Act Out

… for about fifteen minutes, I thought I had invented Theatre of the Oppressed!! Seriously!

It is July 2006, I had been thinking about Pedagogy of the Opressed, wondering how I could use it with the Tibetan people I was working with. My job for an Aussie NGO in Lhasa required the dissemination of reproductive and sexual health education and the population we worked with, although by no means victims, were very much socially excluded, with many layers of oppression impacting on their life choices and ultimately their well-being. What is more, I kept thinking, could pedagogy of the oppressed be used with the oppressor? Was there a space in which the oppressor himself would be able to inform himself of his part in the inequality, especially the oppressor who is an oppressor by default, i.e. all of us in some way or other? Was it possible to work within a pedagogy of the oppressor?

Then the idea hit me. What about theatre? Theatre of the Oppresed…what about Theatre of the Oppressor?!!!

I had already commissioned a series of short plays by a politically correct Tibetan playwright and had the use of theatre approved by my managers; I had even secured some funding from a keen donor to support these short skits to be played in various performance halls in rural and urban areas.

But I wondered what it would be like if there was some form of theatre that actually highlighted inequalities and enabled participants and audiences to really get it - like theatre for education but where the participants were the ones who unravelled the real power structures through their participation, and found solutions from within their own knowledge; from within their own acting?

So I sat in the office in Lhasa, contemplating the idea.  Oh my, my! Wouldn’t that just be groundbreaking and how effective would it be to make physical the oppressions? To perform the dynamics in front of an audience? Like I said for about fifteen minutes I was in a whirlwind of ideas.

And then I googled it!

I was a tiny bit disappointed. Damn it! Who is this Boal dude who had already created, developed and extensively taught ‘my’ new idea?!?! That feeling lasted only seconds though because as I scrolled through pages and pages of articles, jumped from website to website, discovered more about this fascinating network of practitioners and this innovative and creative tool for social transformation, I was overcome by a feeling of having arrived somewhere I belonged, truly belonged.

Corny as that sounds - I was so moved, delighted, excited… I am being truthful, sometimes the truth is very corny.

By the lunchtime that day, and using, I admit, time paid for by the Australian government, I had contacted Formaat in the Netherlands and Sanskriti in India; I had emailed potential supervisors at Murdoch University and made serious enquiries about my PhD research. I was seriously posing the question for my research around the idea of Theatre of the Oppressor used in interventions with trafficked women - a particular interest of mine. I contacted Project Respect in Melbourne and was put into contact with an extraordinary woman who has since become my mentor: Catherine Simmonds, founder of the Brunswick Women’s Theatre and one of the few practitioners of Boal’s techniques in Australia.

Now two years have gone by and I have had the great fortune to have met Augusto and Julian Boal and to receive training from them. I have also done workshops with David Diamond and Victor Cole. I have met scores of dedicated and active practitioners from around the world. My research centres around working with oppressors, I have made adaptations and chose to work with perpetrators of domestic violence. I even (upstart that I am) gave a presentation at the last Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed conference in Omaha, Nebraska, May 2008.

I am just beginning and there is so much to learn but I wanted to set up this blog to encourage dialogue and challenge. To maintain the connections I have made with all you amazing practitioners and individuals committed to social transformation, so that the links are not weakened through time and distance.

I will continute to share what goes through my head and any of the work I am doing. I invite you all to comment and share your ideas, experiences, feelings…whatever.

Thanks for reading.

Erika

Filed under: Personal by Erika