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
Showing posts with label Theatre of the Oppressed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theatre of the Oppressed. Show all posts
Monday, November 2, 2009
Saturday, October 31, 2009
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
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)