limited in finding other ways to see human relationships other than conflict or opposition rather than compatibility. Quoting Starhawk, she says power from within is linked to mysteries that awaken our deepest abilities and potential. "Power-with" is social power, the influence we wield. In Starhawk's terms, "power-with" is dependent on personal responsibility and our own creativity. In that sense, "power-with" is more akin to the idea of the compassionate action of Buddhism than with the power metaphor used in critical pedagogy.
Spry sees her role as "midwife" to the process, with a minimum of interpretation and a maximum of flexibility, and structures plays so there are, for example, multiple protagonists that potentially could collaborate together around particular themes. She also has worked with plays where a particular antagonist is also a protagonist relating to someone else higher up in the hierarchy while being an antagonist to someone lower down.
Such strategies can help us understand and acknowledge differences, yet, through the opening up of possibilities for characters to collaborate through Forum, still find ways to work together. Forum then becomes a place to create a world of possibilities, a world that "could" extend beyond the stage. Rather than preparing actors to resist interventions, interventions could become sites to "investigate collaboration" and new relationships between potential allies.
David Diamond of Headlines Theatre in Vancouver is exploring these ideas as well. Retitling his interactive theatre process Theatre for Living, he has moved away from asking what people do not want, to asking them what they do want. He says:
the language is just developing....We move away from problem solving and into creating and there's a very different energy attached to that...and the language is changing -- it really is in flux right now...the only way to figure it out is to do it. (Smith 93)
Conclusion
All the books written by Augusto Boal on Theatre of the Oppressed, and all the workshops he and hundreds of others have given around the world over the past 25 years, have led to an evolving praxis. This praxis depends on the situations and contexts where the work is emerging in-action.
Theatre of the Oppressed praxis will change as those involved in it change. The circle of reality is moving...and changing...as I continue to explore these ideas in my own practice.
NOTES
1 Spect-actor is a word coined by Augusto Boal
to describe an active spectator in the audience who takes part in the action
in any way. In Forum Theatre presentations, this most often means replacing
a character on the stage at certain moments of the play. Warm-up exercises
are done with the audience before the play begins.
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2 The Rainbow of Desire grew out of Boal's work in various
European countries where he found people sharing problems of loneliness,
alienation, and suicide. It is an overlap of theatre and therapy as it
enables us to look at both external and internal oppressions that are linked
to wider structures of power. In this work, he uses the metaphor of the
"cops being in our heads" but the "barracks are outside" to help us link
structural and internal oppressions.
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