Moderation, Nuance, and Boal

To recap--I'm dubious of well-meaning calls to "agree to disagree" in ongoing debates about the status of GLBT people. This sentiment often cloaks itself in the authority of the "silent majority" or "massive middle" of people wanting just to get back to things as usual, unperturbed by squabbles about whether lesbians can be ordained or two gay men married. But such standoffish neutrality all too often bespeaks privileged disinterest, not consensus-finding. The people who call for fighting to stop are the ones who have the least stake in the battle.

This is not, however, to baptize extremism as the ideal route. I see a difference between the kind of "moderation" that results from disinterest and a moderation that results from careful, ongoing thought. Someone who thinks carefully and empathically about both sides of a debate and finds herself unable to side fully with either side occupies a wholly different position from one who simply shuts himself off from the appearance of conflict. The former's nuance contrasts starkly with the latter's simple-mindedness.

The tricky thing is, however, that nuance and standoffishness often look the same. This is never more apparent to me than in those situations where I find myself standing on the outside of a conflict looking in.

The late Brazilian theatre artist and theorist Augusto Boal created a form of social-change performance he called "the Theatre of the Oppressed." His goal, initially, involved helping people who were oppressed (economically, politically, culturally) to be able to use theatrical techniques to express and think beyond the situations in which they found themselves. Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques typically take the form of workshops for non-trained people (i.e., not professional actors) moderated by a trained artist known as the Joker. Through a series of simple games, the Joker helps the people to use staged images (e.g., frozen tableaus) to create pictures of various aspects of their lives. Feedback from other participants (in TO, everyone is called a spect-actor--watching and doing at once) help the group to see how images and, later, scenes may be sharpened to communicate clearly.

The signature TO technique is "forum theatre," in which a person stages a scenario from her life in which she felt oppressed. Perhaps the scenario replays a time when a boss told her she had to work overtime without pay, and the person felt powerless to stand up for herself. Spect-actors from the group re-create the key scene (where the boss tells her to stay late), playing it out once. The Joker then leads the group into a conversation about whether the scene seems real, who the oppressed person is, and who the oppressor seems to be.

The scene then re-plays, but with one difference: any spect-actor may call out "stop" at any point and "tap out" the person playing the oppressed person. After the switchout, the new spect-actor re-starts the scene from the stop point, but this time the new actor tries out a different strategy. The spect-actor portraying the boss must react realistically--not playing overly evil or overly lenient. Different spect-actors tap out the protagonist, trying and re-trying different techniques.

At the end, the past situation hasn't changed, but--such is the hope--the person who shared the story now sees that she has more choices available to her than she felt like she had before. Powerlessness, in Boalian theory, equates to a lack of choices. Boal's theatre does not offer a clear Key To Revolution beyond critical examination of situations that appear to have few choices. By multiplying possible choices, the person can in the future better navigate situations in which she might feel powerless.

Boal's TO (and the numerous spin-off techniques inspired by him) works like gangbusters in certain situations, particularly those in which relationships of oppression are clear and sharp. When Boal began touring and working more in "industrialized" nations (the "first world"), however, he found that his audiences often balked at identifying clear oppressor/oppressed relationships. Part of the trouble, Boal discovered, was that the people attending his workshops in, say, France or the United States often felt that classically TO scenes such as a corrupt military officer bullying a peasant were the purview of "other" nations. The "first world," went the sentiment, rarely offers such black-versus-white scenarios.

More common, Boal found, were scenes in which the spect-actors described themselves as helpless bystanders, third parties to scenes of, say, racial injustice or gender/sexuality discrimination. The struggle in those cases involved whether to intervene and how best to do so...

How, in other words, does nuance keep from stagnating into inaction?

More tomorrow,

JF