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| Taking
Back the Stage |
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| by
Pappi Tomas |
On
a Saturday night when Ralph Nader drew roughly
10,000 people into KeyArena, an audience of
about 30 gathered in the gymnasium of a youth
center on east Capitol Hill. Taking their
seats among bare white walls and a plain propless
stage, they greeted each other one by one,
so that no two people, actors included, went
un-introduced. "Say hello," they were urged.
"Get to know your neighbor. We're one big
happy family." They were about to engage in
The Color of Justice, a participatory theatrical
production put on by the Seattle Public Theater
as part of its Theater of Liberation series.
The audience intimacy was unusual. But then
how else can a group of mostly strangers be
persuaded to shout "Stop!" in the middle of
a scene, walk up onto the stage, replace one
of the actors, and nudge the story in a new,
and hopefully more positive, direction?
This is a hugely interactive, intensely personal,
and overtly political form of theater called
Theater of Liberation, also known as Theater
of the Oppressed. It was developed in Brazil
by scholar and dramatist Augusto Boal. Boal
wanted a theater that would begin, not within
the centers of culture, but rather out in
the neighborhoods where people were ignored.
He wanted the property of theater - the characters,
the plotlines - to be wrested from the hands
of privileged actors and given back to the
spectators. People could then enact their
own stories before an empathetic audience.
Boal wanted this theater to serve as a forum,
an occasion for discussion, and a laboratory
for discovering solutions and effecting change.
Saturday evening's performance achieved all
of the above. The actors, 10 of them, each
an activist, each a member of a minority group
in Seattle, were not your typical repertory
troupe. And the events they dramatized - incidents
of police brutality, institutional discrimination,
everyday racism - were taken from their own
lives, events that some in the audience knew
well and others knew only secondhand.
They spent only one week preparing for the
event. For two or three hours a night, they
gathered to share their stories. They explored
the expressive capacity of their bodies and
voices, they loosened up their natural ability
to act. And from all this raw material, they
created scenes, composed poetry and lyrical
prose, invented gestures and vocalizations
when words were not enough. They learned how
to improvise.
The audience, too, had to improvise that evening.
"What do you want from this experience?" one
of the facilitators asked them. "Love," someone
said. "Peace," said another. "Unity, freedom,
activism, respect." No sooner had these wishes
been expressed than up on the stage the actors
were manifesting them. They shouted, groaned,
waved, and crouched in response. Then the
audience was encouraged to join in - to represent,
in similar fashion, whatever quality had yet
to be accounted for. This was the model for
the rest of the evening: the people said what
they wanted, and the people were responsible
for making it happen.
Later, from three narrative scenes presented,
the audience was asked to choose just one.
In this, as in all the scenes, one character
is being oppressed. It is this character that
one audience member after another - a white
30ish fellow, a young black man, a younger
black girl, a middle-aged white man-replaces
on the stage. Each spectator turned "spectactor"
then confronts the oppressor and, using whatever
strategy comes to mind - belligerence, sympathy,
reason, humor - tries to even the score.
The point, however, is not necessarily to
find a solution. Participants should leave
Theater of Liberation feeling, at best, as
though solutions are possible, that they are
free to pursue them, and that they'll find
support if they do.
The results, as one might expect, were mixed.
"What do you feel now?" the audience was asked
at the end. "Awakened," said one. "Saddened,"
replied another. Some were "proud" and "happy."
Others were "frustrated" and "angry." All
in all, though, these spectators seemed mobilized.
John Sullivan hopes that this example of "forum
theater" will encourage diverse people to
share a single effort. "White activists need
to be allies of activists of color," he says.
"They need to be resources for those who are
often held back at the gate." Yet he understands
that for many white activists, these stories
of injustice against people of color are "not
their stories." During the WTO, brutality
came as much to whites as to anyone else,
he says, but such an incident was an "anomaly,"
not a matter of daily survival.
It is, however, a matter of survival for people
like Mrs. Ophelia Ealy, one of the actors
that evening, whose son, Michael Randall Ealy,
was killed two years ago under questionable
circumstances at the hands of Seattle police
officers and American Medical Response attendants.
It was her passion in response to her son's
death that had attracted John Sullivan's attention
and inspired him to plan this performance
around the themes of police brutality and
racial injustice.
Even so, Mrs. Ealy herself, at the close of
the forum, spoke in terms that included everyone.
"You don't have to be guilty to be murdered,"
she said. "You just have to be there."
She urged audience members to do what they
had been doing all evening: stand up in public
and talk about this kind of injustice. "It
exists," she said. "It's everywhere. And as
long as we sit back and do nothing, it's going
to continue."
For more information regarding future Theater
of Liberation performances, or how to develop
an event in your own community, call Seattle
Public Theater at (206) 328-4848.
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