No Place to Hide
Forum Theatre Must Live Up to Many Standards

by Ronald Matthijssen

All good theatre brings about changes in those who are touched by it - therefore the question Theatre or Therapy? makes no sense. This is the point that David Diamond (see "Yes But Is It Theatre or Therapy?") made. On the other hand, the question does not seem to be without any importance to practitioners. It eventually takes us to the question of the responsibility of the artist for the impact of her/his art.

Theatre of the Oppressed/Theatre for Living are not "arts for art's sake", so we tend to underline the importance of the potential impact on spect-actors and workshop participants. By doing so, we invite the people who support us, co-organize our events or are involved with the spect-actors professionally (like teachers) to assess this impact according to their standards.

The other day I spoke to a teacher at a junior high about a series of three performances we did with 3rd grade students. He began by more or less accusing us of encouraging the students to distrust their teachers and rather solve all their problems themselves. On stage, the vast majority of the students showed their complete reluctance to cooperate with teachers in the case of violence, bullying and the illegal carrying of weapons. After a while, he acknowledged the fact that it hadn't been us that had shown them this attitude, it were the students that really thought about it that way. Through our performance, we had facilitated the emergence of this collective feeling. The teachers now were traumatized, because they thought they had the confidence of the students. Also they recognized the desire of the students to be able to rely on their teachers, but they didn't know how to facilitate this. He asked me how he could restore confidence.

I proposed a workshop with a "legislative" dimension, in the sense that students and teachers would search together for a format of dealing with conflicts at school. If this workshop actually takes place, both parties will look only at the outcome when evaluating the activity. And rightly so, because we basically offered them help to solve a problem of theirs. In this case, like in many others, we don't think we can hide behing the "Art" props of our theatre and say it's all in the eyes of the beholder. Just as the students have the right to demand teachers they can trust, spect-actors have the right to demand our best effort in order to meet their desires.

This means that, although we're not professionally trained therapists, we should look at the standards of therapy, in order to avoid creating impact at random. I am aware this is controversial. Some collegues say that "theatre has its own language, we should not try to describe it in terms of therapy or social science". This may be true for the performer, but many spect-actors we know do not want to learn another language first. The democratic nature of Theatre of the Oppressed means you will constantly learn new languages.

To give an example: can you go into a school, give a workshop about violence first, in which you develop a scene with a stabbing incident by which a young man dies, then present a play about the terrible consequences of this crime, after which you invite the students to react. But, devastated as they are, they don't react at all. Can you then say: "Oh well, thank you for coming and have a nice day."? This performance really took place. The tour was broken off by the local Health Department, organiser of the performances, for it had an adverse effect on the teenage audiences. No doubt it was great theatre, it changed the lives of the spect-actors completely. But it also took their ability to express themselves away, at least for a short period. Taking therapy standards into consideration could have avoided this.

The responsibility of theatre as a tool for change is great, just as great as the kind of theatre it eventually produces. Theatre can be political, therapeutical and great art at the same time!

Under Pressure 8, November 2001