Cops in the Head

Back to Boal.

I brought up Augusto Boal's "Theatre of the Oppressed" (TO) techniques as a way of exploring the pros and cons of moderation. "Classical" TO encourages participants (spect-actors) to stage their moments of powerlessness or oppression in terms of clear oppressor-oppressed relationships. While doing so can have a wonderfully clarifying effect, letting the person and other spect-actors explore other potential avenues of action, it can also force complicated situations into a falsely melodramatic mode.

As Boal began touring his TO workshops in the "first world," he found the need to modify some of his core techniques. Specifically, in his "Rainbow of Desire" phase, he introduced activities aimed at letting spect-actors imagine and stage situations in which they felt like helpless bystanders. Suppose, for instance, I see a situation that seems like a clear case of oppression: a woman hitting a child, a police officer harrassing a homeless person, a group of people laughing at a racist or sexist joke. What should happen?

Boal's technique for exploring this situation resembles the forum theatre exercise. The person telling the story of an oppression they saw re-tells the story. Spect-actors re-create the scene, including the person who felt like a helpless bystander. Then the joker (the facilitator for the workshop) interviews the storyteller, asking her to name some of the reasons why she felt helpless to intervene. What kept her from acting?

For Boal, these reasons are "cops in the head" that short-circuit activist intervention before it happens. They are the voices that might say, perhaps, "You'll just make things worse" or "You should mind your own business." As the person names reasons for her inaction in that situation, the joker asks a spect-actor to come up and "be" that cop-in-the-head voice. The interview continues until the person feels she's listed all of the relevant voices that together persuaded her not to act or intervene. A line of spect-actors, each playing a different voice, stand before her.

The joker then leads the person through a miniature scene with each one of the voices. The Voice articulates the cop-in-the-head rationale, and the person argues back. The conversation continues, and any time the spect-actors feel the need to do so, they can stop the conversation, tap out a participant, and try out a new argument. This mini-forum scene repeats for each of the Voices. After the final dialogue, the joker asks the person and the spect-actors which of the cops-in-the-head the person seems to have dealt wtih sufficiently and which ones seem still seem unbanished. It's like an exorcism with multiple demons, not all of whom leave completely.

Typically, though, the exercise clarifies one or two persistent worries, one or two cops-in-the-head that remain. The person then re-plays the original scene, trying out the intervention she wishes she had attempted in the first place. As she replays her scene, though, the Voices she has not completely vanished move with her, just behind her. At certain points, they lightly lay a hand on the person's back to remind her that the voice--the worry--is still there.

I've gone through this experience before in a Boalian workshop. It was a long, intense process to name and hash out my frustrations with the "cops in the head" that kept me from acting (someday I'll perhaps go into just what that situation was).

What I got from that exercise, though, was a greater appreciation for the difference between a helpless refusal to take sides and a nuanced moderation that--although painfully aware of some complexities--nevertheless acts.

Yet, as much as I admire the Boalian techniques, they have some limitations. The position of third-party bystander to a scene of apparent oppression is never fun, but it does not follow that some kind of intervention is necessarily best.

More tomorrow,

JF