Why is my Theatre Troupe Falling Apart?

Theatre of the Oppressed Co-Opted by a Western World

Jenna Alstad - 2018

I have been participating in my university’s social justice theatre troupe, Making Waves, since my freshman year of college. It was one of my first introductions to the theatre department at Hamline, opening my first door into the greater theatre making community. Making Waves is a social justice theatre troupe utilizing Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to promote dialogue around difficult social issues in our community. I didn’t know what to expect from a theatre troupe dedicated to social change, had never heard the name Augusto Boal, and had absolutely no good experience in changing people’s minds about things. In fact, I was pretty bad at it. I had heard the rumors about Making Waves from my peers in the theatre department. It wasn’t “real theatre”. It was just too “social justice-y”. But mostly, people just told me it wasn’t realistic. One outside perspective I received questioned what Making Waves was even trying to do, a question that I would continue to grapple with for years to come, “What is the point of your scripts? Is it to make a point? Or is it to get your audience to ask a question? Because if you’re trying to ask questions, then what you need is balance. Because you have a very good/evil dynamic going.” The general perception was that these performers would go into classrooms to teach people about how privileged they are. The plays that were shown were poorly fleshed out with shallow characters and simple arcs, good guys and bad guys, and all around it just made people feel ridiculous.

I wasn’t really ever satisfied with that answer. I could see that Making Waves was struggling, but I wasn’t convinced it was just inherently bad theatre. I could see that it was hard to keep students involved and committed, and sometimes it felt like people showed up out of respect for the program rather than necessity to create, and I knew that just wasn’t right. In fact, for a while I just stopped showing up myself, afraid of being criticized for theatre that nobody around me thought was art. I was worried that maybe it wasn’t.

Theatre of the Oppressed is an interactive theatrical practice founded by Augusto Boal in the 1970s in Brazil to promote social and political dialogue around issues of oppression (https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/augusto-boal-rainbow-desire/). This art practice is founded in the idea that the every day is performance; we are all actors, and we are all spectators, or “spect-actors”, becoming active in our own stories. The characters on stage are alive and breathing because they aren’t characters at all, they are the embodiment of the self as a whole and conscious being. The idea is, the performance is just a rehearsal for life, giving us the tools to create change in the real world outside of this sanctioned theatrical space.

We are animals that have the privilege of being actors because we are acting all the time, but at the same time we are spectators of our actions. Most animals, almost all of them… can’t do that, can’t observe themselves in action. So we have theatre inside, because we act and we are the observer, we are the spectator. -Augusto Boal

When speaking to Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, it is not only important to understand the theory behind the practice, but also to identify who Augusto refers to as the collective we. Boal speaks of “we” as a unit of people with commonality between each other. Each person shares in a similar world experience of oppression.

We believe that all relationships between humans should be a dialogal nature. We should have the moment in which we listen to the other, and the moment in which we speak. But we know that between men and women, between blacks and whites, between north hemisphere countries and south hemisphere countries, all those dialogues become very soon a monologue in which only men speak, only whites speak, and only the north hemisphere speaks, and then we want to reestablish the dialogue. We want to have the right also to say our words. So that’s what ‘we’ means: me, us, the oppressed. - Augusto Boal

Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed is rooted in the political turmoil of late 50s Brazil when Boal, a director at Teatro Arena, wrote and staged plays with students focused on capturing the true state of the Brazilian working class. Boal’s theatre practice began at a time when activist theatre was favorable by the powers at be, but in April of 1964 came the coupe that established a deeply conservative military dictatorship. As politically motivated theatre became more risky, Boal developed new ways to practice his performative activism. These techniques arose from necessity, the need for people to speak their truths in a dishonest society. His techniques could be utilized by the common person, unlike typical elitist art practices. In 1971, Boal was arrested and tortured after having created Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. An international solidarity movement forced authorities to release him, but he would live the rest of his life in exile, fleeing to Argentina directly after his release.

Boal’s techniques are social therapy for oppression, empowering individuals through theatrical techniques to eradicate the oppressors in and outside of our heads. Rather than deconstructing the power systems from the top down, it is rebuilding the power systems in ourselves from the ground up by empowering the truths of the oppressed. This theatre was never made to intentionally change the bourgeoisie, it was only ever meant to give back the power that had been taken through oppression. It is theatre of necessity, rooted in a deeply personal need for change. For me, this brings into question where the necessity comes from within my troupe. Where is this deeply personally rooted need for change. I can find it in myself, and I can see it in the individuals in my troupe, but there is this distance between the deeply personal and the social change. It’s the struggle to get close in a western world where handshakes interrupt hugs and looking people in the eyes is for respect and never to connect. Why are we here when we can’t even speak to our own authenticity?

I wonder, in my pursuit of understanding the conflict between my troupe and this practice and this world, if there is not something inherently wrong with equating “theatre of the oppressed” to “theatre for social change.” Who is this theatre practice of, and who is it for? And on top of that, how do we change society?

When students are asked why they participate in Making Waves, some say they do it for community, others say they do it to stay informed, some want to spark dialogue about troubling issues in society, but universally they all seem to want to change the way people think about marginalized communities. They want to change people’s minds. I wanted to change people’s minds. But Boal taught me that isn’t how we create change. That isn’t how we are to utilize these theatrical tools. It was never about changing people from who they inherently are, it was about empowering the truth of oppression, a story that does not get told. If you show truth and authenticity without implicit bias or critique, the truth will speak for itself.

This isn’t just about Making Waves though; this is about the ways in which Theatre of the Oppressed, like so many other things, has been co-opted by a western society to do something it was never intended to do.

TO (Theatre of the Oppressed), particularly Forum theatre (which is what is most practiced by Making Waves), works best in small homogenous groups, as it promotes an ability to identify the self on stage. The idea is to create a sense of sympathy (compassion) rather than empathy (putting yourself in someone else’s shoes). If forum theatre is done correctly, you should not need to put yourself in someone else’s shoes because your own shoes will be represented on stage. It isn’t about feeling sorry for the other, it is about recognizing and challenging the actions of the self. It is about recognizing yourself as the protagonist in your own story, giving you the tools to advocate for yourself in real world oppressive situations. By performing these techniques in your everyday life, you are inherently spreading the techniques to others who are also oppressed.

There are (at least) three issues with this that come out in Western societies.

(Most) Westerners do not like to identify themselves as oppressed.
In the Western world, particularly in the United States, most groups are inherently not homogenous.
(Most) Westerners do not like small intimate performance spaces that get too personal.

So the techniques get altered to accommodate for the awkward distance between people in the Western world. The audiences get larger, the stories become more detached, and the mission becomes changing people’s minds rather than empowering homogenous oppressed groups. We live in a society unable and unwilling to find and address the aftershock of oppression. We live in a society that does not know how to instigate lasting and personal change.

Boal and his practitioners understand that Theatre of the Oppressed is a living form, continually adapting and adjusting to be most applicable and authentic to the times. I think now is the time in Making Waves to see this adaptation, but to what I am not really sure. I think that’s really the base of everything here. We don’t know who we are, as individuals, and as a collective whole. Our identity is constantly shifting with generations of students graduating out as well as the constant turnover in directors and the ever evolving political turmoil we are all drowning in. I believe in us though. We have a powerful and influential platform, it is time for us to find our voices and understand what truth it is that we are trying to speak.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

http://www.culturematters.org.uk/index.php/arts/theatre/item/2455-the-theatre-of-the-oppressed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOgv91qQyJc&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXutHbXGQfg

http://beautifultrouble.org/theory/theater-of-the-oppressed/

https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/augusto-boal-rainbow-desire/