I went to the Forum Theater Presentation given by Julian Boal and TOPLAB on Monday night. I met up with Amelia and Andrea there, so they’ll probably have other observations about the evening, but it was a pretty cool event.
Julian spoke a bit about his father’s death, and his bottom line was that he sees all practitioners of the Theatre of the Oppressed as recipients of his father’s inheritance. In other words, Augusto Boal’s legacy belongs not only to Julian, but to everyone who continues using and exploring the arsenal of Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. It was kind of a beautiful idea.
Then Julian got everyone up to play a fun warm up game involving antithetical instructions—i.e. “When I say ‘stop,’ you walk. When I say ‘walk,’ you stop.” Etc etc—and then the performers got up to show their plays. Each dealt with a particular oppression: racial profiling in education, gender bias in the workplace, gentrification, cost of health care, and rights for same-sex couples. Julian asked us to vote for the play that best represented an oppression that we face personally, pointing out that the goal of Forum Theater is not to create “Theatre about the Oppressed” or “Theatre for the Oppressed” but OF the Oppressed, that all of us face some sort of oppression, and that the purpose of the evening was to address an issue in which most of us were invested.
So, we ended up coming back to the play about rights for same-sex couples, including same-sex marriage. It was about a gay man whose partner is hospitalized and who is denied access to his room and to any medical decision. Forum Theatre works like this: after the spect-actors (audience members) have watched the play once, the actors begin to perform again until someone yells, “STOP!”. Then that spect-actor jumps up, takes the place of the play’s protagonist, and plays the scene as he or she likes. So, we had people jump up to try to argue with the nurse who barred the protagonist from his partner’s room, to beg the partner’s brother for help, to push past the partner’s homophobic father, to offer guilt trips to anyone who would listen, to call a lawyer, to call the press, and to pull out power of attorney papers, Vermont marriage licenses, and any other form of documentation that they could come up with. After maybe forty minutes of this, Julian thanked us and said, “The time for theatre is now over, but the time for discussion has just begun,” and then the event was over.
I walked out of the event feeling excited about the techniques, but also somewhat frustrated. Call me a self-loathing dyke, but I get a little tired of the Gay-Partner-barred-from-the-hospital scenario as the prime example of Gay Oppression. It’s inevitably met with the solution: once we have Gay Marriage, everything will be great! This is a fine solution for most city-dwelling liberal rich white gay and lesbian couples, the vast majority of whom will never face the Apocalyptic Hospital Scenario, but I don’t think the Gay Marriage band-aid does much for the majority of queer couples who may never find themselves barred from a hospital room but who may face violence, job and housing discrimination—still legal in many states, btw—or day-to-day instances of discrimination and exclusion. Anyway. I remind myself that many radical movements have faced these socioeconomic and often racial tensions, but I still find it sort of jarring sometimes.
This week has been good, busy busy busy at work. Looking forward to seeing you all tomorrow. If any of you want to see some Forum Theatre and get involved with
WHAT CAN WE DO TO BREAK THE CHAIN OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN?
The Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed
and the Education Ministry at the
When:
Where: South Hall of the
Come and join us to experience ourselves as “spectators” and “actors” in the story of violence against women. This is an action to reinvent the past and better understand the present, in order to invent the future.
Break The Chain of Violence Against Women on May 31st in 10T at
