• An Effective Multicultural Dialogue led Marc Weinblatt and Cheryl Harrison
• Small Steps towards Change: A parable from Azerbaijan
• The Mosaic of T.O. in the U.S. and Canada
• Theatre of the Oppressed and Playback Theatre - Cousins with a Common Cause
• Change the World and Have a Good Time Doing It!

An Effective Multicultural Dialogue led by Marc Weinblatt and Cheryl Harrison
By Robert Leonard for CAN (Community Arts Network), fall 1999.

Ever go to a multicultural dialogue and come away inspired, moved, and energized to act? It's rare for me. In my experience multicultural dialogue, all too often, muddles about in guilt, accusation, and immobilized wishful thinking. Not so with artists/activists Marc Weinblatt and Cheryl Harrison. On June 6 and 7, as a "post conference workshop" following the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference, these two skilled and careful practitioners of interactive theatre techniques took 30 strangers through a two-day progressive dialogue about multicultural activism that wound up clarifying personal agendas, shedding light on the terrain, and providing new tools to take to the difficult but crucial struggle.

Marc and Cheryl are experienced partners in facilitating the hard dialogue around multiculturalism. Marc, a Jewish man, and Cheryl, an African-American woman, offer themselves as a model of the dialogue itself as they carefully, thoughtfully develop the actual processes of each day with each other and with the participants. They use their own amalgamation of techniques originated by Augusto Boal and many others. An environment of respect and courage is established at the very outset and reconfirmed at every step along the way. Their experience was revealed in their ability to mix physical exercises that release body tensions and mental strain with imaginative and critical exercises that bring a high level of articulation to hidden perceptions and understanding. Their own deep commitment to and ever vigilant curiousity about undoing the systemic roots of racism (and the other oppressions of our society) made them partners with the participants, not simply instructors or facilitators. Their own critique rests on the premise that racism is a function of prejudice combined with power, that it is systemic and hidden within our institutions, and that it is a centuries old habit that requires patient, persistent and rigorous work to reverse and overcome. Their clear sense of the difficulty is matched with an optimism that is grounded in realistic and carefully critiqued activism.

Given that any workshop of this sort is a unique blend of human experience, there is no need to spin out the particulars of this workshop's journey. It is vitally important to share, however, that this workshop was as practical and realistic as it was imaginative and stimulating. There was unanimous expression at the end of the workshop, comprised 1/3 people of color and 2/3 European Americans, of deep gratitude for the opportunity to witness, to more clearly understand the struggle, and to have practiced effective actions in the context of real circumstances. Attention was paid to the importance of next steps, so that personal agendas could grow. This was a process that accomplished substantial gains for everyone who participated.

(Bob Leonard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Virginia Tech. He is a founder of the Community Arts Network.) © Community Arts Network

Small Steps towards Change: A parable from Azerbaijan
By Marc Weinblatt for "The Higher Source", April 2000.

A little over a year ago, I had the incredible opportunity to lead 2 weeks of community-based theatre work in Azerbaijan -- a former Soviet republic bordering Iran and the Caspian Sea. For those who are unfamiliar,Azerbaijan has been in brutal political-ethnicwar with neighboring Armenia for over 10 years. The situation is not unlike Bosnia or even Israel and Palestine. While the fighting appears to have stabilized in recent times, it is clearly a tragic situation for the region as well as the good people of both countries.

The primary tool I used was a array of techniques known internationally as Theatre of the Oppressed (T.O.) Originally developed by Brazilian, Augusto Boal, T.O. is used all over the world for social and political activism, conflict resolution, community building, and therapy. It is designed for non-actors and is immensely accessible to any population for deepening self awareness, problem solving, and empowerment.

In Azerbaijan, my workshops were set up with 3 groups of teenagers plus 1 group of adult women -- all Internally Displaced Persons (IDP's) -- refugees within their own country. It is important to note that despite the fact that these people live in conditions of poverty, they do not identify as peasants. In fact, before they were ethnically "cleansed" from their "Motherland" where they lived for generations, they had respectable jobs and nice homes. Now they live in huge refugee camps -- in mud brick huts, prefabricated metal units, and tents. They have lost everything. One elder man I met told me, "This was not how I expected to live the final years of my life."

I tell this story, in part because I promised to raise people's awareness when I came back to the United States. I share it here because it reminds me of my own impatience with my own journey. Certainly my life is easier and more privileged than those whose story I laid out. But, like many of us, I struggle with my own inner demons and internal "oppressors". And, perhaps like some of you reading, I want to heal it all NOW. I dream of big, cathartic transformations and quick results. However, this is not usually the case. When I let go of outcome and pay more attention to the moment, I find that I actually notice the "little victories" -- the small steps that move me forward in life.

This lesson was first introduced to my consciousness about 10 years ago as a participant in a week-long Orgodynamics personal growth seminar. Towards the end of the workshop, I had not experienced the huge transformation I had (naively) set myself up for. Our final structure was one in which, individually, we were invited to "dance our dance" to music we blindly pulled out of a grab bag. As I reached into the bag, I wished for African drums -- something BIG and dramatic so I could move my stuck energy. Laughing at this, the cosmos gave me Tibetan chants with virtually no change in dynamics. I barely moved in the 10 minutes the music lasted. Resistance, frustration, and excruciatingly painful throughout until I finally accepted my plight. It was then, at the end, that I experienced a wave of bliss. I had indeed danced my dance. Desiring the path of the hare, I realized mine was the path of the tortoise. When I stopped resisting the smallness of my experience, I recognized just how "large" it was. And I got my transformation.

I was reminded of this again in Azerbaijan. Though the situation was much grander, the metaphor was the same. Small steps can lead to magnificent change.

The Mosaic of T.O. in the U.S. and Canada
By Marc Weinblatt for "Under Pressure" (International T.O. newsletter), July 2000.

Theatre of the Oppressed has finally exploded in the U.S. and Canada. Emanating out of major T.O. hubs in New York, Omaha, Seattle, Vancouver, and Toronto as well as universities across the continent, there is a growing wave of people captivated by its power and effectiveness. Thousands of people, often invisible to all but the populations they work with directly, are creating a veritable grassroots T.O. movement -- using the techniques as part of their work in classrooms, community centers, churches, social service agencies, organizations, therapy practices, even a few theatres. More than anything, this is the face of T.O. in North America. But is it still T.O. as conceived by Augusto Boal?

In early July 2000, 9 of the most experienced T.O. practitioners in North America gathered for 3 days in New York City to explore this and other questions as well as experience each other's current explorations with the work. While there was clearly mutual respect and congeniality, it was also clear that T.O. here is a mosaic of intentions, approaches, and styles. A few trends are worth noting:

Fundamental T.O. elements such as Forum Theatre and the language of "oppressor / oppressed" are having mixed results -- in some cases, changing entirely. In fact, many companies and individuals are shedding the T.O. nomenclature and calling it "Theatre of Liberation", "Theatre for Living", "Redo Theatre", etc. This is perhaps reflective of an overall highly privileged audience not relating to or uncomfortable with the word "oppression". Perhaps it is just better marketing.

Although traditional Forum Theatre is used with great success in certain contexts, more and more there are significant adaptations. Rather than focusing on "oppression", many practitioners are finding it more useful to use words like "disrespected", "powerless", "silent". Even the definition of who is oppressor and who is oppressed in a Forum play is regularly in question. Forum is most successful when the group is homogeneous and is in complete agreement with what the problem is and who is causing it. I have rarely found it to be that clear and simple here. With the exception of perhaps aboriginal cultures, I have never worked with what I would call a homogeneous group. Creating one "Image of the Images" is nearly impossible. Even with street youth -- ostensibly having a shared reality of oppression -- I have found them to be all over the map in terms of how they look at things. Perhaps it is the fact that we do come from so many different places and experiences or perhaps it is the American tradition of the rugged individualist. My experience is that T.O. here frequently spotlights heterogeneity rather than homogeneity. And that is where Forum Theatre and the concept of "oppressor / oppressed" stumbles. Many jokers allow audience members to replace whoever they feel is having the problem. (I sometimes do this myself.) While it does invite a rich dialogue reflective of our different experiences, it is clearly not pure Forum and potentially problematic. The cost of this dialogue can be the rewounding of the targets of systematic oppression or what some call "real" oppression (racism, sexism, classism, etc.) This is a tremendously confusing and controversial issue here with a special flavor particular to the U.S. A few practitioners have dropped the use of Forum Theatre altogether. As in Europe, there is a great appreciation for the use of Rainbow of Desire work to explore the complexity of situations.

.While there are some companies and individuals who consider themselves more Boal "purists", many mix T.O. with other methods and approaches. Mady Schutzman, for example, sometimes integrates sociometry (Moreno) and creative writing in her workshops. Julie Salverson weaves in the visual arts. Jan Cohen-Cruz may incorporate cultural-specific forms in her work (e.g. hip-hop music with urban teens.) Michael Rohd's Hope Is Vital trainings are a mix of Boal and other performance based sequences -- Living Stage, Spolin, as well as some of his own invention. Chris Vine and the Creative Arts Team incorporates puppetry in their work with 3-8 year olds. David Diamond uses Polaroid photography with his "Wildest Dream" program. I often integrate other techniques -- including Playback Theatre, movement, meditation, and non-theatrical anti-oppression tools to support a particular process. New York's TOPLAB (Claire Picher, Carmelina Cartei, et al.) is dedicated to working only with marginalized populations while I may work with a group of progressive white people to combat racism. (A future article could be titled "Theatre of the Oppressor".)

Legislative Theatre has barely been tested here. Aside from a few experiments in Canada using T.O. to actively impact lawmaking, T.O. remains essentially within our communities and universities. Springing from a T.O. project on the criminalization of youth, Vancouver's Headlines Theatre (David Diamond) was awarded money from the justice department to allow local street involved youth to videotape police action. Doug Paterson of CTO Omaha is running for Congress in 2002 so perhaps we will soon see theatre as politics in action!

The names I mention in this article are merely a drop in the ocean of practitioners using T.O. techniques to stimulate change in North America. Many others who remain unnamed join us in the trenches daily, working with real people towards personal and societal liberation. It may not always be called T.O. and it certainly does not always appear the way Augusto envisioned it. Whatever ways we adapt them to fit the needs of this unique environment, I am continuously amazed at how well Augusto's methods still work. Dialogue happens and people's lives change. And we have a good time doing it!

Post-script: One critical challenge the North American T.O. community faces is the fact that the most prominent leaders in the field have white skin. We could not ignore this fact as we looked around the room last week. In our vividly multi-cultural contexts, that is problematic. While there certainly are skillful jokers of color, the leadership remains white as it does with most power structures in North America. With this awareness, our charge is to invite, make room for, and actively support more diverse leadership in the field. While only one piece of the social justice puzzle, this issue is fundamental to understanding our work in North America.

Theatre of the Oppressed & Playback Theatre - Cousins with a Common Cause By Hannah Fox, Marc Weinblatt, & Lory Britain for International Playback Theatre newsletter, fall 2000.
Hannah Fox: On April 28-30, 2000 Marc Weinblatt and I co-led a workshop called Theatre, Ritual, and Community in which we wove together the Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed forms. The workshop was held at Lost Valley Educational Center in Dexter, Oregon, an intentional and educational community set in the middle of Oregon's green country side.

There were thirteen participants, all white, ranging in age and background (teachers, actors, social workers) who came from various parts of the Pacific Northwest to participate. Our invited theme for the workshop was "community."

In our early brainstorming sessions Marc and I agreed that feelings of alienation/isolation and the search for connection were paramount in modern society. How can we create a safe and sacred environment using our respective theatre techniques to explore this important issue? After almost twelve months of planning and preparation by way of phone calls and emails back and forth from Eugene to Seattle, we were eager to put our ideas into action.

Our poster read: "We exist in community: Geographic, cultural, spiritual, professional, social, residential-whether you hunger for more connection in your life or seek to balance the connections you already have, this workshop will be an opportunity to deepen your understanding of how you fit into the world around you. We will use interactive theatre forms Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed to assist in our exploration."

We designed the workshop as a ritual, with clear entry and exit points, for we felt that in order for people feel safe enough to journey into their vulnerability and deep stories, the container would need to be well-defined. We decided that the goal of the workshop was not to necessarily learn Playback or T.O. but for the participants to acknowledge and identify where they are struggling and to build a plan of action for positive change.

This being the first time that Marc and I worked together in this way, I was worried that things would be choppy or awkward, either between our facilitation styles or between the techniques themselves. In fact, the compatibility of the forms (and the facilitators) was outstanding! The work we did together over the weekend as a community was meaningful and deep and a strong dialogue evolved on many different levels. Our hope for the workshop to serve as a vessel for transformation was a success.

Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed are similar yet different. I see each form as coming into the house from a different door but meeting in a common living room. Where as Playback is first about the teller and her/his story, T.O. emphasizes the social stratum. Although both forms are concerned with how the personal meets the social, they begin their explorations from opposite sides of the house. Both techniques are considered interactive theatre because audience members do not only watch but interact with the action on stage, and both forms use personal story and improvisation as their base. Another key resemblance is how readilythe two forms use image and sculpture to reflect back feelings and elements of the story. There is little difference between a Playback fluid sculpture and the sculpting of images used throughout the T.O. techniques. An important difference that I see between the techniques lies somewhere in intention and purpose.

The two forms were conceived in different cultures for different reasons. The T.O. technique (born in Brazil) was made for political action and social reform. Playback Theatre (born in the US) grew out of a more psychotherapeutic context and has always had an interest in art and entertainment. Although the goals of Playback are continually changing to meet the needs of specific communities and of society at large (i.e .Playback is becoming more and more interested in the social dimension), it continues to strive towards artful presentation and aesthetic. The blending of Theatre of the Oppressed and Playback Theatre techniques provided an effective and powerful toolkit with which to explore our relationships to our communities. Alternating the Playback form with T.O. allowed for a rich and revealing experience. I was delighted by how seamlessly the two techniques wove together and by how complimentary they both were to our theme.

From the evaluation forms I can report that most of the workshop participants, if not all, took with them valuable tools and new perspective from the experience back into their lives. We will end this article with a short personal account from a TRC participant for whom the workshop's exploration and discovery process enabled her to take the big first step towards a life dream.

(Hannah Fox is a theatre and dance artist, teacher, and director. For the last five years she has been running her own Personal Story Theatre after school program for teens, teaching Playback Theatre at Lane Community College
and directing both the Eugene Playback Theatre company and the Young Women's Theatre Collective. Hannah has recently left Oregon to pursue graduate studies in performance arts at New York University. Contact info: hahafox@hotmail.com ; 409 Park Place Brooklyn, NY 11238)

Marc Weinblatt: To the lay person, Playback and Theatre of the Oppressed can look very similar. Both forms share a commitment to the language of theatre as a tool for transformation. Both have a cadre of community building games and exercises which also serve to bring the body, voice, and emotions alive. Both use physical imagery or human sculptures to invite the expression of truth. Yet, there are fundamental differences which sometimes make the forms seem antithetical in intention. A simple way I define the difference between Playback and T.O. is as follows: Playback Theatre "serves" the teller; Theatre of the Oppressed "uses" the teller. When it comes to personal story, Playback has a pure and sacred quality which is unparalleled. Focusing more on the individual, it allows one person's story to be heard, shared, and honored. That is Playback's greatest strength. We all have witnessed the healing power of this remarkably simple process. Focusing more on the group, T.O. shines as a social exploration. The individual's story becomes a springboard for the collective wisdom. When a "spect-actor" steps into someone's story, they can't help but bring their own story into the discussion. It is also unabashedly action oriented and a very powerful problem solving device. T.O.'s most famous structure, Forum Theatre, is sometimes referred to as a rehearsal for the future.

Over the years, there has been more and more crossover. Augusto Boal's ventures into Europe and North American presented him with many stories of alienation and loneliness. This led him to adapt T.O. to include structures which invited introspection and more direct exploration of personal story. While he remains a champion of social and political activism, his later book, The Rainbow of Desire is subtitled, the "Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy."While both use interactive theatre to make a difference in the world, it is remarkable how separate the two communities of practitioners are. "Theatre, Ritual, and Community" (TRC) was one of the first public workshops (I know of) which consciously brought these two forms together.

Hannah and I originally discussed offering a training which combined the two (which we hope to offerin the future) but we ultimately decided to simply use the work, as best we know how, to support people on a journey of discovery and transformation.We both have a bag of tools -- hers more Playback oriented and mine more T.O. oriented. However, we both are familiar with the two forms and have a great appreciation for their power. As a first time event, we tended to alternate leadership with each us of focusing on our "home" techniques -- Playback to invite story and healing, T.O. to invite dialogue and action.

Part of the beauty of working with Hannah was how fluidly we wove our process together. One of her warm-ups would shift to fit the tone created by mine. I would adapt a T.O. structure to address the needs brought forth through her Playback structure. It was a dance of two highly complementary forms and practitioners - compatible as long as we were mindful as to our intentions with each step. T.O. can indeed foster personal storytelling but Playback does it so exquisitely. Playback undoubtedly can increase social awareness but T.O.'s very foundation is to promote critical thinking and social activism.

What a delight to have at one's fingertips two extraordinary treasure chests. As Hannah and I continue to experiment and play together, I imagine we will discover new flavors - perhaps even develop hybrid processes which could expand the craft and open new doors for transformation. And as Augusto Boal has approached his own evolution of T.O., we undoubtedly will adapt the work to fit the needs of our ever changing environment.

(Marc Weinblatt is founder & director of the Mandala Center for Awareness, Transformation, & Action based in Port Townsend, Washington. Formerly Artistic Director at the Seattle Public Theater, Marc is an internationally
recognized expert in the use of Augusto Boal's ground breaking Theater of the Oppressed to stimulate personal and social change.

Lory Britain (TRC workshop participant): Doing Playback Theater for a year as a student in Hannah's class has been the catalyst for pulling myself back into my heart amidst my serious work life as the director of a large child abuse prevention agency. The gulf between the intellectual side of work and the joyful side of me has been widening as I continue to shoulder the responsibilities and intense demands of my job. What I did not realize was that the "Theater, Ritual, and Community" workshop would point me directly to the now obvious "heart choices, not hard choices".

In retrospect, I believe that the blending of Playback techniques with Theater of the Oppressed techniques created a means to dissipating this gulf within me. The exercises alternated between pulling out the emotional, kinesthetic side of myself and drawing from my intellectual rational side. Playback techniques and exercises require quick-paced improvisation that bypass internal dialogue within myself. This brought me closer to the feeling part of myself. At the same time, the Theater of the Oppressed techniques such as silent sculpturing of bodies represented relevant issues and possibilities in my life in a powerful and concrete way.

My career change became the focus of the workshop. As I explored (and argued with) the different voices within myself, it became clear that I was ready follow my heart. The community created over the weekend provided support and commitment necessary in making changes in my life.With enthusiasm on my part and encouragement from others, I have begun the process of disengaging from my current position and creating my own
consulting business. "Following my heart" has already yielded several independent contracts and I am envisioning how to use theater techniques to help adults understand their children better. I am extremely grateful for the experience and insight from the TRC workshop and excited for what lies ahead.

(Lory Britain, Phd., Program Director of the Relief Nursery. She is the author of children's book, It's MY Body. Contact: loryb@pacwest.net)