| Response to Boal
by Joel Plotkin, Canada
"...we know that there exist some groups
that dedicate themselves to working in favor of corporations,
obeying their commands, trying to adapt their workers to the better
fulfillment of their roles, so that the workers might become more
profitable, more lucrative. Even though they use, in a fragmented
form, some of the exercises, games and techniques that we created,
in addition to their habitual role-playing, they seek to consolidate
a situation of oppression – exactly the opposite of our
philosophy.” Augusto Boal, Under Pressure, Year 3, Volume
11,August 2002
*************
Let me begin by affirming the enormous respect I have for the
work of Augusto and the groups that have taken inspiration from
him. I have attended three workshops taught by Boal at the NY
Marxist Center and was a visitor to the 1997 Theater of the Oppressed
Festival in Toronto, which I reviewed daily for an e-list for
sociodrama (now defunct).
I have done considerable work with drama therapists,
psychodramatists, and Playback Theater, which use techniques similar
to (often identical to) TO methods for purposes of personal change,
group problem solving, and sociodramatic change. I came to Boal’s
work after having experienced and viewed workshops run by people
in that sector. I have also done workplace training in corporate
settings using action methods (I’ll use this term to describe
those techniques that are common to both TO and other forms of
applied theater)
Tools of Aristotle
I find no fundamental difference in the techniques. Whether used
for social change, political empowerment, improving group dynamics,
or personal growth, practitioners focus on and strengthen very
similar skills: creating awareness, embodying change kinaesthetically,
training skills in immediacy, and enhancing verbal and nonverbal
relatedness. The tools are the ones described by Aristotle, (product
of a sexist, slave culture that he may be): anagnoresis and peripeteia
(awareness and reversal). Catharsis, or rectification, (H.D.F.
Kitto’s translation) provides the means by which art (and
rehearsal) abstracts the raw, painful elements of human interaction.
I have used forum theater techniques in business and professional
settings—sometimes with the police, sometimes in industries
I considered socially reprehensible (industrial food processing).
In all cases, the workshops were contracted by human relations
departments to focus on valuable human skills such as racism and
gender bias elimination, harassment elimination, counseling, and
improving interpersonal and group communication. With police,
workshops were focused on improving communication skills and diversity
tolerance to eliminate police violence in domestic and community
interventions.
Working With Oppressors
In short, I have worked with people whom it is easy to label “oppressors.”
In all cases, I have found that there is no difference in the
kind of work I do, regardless of the amount of power held by the
participants. Theater work enhances personal power, harmonizes
and cleanses group power, and causes awareness of social, economic,
and political power. I’m convinced that no one who goes
through this work does not emerge better for it—humanized,
conscientized, physically more flexible, more sensitive to others.
It can be argued that a more human oppressor
is a more dangerous oppressor. I work with these people because
I feel certain, as certain as my philosophy and faith can make
me, that my work contributes to the elimination of oppression.
Not that the torturer becomes a more effective torturer, or that
the arms dealer becomes a more effective arms dealer, but that
I have introduced a seed of subversive awareness that will ultimately
make it impossible for someone to continue to be a torturer or
arms dealer. (And, by the way, I would probably never accept a
contract to work in either setting) My work has convinced me that
the some of the most important work we have to do is with oppressors.
It is often the hardest work, since often the oppressors are more
like ourselves (the jokers) in privilege, background, and education
than we are like the oppressed groups with which we work. The
world will not change until both the oppressors and the oppressed
change. Indeed, it is my fullest belief that each of us has within
ourselves both the power to oppress and the capability of victimization.
We desperately need TO workers who can work
with rapists, as well as rape victims. TO with “oppressors”
is not designed to help them oppress better; I fully agree that
no one should use action methods to improve the ability of the
police to beat and club people into submission, or to train salespeople
to trick and deceive, or to train bureaucrats to manipulate and
distort the public missions of their work.
Rainbow of Desire
Nor should drama therapy be seen as counter-revolutionary: helping
people to cope meekly with oppressive situations, or to become
complacently tolerant of evil. This is often cited by activists
as a reason for rejecting personal change approaches. No therapist
I’ve met wants people to submit to oppression, but to become
fuller human beings in order to cause change in their lives.
The techniques of Rainbow of Desire parallel much of the work
of DT’s. The difference I have seen (Boal’s use of
the technique in a large group session in Toronto and David Diamond’s
in a smaller session there) is that ROD seems to focus on plot
(or mythos) choices, while DT tries to go beneath the surface
to look at the deeper human needs at play in a situation. These
needs are no less universal than the web of power that TO so ably
highlights. I have seen drama therapists accomplish far more in
the same short workshops as I saw in these ROD sessions.
Drama Therapy
I remember watching (in Toronto) a videotape of David Diamond’s
excellent work with a First Nations group in Northwest Canada.
TO work centered around the continuing pain of the legacy of the
“Indian Schools” period, when suddenly, painfully,
the issue of sexual abuse by Euro-Canadian teachers and social
workers surfaced. Watching David flounder somewhat under the power
of this issue, I recall thinking that here was an excellent opportunity
for a psychodramatist or drama therapist, working closely with
a TO joker, to accomplish still another transformation. At a National
Association for Drama Therapy conference in 1996, Warren Nebe
described a series of pre-liberation workshops in South Africa
in which all the action methods were used, so that personal pain
could be directly addressed by drama therapy methods, story elements
mirrored through Playback Theater; TO was used prominently to
help participants encounter the powerful forces of oppression
at work in their society.
No Orthodoxy
I am urging a considered and careful inclusivity for other approaches
and allied work with other theatrical action methods. I am urging
a willingness to reconsider the way we label or stereotype groups.
And I am urging TO practitioners to avoid turning Boal’s
wonderful work into fundamentalist orthodoxy.
Contact: joel@sunyit.edu
Under Pressure 12/13, February 2003
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