THE INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY IN CANADA: CATALYST THEATRE'S ITS ABOUT TIME

Alan Filewod

It's About Time, pièce interactive du 'Catalyst Theatre', créée pour des prisonniers, représente un developpement très important dans le théâtre politique du Canada anglophone. Dans ses principes théâtraux, la pièce ressemble au 'théâtre forum' du régisseur brésilien Augusto Boal, mais le théâtre interventionniste du 'Catalyst Theatre' s'est développé indépendemment des formes parallèles étrangères. Cette analyse de It's About Time compare les techniques du 'Catalyst' au plus célèbre modele du théâtre interactif de Boal.

Catalyst Theatre's 1982 production of It's About Time, an interactive performance for prison inmates, was a major development in political theatre in English Canada. In its theatrical techniques, the play resembled the 'theatre forum' of the Brazilian director Augusto Boal, but Catalyst's form of interventionist theatre developed independently of parallel forms elsewhere. An analysis of It's About Time compares Catalyst's techniques with Boal's more well-known model of interactive political theatre.

In the summer of 1982, Edmonton's Catalyst Theatre began work on a collectively created 'participational theatre event' for inmate audiences in penal institutions in Alberta. 1 In its theatrical principles and its attempt to use theatre as an analytical forum, It's About Time stands as a major development in Canadian political theatre.

The dominant tradition of political theatre in English-speaking Canada derives from two sources. Its dramatic roots may be found in a genre of didactic historical drama that originated in the nineteenth century, with such plays as Curzon's Laura Secord and Mair's Tecumseh, and which continues to the present day in the works of such dramatists as Rick Salutin, Herschel Hardin and Sharon Pollock. The theatrical principles of this dominant tradition may be traced back to the workers' theatre movement of the 1930s and the subsequent tradition of radical redefinition of the process of theatrical creation. This tradition includes George Luscombes' introduction of group theatre techniques and leftist politics in the 1950s at Toronto Workshop Productions, and the alternative theatre movement of the 1970s, with its emphases on collective creation, documentary investigation and nationalist politics.

Deriving from these sources, the political theatre has encompassed a spectrum of political engagement, from the critical politics of socially committed playwrights, to the agitprop activism of companies such as the Mummers Troupe of Newfoundland. In general, political theatre in English Canada can be characterized by an emphasis on the ideological values of the text, historical revisionism, group collaboration, regional identity and grass-roots populism. These features are as well characteristic of the alternative theatre movement as a whole, of which the political theatre has been an inextricable part.2

It is in the context of this ideological tradition that the work of Catalyst Theatre may be seen as a significant development. It's About Time exemplifies a recent tradition of political performance which is essentially non-literary. Instead of examining political subjects, the performances in this tradition intervene directly in political or community situations to bring actors and audience together in a process of shared analysis.

Catalyst Theatre was not the first to explore interactive techniques in performance; an important antecedent can be found in the adoption of techniques from the British Theatre in Education movement and the plays of Brian Way, most notably by the Globe Theatre in the late 1960s, and by numerous theatres for young audiences (including Catalyst) since. The principles of audience interaction were first formulated by J.L. Moreno in the 1930s, when he adapted his techniques of psychodrama to social issues. Moreno's sociodrama enables the spectator to enter the staged action to test his responses to 'intergroup relations of collective ideologies' under the clinical supervision of a therapist.3 Sociodrama has been practised in Canada by various institutes of sociometry, but has had little apparent effect on the theatre.

Despite these antecedents, Catalyst appears to have been the first professional theatre in English-speaking Canada to develop its own form of interactive theatre, and to apply it to community issues. In Catalyst's work the interaction of audience and performers is necessary to both the performance and the political function of the play.

Although the theatrical form invented by Catalyst is unique in English Canada, it has notable parallels elsewhere. In Québec, with its separate tradition of political theatre, interactive theatre has had a longer history, beginning in the work of Théâtre Euh! and continuing with its successors, most notably Théâtre Sans Detour.

The most important parallel however is that of the "forum theatre" of the Paris-based Brazilian director Augusto Boal, whose procedures for interactive theatre are outlined in two books, Theatre of the Oppressed and Stop: C'est Magique!. 4 Boal's influence has been felt more deeply in Québec than in English Canada; even as Catalyst was working on It's About Time, the company had the opportunity to compare its techniques with Boal's when Théâtre Sans Detour brought its theatre forum production of Pour le meilleur ou pour la pire to Edmonton's Bread and Roses festival in 1983. That meeting showed clearly that Catalyst's techniques, while closely related to Boal's, had developed along notably different lines. In the course of describing the conditions that led to the unique features of It's About Time, this paper will suggest how those features resemble - and depart from - Boal's more well-known model of interactive political theatre.

Catalyst Theatre had its origins in 1977, when students working under David Barnet, a professor of improvisational theatre at the University of Alberta, created a cautionary documentary drama about alcoholism called Drinks Before Dinner. A series of sketches based on real models, the play toured Alberta under the sponsorship of the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Commission. AADAC requested a follow-up show the next year, and on that basis Barnet founded Catalyst Theatre Society in 1978. Following the appointment of Jan Selman as artistic director in 1979, Catalyst won quick acceptance in Alberta's social services community, and by 1980 was performing a full season of plays commissioned by social agencies, as well as regular public performances. With an annual budget that eventually exceeded half-a-million dollars (with almost no arts council subventions), Catalyst developed as a major employer of young actors in Edmonton. To quote a company newsletter:

A Catalyst project always involves some kind of an in-depth relationship with the audience for which it is created - through research, discussion, direct participation and pre-and/or post production activities. Actors have worked in virtually every setting imaginable - on the streets, in group homes, school gymnasiums, classrooms, hospitals and, occasionally, a traditional theatre.5

From the beginning, Catalyst explored ways of involving the audience directly in the performance. In Drinks Before Dinner and The Stress Show (1978) the actors 'justified' their dramatic actions by answering questions from the audience in character. By the standards that the company later developed, these justifications were limited in their potential to draw the audience into a critical analysis of the issue at hand. They challenged the conventional relations of actor and audience, but they did not permit a genuine synthesis of experience. The audience could respond to the problems depicted in the play, but the scene in turn could not integrate those responses into the play. In that sense, analysis stopped short of dialectic. Catalyst's search for a form that would enable the audience actually to change the dramatic action and so test solutions to social problems resulted in the 1980 production of Stand Up For Your Rights, developed with mentally handicapped audiences. It was in the attempt to solve the problems of involving the mentally handicapped in an improvisational performance that Catalyst invented a theatrical technique identical in its premises to Boal's forum theatre.

Boal's 'poetics of the oppressed' began as an attempt to introduce the ideas of the radical educator Paulo Freire into popular theatre. Working in the barrios of Brazil, Boal shared Freire's ideas of adult education and social change, which posit that an oppressed group is denied the ability to determine the conditions of its existence. Like Freire, Boal followed a Marxist analysis in which art and education are processes of 'codifying' and 'decoding' reality as a means of 'conscientization' (the accepted translation of Freire's conscientizacao). 6 Boal begins his analysis with a critique of Aristotle, in whose Poetics he finds a recipe for a 'powerful purgative system, the objective of which was to eliminate all that is not commonly accepted, including the revolution, before it takes place.' 7 Boal argues that his ideas complete the critique of Aristotle initiated by Brecht. If Brecht suggests that the spectator 'delegates power to the [dramatic] character but reserves the right to think for himself,' in Boal's forum theatre the spectator himself 'assumes the protagonic role, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change - in short trains himself for real action.' 8

In Boal's forum theatre, the actors create a scenario in consultation with a 'target' audience. The forum play, which describes a typical situation of oppression common to the audience, is played once in its entirety. It is then repeated, and the audience is invited to step into the action to show how the main character might have better dealt with the problem. The performance is supervised by a referee figure called the Joker, who explains the rules. A participant may replace the oppressed protagonist at any point in the action. If that person acts out an unrealistic solution to the problem, the audience must stop the action by calling 'magic!' This leads to group discussion during which the audience is expected to discover the correct solution to the social problem.

Like Boal, Catalyst sought a theatrical technique by which the audience as a collective could define collective solutions to their common problems. Stand Up For Your Rights, which was commissioned by the Alberta Law Reform Commission and the Alberta Association for the Mentally Retarded, analysed the legal rights of mentally handicapped adults. According to Jane Heather, one of the actors in both this and It's About Time, the company encountered three main difficulties in creating an interactive performance form:

How to make a show really participational for this target audience without everything getting out of control.
What is really 'out of control'.
Learning to trust the audience.9

Each scene in the show depicted a common instance of discrimination: typically, a mentally handicapped man loses his job, and a young woman's parents deny her permission to marry. The performance, usually before an audience of twenty to thirty, was controlled by a referee who introduced the action as a game and invited the audience to stop the action whenever a character was in need of help or whenever a character was treated unfairly. In practice the referee would often take the initiative of stopping the action with his whistle. In a normal performance, the actors could find themselves spending several hours on a single scene, helping the handicapped participants in their interventions, debating audience response and of course repressing their natural inclination to instruct the participants. Catalyst's form of intervention theatre developed less systematically and much less rigidly than Boal's, but it shares the fundamental principle that an oppressed group can use dramatic performance as a tool of social analysis. Boal as a Marxist and Moreno as a psychoanalyst have in common a belief in the scientific analysis of human action, and this empiricism is embodied in the strict procedures of their respective intervention techniques. In Stand Up For Your Rights the referee is necessary to explain the process to the handicapped audience, but he is not a spokesman for a specific interpretation of the events. In that sense, Catalyst's intervention technique departs significantly from Boal's; in It's About Time Catalyst would depart even more by eliminating the referee figure entirely.

After the success of Stand Up For Your Rights Catalyst became interested in the problems faced by prison inmates when they re-enter society. Working for the first time without a sponsor (and consequently without specified goals), Catalyst decided to create an interactive performance that would address those issues for prison audiences. It's About Time is best approached in terms of the problems that the Catalyst team confronted in the process of. deciding the final subject and format of the show. As the three actors in the project began to research prison life, they found that only by admitting the impossibility of achieving expertise could they begin to understand their subject. This realization in turn became the opening statement of the play, delivered in the manner of a prison 'rap'.

When we started out we knew fuck nothing.
Now we know fuck all.
                                It's about time.
We were fish and we were caught
We want to do a play we thought
                                All about time.
So armed with paper, pens and questions
We began to get suggestions.
                                It's about time.
The system sucks most people said.
And all we really need is bread
And others said it's suicide
To try and do a show inside
                                We said / it's about time.10

This opening rap, with its admission of naiveté and its declaration that the show is a performance of findings, was one of the few constants in every performance. Both the structure and the specific content of the play were designed to adapt to each new audience. Consequently, the text of the play exists only in a typescript of early versions of some of the scenes, all of which changed continually in performance.

The actors' initial meetings with inmates revealed that the original idea of a play about the problems of re-entering society was inappropriate, for two reasons. The first was inherent in the penal system itself. The project took the actors to every kind of penal institution in Alberta, from the federal penitentiary at Drumheller to short-term minimum security prisons and half-way houses. The actors discovered that if an interactive performance were to be effective, it would have to deal with the very different conditions obtaining in very different institutions. In the words of Jan Selman, who directed the project, 'What we found out very quickly was that there's no point in talking to a guy who's got two years more before he gets out about the problems of getting out.' 11

The second reason for a change in the focus of the project pertained to the research process. The actors began by meeting with inmates in various institutions. In these preliminary sessions, the actors had to confront their own attitudes towards criminality, and they had to overcome the prisoners' suspicions in order to establish the rapport that would encourage inmates to relate experiences and insights not normally told to outsiders. When the actors asked the inmates what they thought the play should be about, the invariable response was that it should describe prison conditions for outside audiences. Selman has observed that had this been the direction the play had taken, the inmates 'wouldn't have told us the right stories ... no way.' 12

The play began to take shape when the actors changed their tack and asked inmates what they would say in a play devised for other inmates. This approach proved effective, although it also raised comments and questions that could only be dealt with in a critique of the penal system itself. In order to be successful as an analytic forum, the play could only focus on those issues over which prisoners have some control. In this regard, Catalyst's intervention theatre is antithetical to Boal's, which is predicated on the idea that the audience can change the material conditions of their lives. Nevertheless, Selman saw the play as a political act: 'They [the inmates] have their criminal consciousness; if [we] could move from there to the bigger things, we would be doing more than therapy.' 13 In this Selman echoes Boal's distinction between forum theatre and psychodrama.14 For Catalyst, however, the 'bigger things' were limited by the prison walls.

By the end of the research period, which lasted from mid-summer to December 1982, the actors had clarified the three basic principles that define the shape of It's About Time. It had to address issues of prison life rather than the problems of release into society; it had to restrict itself to those matters over which inmates have some control; and it had to reconcile the requirements of a show that could reflect the specific conditions of each prison with a general structure applicable to every type of institution. In practice, the research began with workshops with paroled residents of half-way houses and continued with four sessions at Drumheller, in which the actors conversed with inmate volunteers, played some rough scenes and asked the inmates for criticism. This process gave the actors the basic information they needed, and it gave them documentary material in the form of case histories and monologues that could be worked into the play. In all of the workshops the participants were asked to step into the scenes and improvise. In this manner the actors tested their perceptions against the authentic experiences of the inmates.

The areas of investigation that the actors defined in the research became the four basic units of the play. The first unit, 'The System,' introduced the specifics of the host institution and dealt with the problems of adjusting to inmate life. The second unit, 'Inside-Cool', looked at the daily problems of prison society: the difficulties of obtaining telephone calls, job changes and visits. The third unit, 'Inside - Close', asked the critical questions, 'Who am I? What do I want? How do I get it?' Here the issues were more complex: relations with family and lovers outside; the complexities of dealing with other prisoners and the obligation patterns of prison society; and the larger question of inmate solidarity. The final section, 'Outside', looked at the issues the play had originally been conceived to examine.

Finding a suitable dramatic structure was only part of the complexity of the process. The actors also had to prepare the scenes with audience intervention in mind. Initially the intervention techniques owed much to those used in Stand Up For Your Rights. The actors would ask audience members to step into a scene and replace or advise the characters.

For Boal, the animation - that part of the performance that initiates or provokes the audience to intervene - must be supervised by a referee figure who leads the audience to an understanding of the issue. Catalyst found that inmates resented the authority of a supervisory figure, and that the animations worked best when they proceeded from emotion rather than analysis.

This discovery was made possible by the decision to develop the performance around realistic dramatic characters. Ironically, in order for the play to be accepted as authoritative by the inmates, the actors had to deny their initial statements of inexpertise by creating the roles of believable inmates with careful attention to documentary fact.

Each of the three actors created a 'base' character, of whom the most appropriate to a particular institution would receive the most 'airtime' as the main character. Robert Winslow played Mike, an older con who has been in and out of prison often, and is now incarcerated in a federal prison like Drumheller. Ed Lyszkiewicz played Jim, a 'fish' imprisoned for the first time in a provincial prison. Jane Heather played Cindy, a woman with a long history of incarceration, now in a provincial prison.

A given performance would focus on one of these three characters, with the other actors playing subordinate roles as required. In addition, the other two 'base' characters might appear in their own scenes. The exact structure of the performance rested on the actors' judgment. They would commence the performance by talking informally with the inmates as they entered the playing area. These prefatory conversations established an informal atmosphere and gave the actors the opportunity to verify the local conditions in order to avoid errors.

Depending on the audience, each scene could be played in one of several versions. It's About Time then existed as a basic scenario which could be applied to any one of three main characters, for whom each scene existed in several different forms. The actors had to follow the route through the play they judged most relevant to a particular audience.

The performances usually took place in prison common rooms or chapels, attracting any number from fifteen percent of the approximately five hundred inmates at Drumheller, to seventy-five percent of the inmates in smaller minimum-security institutions.15 The audience sat along two sides of the room, and portable flats screened off the remaining sides. The set consisted of a table and two chairs. In half-way houses the performance usually took place in the audience's living room.

The show normally began with the introductory 'rap,' which effectively 'demystified' the performance by explaining how it was made. At the same time the use of the familiar rap idiom demonstrated the actors' familiarity with prison life. The rap was followed by a test of improvisational skill in which two actors would speak extempore on a topic suggested by the audience (commonly, sex or drugs) while maintaining eye contact with each other. They would then repeat the exercise, this time looking at the audience. The exercise established the actors' theatrical skill, and it showed at an early point that the audience had some control over the direction the performance would take.

The actors would complete the opening segment of the play with short monologues introducing their characters. The typescript contains only one example:

I'm Cindy Lambert, I'm 23. I spent about half the last four years in one joint or another. My last worker, she said to me, Cindy, you're institutionalized. She made it sound like a disease - once you get it you're dead. Cancer can be beaten.

It was after these opening statements that each performance followed its own course with the 'Inside-Cool' unit. This sequence would normally examine a common prison problem, such as obtaining a visit from outside. The actors would play the scene so that the character fails to obtain the objective. The scene would then be turned over to the audience in the first animation of the show. Because the scene described a straightforward procedural problem, the audience could be expected to respond easily. Their responses would become the basis of further attempts at the scene.

The 'Inside-Cool' section looked at typical problems from a structural or sociological point of view. In the next unit, 'Inside-Close', the issues were defined in terms of character. It was at this point that character biographies were delivered in greater detail. The central character would describe, often in conflicting versions, the circumstances leading to his or her arrest. These biographies would resurface throughout the play, which usually ended with the 'Outside' unit, in which the main character would have to confront the problems of parole and finding a job.

Monologues such as these biographical introductions served a structural purpose in the play by bringing the 'open' scenes back to the reality of the dramatic characters. The actors discovered that monologues could also be used to elicit audience response. This led to what amounted to a rediscovery of literary values, when the documentary reality of the monologues was enhanced by metaphor. In this example, Jim speaks from the point of view of a young inmate who has been in and out of prison several times but has never had parole. The language and tenor of the speech are typical of the play as a whole:

this is how I fuckin' walk in here. Fucking turtle, right? And the worst thing is, I like it! I like walking like this! I like shufflin' around like a fuckin' turtle. Stick my head out, look around, pull it back in ...

You can throw me around, put the boots to me even, my head's in, no problem.

Do my of you know, like when a turtle's head and legs are in and throw it in the water - does it float or sink?

When I'm chucked back outside, what will I do? Into the watery waves of the world - will I float - or will I sink? 16

According to Selman, most of the responses to this monologue borrowed the terms of the metaphor, which enabled the inmates to articulate private and rarely-expressed feelings in public discussion.

If the monologue was a more effective animation device because of the introduction of a literary technique, then it would seem to follow that mimetic character action should have been even more effective. Characters in conflict can demonstrate a problematic situation as a complex of motives and restraints, but the Catalyst actors found that such 'closed' scenes reduced the possibilities of intervention by creating a wall of fiction between subject and audience. The actors experimented with several narrative techniques to resolve this apparent contradiction. Of these the most interesting is a scene entitled 'The Visit' in the typescript.

Focusing on the problems of maintaining relations with the outside world, 'The Visit' usually came early in the show. The typescript version of the scene involves Mike and his wife Gina, but in prisons with younger populations it would focus on Jim and his family. The structure is simple. Gina has come on one of her regular visits after having failed to arrive the previous week. Mike is on edge because of the missed visit; Gina is nervous because she must tell Mike that she has been offered a promotion in another town. The visit ends angrily and inconclusively. According to Selman, the scene ended when 'the wife left, the con went out and [said] "that fucking bitch" and just waited. That's the form the animation took: just an emotional outburst.' 17 The audience tended to support Mike's assumption that Gina was cheating on him.

This is the only scene in which the audience response was incorporated in a formal extension of the action, rather than taking the form of a discussion followed by a replay of the scene. After the discussion, Mike and Gina would improvise the letters they would write to each about the incident, taking as their material the conclusions arrived at with the audience. The actors spoke their letters aloud, alternating paragraphs.

This framing technique of intercut letters placed the action in a critical context. Mike's decisions were countered by Gina's independent will; the conflict was left unresolved. By giving equal weight to both characters, the scene acknowledged that the issue of relations with persons outside is one over which prisoners have little control.

In its very structure, 'The Visit' objectified the frustration inmates feel in their daily lives: it embodied their inability to change the conditions of their existence. As a dramatic forum the scene was successful because of its admission that the issue was not one of political change but of individual attitudes towards an unchanging reality. Just as Mike had no control over Gina, the inmates had no control over the prison walls, and the actors had no magical solutions.

Despite the restrictions on action imposed by those walls, It's About Time was genuinely political theatre: it analysed human society as a process of political relations governed by certain material facts, some but not all of which the audience could challenge. For that reason It's About Time defies detached critical assessment. The only persons competent to assess it are the inmates whose reality it expressed. Interventionist theatre, by definition, can only be accounted a success if it contributes to a change in the situation it analyses. It is impossible, however, for the detached outsider to ascertain what effect the play may have had on the complex structures of prison society. From Catalyst's perspective, the project justified itself as soon as it brought inmates together to discuss controversial issues in an analytic context.

It is perhaps necessary to stress that despite this particularization, It's About Time cannot be dismissed as a therapeutic workshop project. Throughout the performance the actors emphasized that they were professional performers. This review from the Drumheller inmates' newspaper suggests that the audience had no difficulty in accepting the play as an aesthetic experience as well as a workshop forum:

High energy, fast rappin' rhyming with rhythm left no one dozing when this show began. The players moved like a team of pickpockets working the audience for all cash and valuables on hand, the audience paid with attention and were given a performance with power to spare ... 18

That an appreciation of the It's About Time as theatrical entertainment was dependent on close involvement with the subject can be inferred from Keith Ashwell's review of the show in the Edmonton Journal. In January, 1983, Catalyst invited interested theatre professionals to a performance of the play at Northern Light Theatre, before an audience of half-way house residents. Ashwell's review reveals inadvertently the transformation that occurred when the play was removed from its context:

[There] were scenes that became dangerously lethargic, because the actors didn't know which route to take next and their "instructors" were not about to help them.

The production is almost totally sympathetic to the cons' view of the world. Whether it can find a convincing handle on a compassionate social response, I don't know, but I think it will because the actors produced some fascinating, intuitive and finely-focussed portraits of prisoners, likenesses that were sincerely applauded.19

Attempting to evaluate the play as a public performance (a response Catalyst invited by performing in a theatre), Ashwell brought to it standards and expectations derived from more traditional performance forms. The 'dangerous lethargy' that he criticised was an important part of the interactive process, and the matter of a 'compassionate social response' had no bearing on the play. The perceived inadequacies of the play as drama may in fact have been its strengths as intervention theatre.

The argument that the detached observer brings aesthetic experiences to the play which obscure its true values can be supported by referring to the nationally-broadcast television derivative of It's About Time, part of Catalyst's 'CBC Catalyst Television' series (which also included a taped performance of Stand Up For Your Rights). 20 Taped before an audience of inmates at Drumheller, Incarceration used material from It's About Time, but with a different cast of actors under the direction of David Barnet.

Although the programme differs from its theatrical parent by stressing audience discussion and information rather than intervention, the fundamental relation of dramatic material and audience involvement is evident. With no first-hand knowledge of the subject, a disinterested audience cannot fully understand the qualities of imitation, dramatic logic and language that make up the actual aesthetic experience. Beal's call for a "poetics of the oppressed" finds support in the fact that in its aesthetic dimensions as well as its subject matter, It's About Time addresses the sensibilities of a special audience.

It is too soon to venture whether It's About Time represents a new direction for political theatre in English-speaking Canada, but it is possible to conclude that it has redefined the boundaries of political performance. Some immediate influences can be noted; since the project commenced, Catalyst has conducted workshops in intervention techniques for other theatres, most notably at three festivals of popular theatre (Bread and Circuses, Thunder Bay, 1981; Bread and Roses, Edmonton, 1983; Bread and Dreams, Winnipeg, 1985). These workshops have coincided with a growing interest in Boal's forum theatre in English Canada, by such groups as Vancouver's Homemade Theatre and Headlines Theatre, Sudbury's Sticks and Stones and Toronto's Second Look Community Arts Resource. While the adoption of Boal's techniques has introduced a major international movement to Canadian theatre, it is important to note that they were anticipated by the independent explorations that led Catalyst to create a unique form of intervention theatre in It's About Time.

Notes

THE INTERACTIVE DOCUMENTARY IN CANADA: CATALYST THEATRE'S ITS ABOUT TIME

Alan Filewod

1 JAN SELMAN 'It's About Time', public seminar, Bread and Roses Festival of Popular Theatre, Edmonton, 23 June 1983
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2 For a further discussion of the development of political theatre in English-speaking Canada, see my article, 'The Changing Definition of Canadian Political Theatre,' Theaterwork 3,3 Mar/April 1983, pp 47-54.
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3 J.L. MORENO Psychodrama 4th ed. New York: Beacon House, 1977, p 352
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4 AUGUSTO BOAL Theatre of the Oppressed trans. CHARLES A McBRIDE and MARIA-ODILIA McBRIDE New York: Urizen, 1977 and AUGUSTO BOAL Stop: Cest Magique! Rio de Janeiro: Civilizacao Brasileira, 1980
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5 Catalyst Courier 1, December 1981, p 1
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6 PAULO FREIRE Pedagogy of the Oppressed trans MYRA BERGMAN RAMOS New York: Herder and Herder, 1970, p 67
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7 BOAL, p 47
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8 BOAL, p 122
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9 JANE HEATHER 'Stand Up For Your Rights,' Catalyst Courier 1, December 1981, p 3
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10 Catalyst Theatre, It's About Time, typescript. The typescript is unpaginatcd.
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11 JAN SELMAN interview 28 June 1983
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12 SELMAN interview
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13 SELMAN seminar
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14 See EDGAR QUILES and GEORGE SCHUTTLER, 'Theatre for a World in Transition: Excerpts from an interview with Augusto Boal' Theaterwork 3,5 (1983), p 19
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15 SELMAN seminar
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16 It's About Time typescript
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17 SELMAN interview
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18 'Catalyst Theatre delivers It's About Time,' Drumheller Penitentiary inmates' newsletter, nd (Catalyst Theatre files)
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19 KEITH ASHWELL, 'Cons earn accolades,' Edmonton Journal 2 January 1983
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20 Incarceration prod Jack Emack CBC Television Catalyst Television 1983
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