Sen Zhan narrates this episode and speaks with Theatre of the Oppressed
advocates and facilitators, Barbara Santos and Till Baumann

SZ:  Imagine going out on Saturday evening to see a play at the theater. You find your seats. The curtains rise. The performers are in their places. You sit back and relax ready to take the story in.

The play seems to be something about conflict. Power dynamics between the characters unfold and some scales were tipped along the way. And then, maybe someone important dies.
                       
As you’re watching the story unfold, something is happening inside of you, some kind of sensemaking. There is some metaphorical stuff happening on stage, you’re sure of that, but what do the metaphors mean exactly? You think you might know what the prop that the main character is using represents and maybe why that song keeps coming back across different scenes. You’re not sure if you’re the only one who is thinking this. Your eyebrows furrow as you try a little too hard to figure it out.
                       
Then the lights black out. The curtains drop and now everyone is clapping. Some are shouting their praise to the case, throwing flowers onto the stage. The performers line up, join hands and bow fervently to the audience who are now rising for a standing ovation.
                       
You look around. You’re one of the only ones still sitting. Reluctantly you also rise and join the ocean of applause. It would seem unappreciative to do otherwise, but inside you’re still trying to work out just what this play was about. You have a few theories, but you’re wondering if your interpretation is too obvious.
                       
As you pass some clusters of people on the way out, you hear snippets of their conversations. Ah ha, someone said what you had been thinking about the play, so you’re not alone in having understood it this way.
                       
Now, someone else said something you didn’t quite understand, but it sounded fascinating. You wish you could linger a while and listen to more of this analysis without it being weird.
                       
You move on and your mind is pulled away from thinking about the play. The evening continues elsewhere, and the story remains somewhere in your system, another piece of media that you’ve consumed soon to be overwritten by the next piece of content on your social media feed.
                       
But somewhere inside, you’re still thinking about that story, the conflict it depicted, the power struggles, the turning points, where things got heated up and you find yourself wondering what if something about the story were different. Could there have been an alternate ending? Did that character really need to die? What might have happened if that really important prop just disappeared from the scene? What if someone came in at a crucial moment and convinced that really angry character to go take a walk instead of starting a street fight?
                       
What I’ve just described is exactly what happens in a participative theater modality called Theater of the Oppressed and you’re about to hear why Theater of the Oppressed is such a powerful way of leveraging citizen involvement to make social change and you’ll experience what it’s like to be at a live Theater of the Oppressed production hosted by Kuringa, a facilitator specialized in Theater of the Oppressed methods.
                       
Now before we raise the curtains, let’s rewind the timeline by a few decades and do a two-finger pinch out on Google Maps way out until we can see in our minds eye the United States in North American and Brazil in South America.
                       
On April 1, 1964 Brazil’s Democratic Republic was overthrown by the Brazilian Armed Forces supported at the time by the United States in an effort to contain the allegation of Brazil’s development towards communism. The military dictatorship which at its height stifled freedom of speech and political opposition, adopted media censorship, torture and exile of dissidents lasted for 21 years until 1985.
                       
During this time of political domination, a white Brazilian playwright and social activist by the name of Augusto Boal drew attention to the censorship, oppression and torture enacted by the military regime. He did this through an innovative format where audience members of a play could stop a performance and suggest different actions for the characters experiencing oppression and the actors on stage would carry out their suggestions. This was the foundation for what would later be known as Theater of the Oppressed.
                       
The military junta saw Boal’s activity and all such cultural and artistic activities as a threat to their grip on the country. In 1971, on his way home, Boal was kidnapped off the street, arrested, tortured and exiled not to set foot again in Brazil until 15 years later in 1986 after the removal of the military governance and the restoration of Brazil to a democracy.
                       
We now snap to the summer of 2022 on the other side of the pond in Berlin, a city with its own history of struggle against authoritarianism where a group of 35 social activists come together for a week-long intensive course in Theater of the Oppressed. The course is delivered by none other than one of Augusto Boal’s longstanding collaborators from Brazil, Barbara Santos and her colleague Till Baumann.
                       
I interviewed Barbara, Till and four participants from her course separately over the span of one month. Barbara is a Kuringa or the facilitator for the crucial component of audience participation during Theater of the Oppressed productions.

BS: First of all, I have to say that I am Brazilian. When people listen my English is listen the voice or for somebody that speak English with Brazilian accent because we are not seeing each other but just listening.

SZ: For 20 years, Barbara worked with Augusto Boal at The Center of Theater of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro and following Boal’s passing in 2009 has continued to develop her technique in Theater of the Oppressed in a feminist perspective.
                       
Barbara’s organization, also called Kuringa offers annual qualification courses in The Theater of the Oppressed method which I attended this summer. One of the outcomes of this course was a cocreated performance which we produced in four and a half days. That’s right, an entire production in less than one week which you’re about to experience in a moment.

BS:  You are going to see here we are going to play something, but what we’re going to play is like a question for you, some problems onstage. Also, as a provocation for us to come together, we are not looking for the perfect answer or “the” answer, but maybe some possibilities. After a while we will invite you to find alternatives that are easy.

SZ: Theater of the Oppressed is at its core a participative changemaking tool for evolution toward more just societies, but before we can wisely apply ourselves to action, let’s first slow down and consider the topic of oppression.

BS: Oppression is something so present in our lives. We understand oppression is the feud of injustice and balance of power thinks that provoke relations that space in advantage and disadvantage is about who can assess and who cannot. Oppression is the result of this inequality.

SZ: The inner pedagogue and social activist Till Baumann is deeply connected with communities in Latin America and became involved with Barbara’s work in Rio de Janeiro in the ‘90s. Till contributes to understanding oppression across different contexts and cultures.

TILL BAUMANN:   For me it is very much related to the realization or the non-realization of violation of human rights, but human rights violations are also very much rooted in structures, structural injustices.

SZ: From what Barbara and Till are saying, something I wanted to understand was if oppression was always systemic or if there were situations where some people simply had more power than others. Barbara explains.

BS: It’s concretely one person has more power than another person in the group, but why this happens is systemic. This person, both of them, they are representing a social group behind them. It’s not about them. It’s about how the group that this person belongs is organized in society.
                       
Having a black woman like me in front of a white man from the north of the world, society is going to see us in different positions. Our assets are different but not because of him particularly. It’s not because of me particularly, but because of what we represent.

SZ: Till describes what he’s seen in his work when it comes to people beginning to recognize that they are implicated in systems of oppression in the roles of either the oppressed, the oppressors or sometimes both at the same time.

TB: Often what happens in The Theater of the Oppressed workshops, there is a step of becoming conscious of oppressions. I think it’s very crucial this moment and also very, very sensitive. It needs a lot of trust. It needs a lot of connection in the group.
                       
For me, this connection between the people in the group that we work with is really the central issue, the key point because if people feel connected and feel trust with others and don’t feel alone and isolated with the situation or with the topic also, it’s very different. It creates a lot of possibilities.

SZ:  Till continues with the importance of collective support as we reckon with what it means to have participated in oppressive power dynamics and how we can be supportive to all the actors involved in these stories by demonstrating our willingness to examine ourselves and what roles we may be playing in the system.

TB: For me it’s a possibility to come together and not be alone in the situation of having a certain role in society and also receiving criticism often for good reasons, but being able to process this together with other persons that might have similar stories of socialization.
                       
I think this would be one of the answers for me that The Theater of the Oppressed can create settings where people don’t stay isolated when they start reflecting on their own privileged place in society as males or white males for example.
                       
This is why it’s so important how you do it because there are a lot of bad examples also of groups of men coming together and not having an impact or objective with what they do but rather the idea of reaffirming manhood. The important thing for me in The Theater of the Oppressed approach on masculinity is that it’s anti-patriarchal, antisexists.

BS: So, we have here onstage a form of the play that brings several questions. In other words, we are going to come together to understand these questions and find some alternatives. Okay?

PATICIPANTS: [agree, sing]

SZ: Once the first part of the performance is finished, the Kuringa steps out to canvas the audience for how they understood this offer.

BS: How do you understand? What are the questions that you understand from the play and what it’s about?

FEMALE VOICE:  How you can stop hatred.

MALE VOICE:  Is it love or is it power?

FEMALE VOICE:   It’s very problematic.

MALE VOICE: It’s about the polarization of society and the world.

MALE VOICE: It’s religion.

BS:  Now we see the complexity. We asked our audience how they understood our question. From which place they understood because maybe they didn’t understand from the same place like us because if the audience didn’t understand it, there’s a problem. We have nothing to do together, but when we both understand in our piece of theater has some problem, let’s talk about how to overcome it.
                       
We really want the audience to understand that we don’t ask them to be heroes, to come with amazing solutions, individual solutions. No, no, no. We have to come together and think strategically. A solution is not the aim. Solutions are complex and need time, but we are much more interested in the strategic. We analyze this.

TB: We always say that the play is like a question, not to receive one answer but it opens from many different answers that come from the audience in this dialogic process and gives you the possibility to question the status quo is absolutely central and this is a really fascinating process because you often don’t know what will come from the audience’s ideas.
                       
I like very much a term that Augusto Boal used which is about actors. There is no more difference between the actors onstage and the spectators in the audience. In English there is this wonderful phrase, “to act” which includes several aspects, one is to be tracked onstage but the other aspect is to act, to act onstage and in real life, to act to transform society. It’s like a rehearsal for a revolution. It’s not a revolution. It’s a rehearsal.

SZ: Because this focus on acting in society is so important and indeed what Theater of the Oppressed hopes to activate in its audience, a few of the participants from the course wanted to add their perspectives on why they forum part of Theater of the Oppressed is such a vital step to taking a performance offstage and into the world to catalyze real social change.

SIMON: My name is Simon. I’m 29 years old. We are the actors performing and the audience is consuming the play. We invite the audience to enter into dialogue. It’s a circular process. It’s us in a laboratory space that we open with our play and that for me is a completely different way of understanding theater not as entertainment, but as a dialogue that we think about together, things like responsibilities to society, ethics.

RANIAH: My name is Raniah. I’m 34 years old. One of the qualities of Theater of the Oppressed is to shake and deconstruct the idea of the passive spectator. Come to the stage and practice the change that you think or claim you know and understand from your position, very armchair position in the audience, come to the play and challenge yourself and challenge your ideas.

FRIDA: I’m Frida. I’m 32. Our workshop is an open stage. The work offers you onstage tickets to become an acting part of the community. Anytime you want to you can get onstage.

CLAU:  My name is Clau. I am 29. When we look at an image or a scene, we are asked to renounce a sense of mastery over the aesthetic creation. There is a revelation of the fragile and porous boundary that divides actors and spectators and how artificial that division is. As you talk about the experience of the actor, you inevitably start to reflect on your position as a spectator or as an observer to what is brought by other audience members, by other spect-actors. We attempt to break this division between who acts and who listens.

SZ: Let’s head back to the theater. You’ve just observed from your seats in the audience a performance depicting a scene of oppression and heard some interpretations from your co-audience members of what this seemed to be all about.

Now the Kuringa has another invitation for you.

BS: We invited you just to get to know your neighbors and exchange ideas with your neighbors. What would be possible? Which kind of strategy you could imagine at any moment to use here to try out new possibilities. We are looking for collective strategies because we know that it’s not about individual solutions but collective solutions. As members of different societies, what can you imagine for this kind of situation, what we can do as a society? Get to know your neighbors. They’re nice people.

SZ: Then the most exciting part of the evening begins when the audience tells us at which point in the story they want to step in and change something.

BABARA SANTOS: Some possibilities, some ideas. I want to come for the concrete action. When you come onstage? Which moment? This is the question, how to wake up others. Let’s go people! And sometimes say, “Let’s go,” and you are alone there. We have to have some strategy for don’t go alone.

SZ: So, how does all this rehearsal for revolution lead to the concrete changes we want to see in society? We return to participant and actor, Raniah for her take.

RANIAH: I would like to just emphasize that there are different possibilities and scenarios for ones life than the scenario that we’ve been taught. I lived this experience, as a woman, I need to do X, Y and Z and live my life a certain way. There is no other scenario. This is the success scenario.
                       
When I started questioning that, there is another way out of the situation that I’ve gone through or I might be facing in the future, if the person can just have this inner voice, this confident voice saying okay, there is another possibility for our life, another possibility for our ending.
                       
There is a lot of social change on a larger scale than [inaudible 19:57] because it starts from the individual. Because eventually, working on the individual parts will impact the community. I’ve seen through my work how the community can heal itself and healing goes hand in hand with change. If I cannot find another possibility for my life, why am I questioning another possibility for the whole community?

SZ: Continuing with this idea of generating alternative futures, Simon also contributes how his social activism work has been changed by his involvement of Theater of the Oppressed.

SIMON: What I think this method can give to social movement work is this lab character. We are able to create an open space where we can try out innovative strategies so we can think outside the box.
                       
That is something I think we really need in social movements because we have this functional logic where we think this is the problem. We have to work in the most effective way to solve it. We are not able to create a new vision, a new version of what we want because we are so into functioning against what we want to fight against.
                       
I like this playful way of trying out. It’s possible to fail and learn from it that we are lacking. I think what social movements try to do on the big scale Theater of the Oppressed is able to bring closer to myself or to use to really feel what we are doing and to see where is my concrete responsibility.

SZ: The supportive role of this theater work is something Clau speaks to as well.

CLAU: I think that the Theater of the Oppressed enables us to try things out onstage in a safe space together and to imagine new possibilities and how then we can bring these new possibilities, these new opportunities into marches, into squares, into protests, schools, families, relationships and bring the change that we are looking for. It’s a practicing tool or a practicing space where we can make mistakes knowing that struggles for social justice are necessarily ongoing. They are a process, but justice is a process. It’s an action.

SZ: While Simon and Clau talked about how the work in Theater of the Oppressed opened up possibilities for them in their work as social activists, Raniah spoke to the central importance of the body and the changes that she has noticed in herself.

RANIAH: My relationship with my body has transformed completely since I started navigating through the world of Theater of the Oppressed. This affects so much how I even make decisions, how I interact with my surroundings, how I’m present and grounded as a professional, how I connect to my fears and my inner voice. The Theater of the Oppressed is a lot about embodiment to revive and reach your connection to your body. It poses the body as the entry point for the whole process.

BS: We thank you so much.

[applause]

SZ: So, I’ve just upended your quite evening at the theater enjoying a carefully crafted play and turned it into one where you’re aroused out of your seat, get onto stage and bring half the audience with you to rehearse for revolution. Maybe not what you expected your night to look like, but I promise you, you’ll remember this night as the one where you transformed from a passive consumer of stories to an engaged spect-actor pushing social change forward.
                       
All this sounds amazingly fun. Theater of the Oppressed is quickly growing as a modality around the world and has been since the ‘60s. How can you get involved in it if there is not a production or workshop happening in your area?

TB: Well, we do a lot in Kuringa and I know that other colleagues also do this in other places of the world with modification. If there is a group of people with no formal theater yet, it’s not that this entire group of people has to travel and participate in a workshop that is far away, but one or two people can be part of a qualification of a workshop, of a course and then multiply. In a way, this is how forum theater has spread around the world to all the five continents and more than 60 countries.
                       
The practical experience of having participated in a workshop, having seen the forum theater presentation, being physically present or even onstage is probably the best way to get to know it, but if this is impossible, then there are ways of reading, watching and being in contact with persons that work with Theater of the Oppressed in different parts of the world.

BS: I think what we are looking for is transformation. Transformation has different tools. Depending on the situation, we’ve had more results than others. Sometimes people come together to talk and it’s really useful because talking is empowerment and is understandable.
                       
Sometimes people go together and make a demonstration outside. It’s only one event. It’s not going to change things but may start the process. Maybe people do a kind of theater together don’t need to be exactly perfect volunteer there was a kind of tool that comes from other ways of theater.
                       
We have several ways and people that even don’t do theater, they paint or do other things to empower others. There are several ways. I would say to people that maybe they are doing theater, but they don’t volunteer.
                       
If they want to make that theater more engaging, what I always advise is to make alliances, come together with other groups. Maybe I don’t know something but want to talk about the topic. Investigate the topic. Maybe you can talk with a group of people who have already read about this topic. Maybe they don’t do theater, but they are developing this discussion. Don’t imagine that you have to do the whole work alone.
                       
You can even search the internet. There are a lot of groups that are doing different kinds of theater that engaged some topic. You have plenty of opportunities to see plays and examples and books. We have several things that we can search and get to know before we start our own work.
                       
Maybe I’m not going to do a forum, but I can be inspired by that. They do steps that feel comfortable. I can present my piece and afterwards talk to the audience. I don’t have to do the forum. I can still have a conversation with the audience. I can do different things. There are many possibilities to address problems, to develop pieces of art and come together with other people.

SZ: This may have been a program primarily focusing on the modality of Theater of the Oppressed, but getting involved in any kind of change you want to see in the world is activism and that can be accessible from many entry points.

FEMALE VOICE:  Maybe you have your own way of maneuvering getting onstage. How do you want to be part of this? How would you like to contribute to this project? If you feel comfortable cooking something or bringing coffee and having a break with everyone who is building, then that’s enough of a contribution to get in touch. Then slowly, this contribution or this participation can become bigger, but just getting in touch with those who are changing something or appropriating the space is the first step.