A bouncy little fellow who nowadays has long white hair and whose daily energy has apparently not flagged by one Joule since age twenty—Augusto Boal by name—once created a remarkably interesting form of theatre called Forum Theatre. His rambling prose describes it, in the Theatre of the Oppressed.
Just this past weekend in Seattle, a Port Angeleno came to town and ran a Forum. It was, as Forum always is, both frustrating and exciting. And remarkably interesting.
In Forum Theatre, a cast presents a scene, called a "model," in which the protagonist is in some sense oppressed. The scene is run several times, and after having seen it once, the audience is encouraged to yell "Stop," take the place of the protagonist on stage, and change the course of the action. The cast will improvise, as the spectator (now a "spect-actor") alters the situation, and the onus is on said cast to keep the oppression strong, even as the new spect-actor resists.
My experiences with Forum Theatre are the only truly communal public experiences I can remember, where a group of relative strangers partakes fully in civic life. The ancient Roman fora and the Navajo councils must have had this quality, but our own public life is almost always isolated, and our communal life is almost always private. This is most apallingly true of art galleries, museums, musical performances, and theatre pieces, all of which ostensibly exist for the very purpose of engendering a public dialogue. But can anyone here remember even talking to a stranger at an art gallery? Anyone? Anyone?
It may be possible not to participate in a Forum Theatre event, but it is not easy. The models are never high art (they're typically short on nuance) but the model should manifest an experience of real contemporary life. This can be done well or poorly, and how well the model is constructed will influence the audience participation; but overwhelmingly, this is a people's art, and people do participate.
Boal quotes Lope de Vega: "Theatre is two people, one passion, and a platform." He adds, "I agree with him, you have to have two people. And also I agree, there has to be some passion, they both have to care about something. But as for the platform, I don't care, you can leave that aside."
As soon as I step into a Forum model, I know that a hundred eyes are judging my ethos, my way-about-me, my behavior. I intend to act truly—but I will I act rightly? In the eyes of my peers?
The protagonist I replaced in last weekend's Forum was a homeless mother of two. Our Joker (Forum's Master of Ceremonies) verified that I knew I was playing a homeless woman, and not a man. Does anyone know what that means? No? Good. Neither do I. In the scene, a yuppie blows off this character when she asks for change. In my intervention, I yelled and interrupted his conversation.
Surely there's no reason why a woman can't be as vocal as a man, although it may be difficult to overcome that internalized inertia that keeps us all in our place. It was hard enough for me, as a man, to become as outspoken as I am. But our Joker shooed me aside as a man of privilege who had nothing to contribute to the plight of a homeless woman. This was a mistake, I believe; what role can I have in politics, if I am assumed to be supremely privileged and unable to identify with an oppressed character? There are cracks in my privilege—there are faultlines. "Charity," as Boal's mentor Paolo Freire said, "Is the first tool of the oppressor." And in Boal's, Freire's and my own understanding of oppression, only the oppressed can overcome it; we cannot wait for the oppressor to turn his head.
Forum Theatre in America always risks being dilatory: only educated white people seem to attend. Are we to engineer our own liberation? From what? From guilt? Should we condescend to another class of people by offering trite solutions brewed in the thin broth of freedom? We will be irrelevant, if that is all. But we always learn something about our own community and how it works, as soon as we step on stage, as soon as we take on another role, and as soon as the eyes of the others are upon us.