Emancipation or Post-Modernism?

by Ronald Matthijssen, Formaat

Not only in the U.S. and Canada has Theatre of the Oppressed exploded into an amazing variety of methods, techniques and images. During the first three issues of Under Pressure we have had contributions from Austria, Italy, the West Indies, Italy, Sweden and the Netherlands, there is some information about Uganda in this issue and we are eagerly awaiting news from the Ouagadougou Festival held last March. Last year we asked Augusto Boal about his view on this development and he gave us some stunning examples from India and South-Africa (see the January 2000 issue on our website www.formaat.org). In this interview Augusto expressed his view that you can change the shape of TO according to the context in which you use it, but you can't change the rules. He also pointed out that he didn't invent the rules, but merely discovered them. It seems now that some, or even many, have discovered new rules and may be tempted to discard the old ones. It seems that there is a strong movement of emancipation from the rules laid down in Theatre of the Oppressed and other early publications by Augusto Boal. But is it merely emancipation or is there more to it?

Community-based Theatre
One of the hot items that emerge every time you discuss the development of TO is the question of communities. Marc Weinblatt and many others have addressed the issue of the effect of Forum Theatre in homogenic and heterogenic groups or communities. From the logic of TO it is clear that a Forum is ideally a homogenic one, i.e. there is a clear awareness about the nature of the oppressor and the oppressed. A homogenic Forum can be found within communities that share a common interest, e.g. homeless people, people with learning disabilities, refugees, black underprivileged youth etc. Their interest would be to overcome general oppression ahead of personal oppression. The awareness of a general oppression could be called a modernist position. Forum Theatre can therefore be regarded as a modernist technique of revealing structures that are omnipresent.

Post-modernism doesn't accept any given structures but, on the contrary, aims at liberating people from the oppression that originates from these structures. Using Rainbow and related techniques will reveal this oppression and will thus make way for personal development without cops-in-the-head. In this case, participating groups can and maybe should be heterogenic and there is no direct need to find a common denominator. On the other hand there is certainly a connection between the cops-in-the-head and the cops on the street (which you can record by filming them like David Diamond and the street youth of Vancouver do), so Rainbow-type activities could be given a Forum perspective. Prison theatre, as described and developed by James Thompson and the TiPP-Centre in Manchester (UK) is a good example of a road that could be taken.

On the modern/post modern edge
As all good things are three, there seems to be another road that is finding its way into many communities, homogenic or heterogenic. In The Radical in Performance (1999, Routledge) Baz Kershaw points out that performance finds its greatest impact on the edge between modernism and post-modernism. This means that breaking and even ignoring the rules would bring you closer to an understanding of the rules (or the oppression) behind them. The process of subsequently dealing with the "general" oppression would then give you the head start of having looked behind your personal boundaries. At this point the hybrid models which Marc Weinblatt described in his overview of some of the emerging techniques in the field would contain this advantage. From this point of view, "classical" Forum Theatre is static because it confirms the weight of general oppression without looking for alternative options on a personal level. The awareness of being "under pressure" can either paralyse people or supply a momentary catharsis within a Forum session without moving any personal or societal limits.

Creating communities
Augusto Boal has recognised this problem and put Legislative Theatre at the end of the liberation process that accompany TO activities. From a personal point of view, Legislative Theatre is predominantly about creating and connecting communities, which are expressing their desires. It is less just another form of political action. Legislative Theatre can be right on the edge of modernism and post-modernism. During a Forum Theatre project with people from an underprivileged area in a Dutch city, the rehearsals turned more or less into Rainbow sessions. The Forum piece the actors then made had such a political impact that it turned out to be legislative. The actors entered the process as a heterogenic group of age and colour and left not as a totally homogenous community, but they had produced a new structure within the neighbourhood that others can develop on. I refer to what Dani Lyndersay from Trinidad reported from the Popular Theatre in Nigeria, where a play can leave its traces within a community, having expressed a common desire for change and simultaneously having changed the lives of the participants. No matter how we shape it or how we call it, everyone who has worked with it, has felt that Theatre of the Oppressed leaves traces of change.

Under Pressure 3, July 2000