© Copyright 1995 by Gary Wood.
Published in "Alternate ROOTS", April 1995.

The History

During the week we immersed ourselves in Boal's techniques (see sidebar), explored conflict resolution methodologies, discussed working models of other response organizations, studied the history of militant nonviolence and jointly envisioned our traveling troupe. It was a training organization, a performance collaborative, a stealth-clown version of the Navy Seals, a support network of arts organizations and grassroots movements, a for-profit corporation doing business in foreign markets, or it was all of these -- or it was none of these.

As our collective brainstorm moved in, our performance work became more acute. The environment was as supportive and as safe as any ensemble I have worked with. The nature of our individual oppressions was often exposed to be the same. Boal has rightly insisted that working to create a set of alternative actions can do two simple things, from which many others are possible. Firstly, the act of collaboratively arriving at alternatives causes a desirable and open dialogue. Secondly, witnessing the alternatives as they are played out in dramatic form is a "rehearsal for life" that benefits the community audience.

It is this aspect of the work that speaks to the efficacy of performance for the resolution of human conflict. By combining the rhetorical conventions of ritual and performance and the authenticating conventions of community ideology we paint ourselves in motion. The objectivity of seeing the Self played out a thousand ways brings us closer to the subject. What I had sought to confirm was true: there was power in the techniques, this power had the ability to heal, the techniques were transferable, and the process was adaptable. Like a hermit crab, I had found a shell to house the body of my work as a teacher, an activist and a practitioner of theatre.

This convergent experience of finding a new, accessible and compact cache of tools is perhaps the single unifying point mentioned in evaluations of Peace Troupe work. In three national workshops more than 70 participants have trained in conflict resolution methods and learned a series of rehearsal techniques developed by Boal. We use the practice of asking, up front, about expectations. At the conclusion of a workshop we discuss those expectations and use anonymous forms to evaluate and document these early experiences. The consensus is clear: participants feel a sense of empowerment that has helped clarify choices for future action. Some of these participants have joined our collective efforts and formed small regional collaboratives of artists and others engaged in community projects. One participant has used the skills to mount resistance to the location of a toxic waste landfill in her neighborhood and another to stage dramatic events at a midwestern missile site. In New York City, a participant from the January workshop is helping in the fight to save a Greenwich Village community garden by using the techniques to generate alternatives to the garden's destruction.

Building on the initial workshop in Celo, Peace Troupe has developed three main methods of working within communities: collaborative workshops, deployments, and community residencies. Of the requests that Peace Troupe has received for training, seven have been for workshops, one for a community deployment, and one for a long-term residency.

Workshops are aimed at transference of skills. These workshops are usually sponsored by an organization to address a specific social issue, to train artists and cultural workers, or to empower participants. They have ranged from three days to one week. We schedule workshops to have several lengthy performance/rehearsal sessions during the day. A "rehearsal", as typically understood, is not the best way to think of rehearsal in a Boalian sense. To Boal, the act of moving from the role of a spectator to the role of an actor is an integral part of the moment of his anti- Aristotelian "catharsis". This act constitutes a "rehearsal for life" on the part of the recombinant "spect-actor". The evenings of such workshops are spent in conflict resolution training sessions and in scheduled (but open-ended) panel discussions. This is often where a plan for implementing the techniques is mapped out.

Residencies are extended visits to, usually, geographic communities. The model of this project is currently being developed with the community of Keysville, Georgia. The Keysville residency involves the use of multi-media tools to document a community as it exists, and as preparation for adding the distinctly Boalian step of re-inventing it as it might be. In the case of Boal, this envisioning process usually applies to the individual. Peace Troupe, from the beginning, has sought to alter the methods to apply to masses. Our first video documents this attempt as we staged possible interventions to a scheduled Ohio clash between the Klan, an anti-Klan hate group and several nonviolent peace organizations. This was all scheduled to take place just blocks away from a family-oriented community festival. We staged the event and sought ways to divert the announced violence planned by the anti-Klan hate group.

A deployment is the most complex aspect of Peace Troupe's work. At the behest of a group engaged in conflict, members of Peace Troupe would work locally toward resolution of conflict or exploration of a social issue. By maintaining teams regionally, it is envisioned that a cadre of up to a dozen Peace Troupe members could arrive in any location within 24 hours. Working with local citizens a series of training sessions, public performances, workshops and "events" would be implemented. The Peace Troupe team would work with local leaders and community members to resolve the conflict nonviolently through traditional methods of negotiation and mediation, Listening Project-style community exploration, open debate and the creation of public art.

During January of 1995, at the "Youth, Nonviolence and the Role of Performance Process" workshop held at Horizons School, Peace Troupe members met with a Minister from Wedowee, Alabama. Wedowee, in Randolph County, is the site of a school that was arsoned last July following a series of racist statements by the school's principal -- who has been controversial in the community for over 25 years for his public bigotry. After attending an evening session of the Peace Troupe workshop and meeting with 15 high school students and 15 adults, the Minister was moved to invite Peace Troupe to assist in addressing the issues that these incidents have raised. As adults fight openly, and often violently, students in the rural community are caught in the middle of a decades-old struggle that they have little desire to take up. They are the target of racist comment and action -- like the canceling of their prom for fear of inter-racial dating -- yet they insist they are committed to avoiding the errors of their parents. This invitation remains intact and members of the Peace Troupe staff have traveled to Alabama to meet with community members and to develop a plan that involves young people.

Baz Kershaw, in The Politics of Performance (Routledge), examines the "contextuality" of performance events in relation to the post- modern notion of "intertextuality" and this discussion sheds some light on the efficacy of Peace Troupe. The power of contextuality seems clear: "Godot" on Broadway is not "Godot" in Bosnia. But intertextuality is the complex play of a cultural text, like Madonna's character images, aginst other cultural texts. When Madonna performs nearly nude on a bed placed in the middle of a Catholic church, she plays not only with our sense of spatial context but with our "reading" of those other powerful cultural texts. She forces us to interpret from within a new, if temporary, set of given circumstances.

Mady Schutzman, editor with Jan Cohen-Cruz of "Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy and Activism," has begun in related work to interact with mass-produced cultural images of the female body, reinventing these images from a radical feminism. She explodes the interactivity of Boal's "spect-actor interventions", recasting the female image in extreme states, often as slick magazine covers, using the same tools of technology that manufactured the originals.

Boal himself, in his most recent book "Rainbow of Desire," has begun to apply his ideas to a Western, and more deeply psychological, sense of oppression and oppressor. And when we talk of oppression, what do we mean? This issue, insufficiently answered by Boal, has a clear articulation in the chapter called "Five Faces of Oppression" in Iris Marion Young's Justice and the Politics of Difference.

The March 26 to 28 "Mainstreaming Peace Teams" assembly at American University in Washington, DC addressed policy issues relating to the global nonviolent peace movement. The consultation was attended by David Grant -- a co-founder of Peace Troupe, and a peace team (and Peace Corps) veteran. The conference assembled over 50 experts in the fields of nonviolence, military peacekeeping missions, relief organizations, and civilian peace teams. Michael Beer, coordinator of the project which was funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace and the Chase Fund, commented that "civilian peace team interventions are proliferating in violent conflict zones around the world. Large institutions and governments are starting to take notice. These unarmed peace teams have been operating quietly and effectively in many conflicts" including Haiti, South Africa, Central America, the Balkans, Russia, Israel and Palestine.

Continuing to explore these and related issues, Peace Troupe has planned a workshop session in the Asheville, North Carolina area prior to the Alternate ROOTS Annual Meeting. By offering training in a variety of techniques and by bringing together artists and political activists we will explore the ideas of "politicizing theatre" and "theatricalizing politics" in a one week workshop designed to integrate the work of performance, art and peace.

As we move into an age of hyper-interactivity the discussion now occurring is fruitful. For Peace Troupe's ultimate end is an interactive Play-Ware, and no Spielberg-Katzenberg-Geffen-Gates creation can come close. This "virtue-reality" is created by the players, as they play. The context can never be the same. The intertextuality is always self-referential.

PROTAGONIST:

The person experiencing the "oppression", often referred to by Boal as "the oppressed", which has met with some argument.

ANTAGONIST:

The "oppressor" or the source of the oppression. Initially to Boal this was the person who prevented you from acting on your will. He referred to the "cop in the street" as an example of the oppression present in Brazil. After living in political exile in France and traveling in Western countries, Boal became aware of a more psychological set of oppressions, which he has recently articulated as "cop in the head."

INTERVENTION:

The passive to active dynamization of the spectator into the actor produces the spect-actor. This is the moment when the dramatic action is halted and the protagonist is replaced.

SPECT-ACTOR:

In this role, alternatives are offered, by way of improvisation, in an attempt to bring the scene to a different conclusion.

JOKER:

The director, guide or mediator who facilitates the passive-to-active experience of the spect-actor and who encourages the discussion which follows a "rehearsal."

IMAGE THEATRE:

Actors choose real moments from their lives and "sculpt" other actors into images of those moments. By dynamizing the images with freeze-frame motion, a collective reading is possible. Discussion of the changing role of oppressor/oppressed can lead to alternative actions which can be played out in a scene or re-scultped as a series of images.

MASK and RITUAL:

An actor casts, directs and stages a scene that contains a moment in which that actor wanted to act but couldn't or didn't. The moment is chosen from real stories told by the group. The scene can be presented as a series of images or can be improvised by actors using dialogue. In both cases discussion occurs about various "masks" that the protagonist and the antagonist might be wearing. When the group agrees on several distinct masks, the scene is played again in an exaggerated form with characters wearing, unrealistically, a single mask. This often produces results which allow a different view of the moment to emerge. This is a series of exercises to which much time is devoted in Boal's work.

INVISIBLE THEATRE:

A particularly controversial form of playing scenes in real settings, as real actions. David Grant and Gary Wood have experimented widely with this method as a Peace Troupe technique. Recent success in Atlanta and DC continue to make this subversive form fascinating. Examples have included a staged television crew interviewing "actors" on the street and engaging other "non-actors" on the issue of the Martin Luther King Center, stagings in the DC Metro of economic and racial incidents which illustrated a range of attitude and caused a series of reactions among passengers and Metro police, and a staging of a homosexual couple buying a wedding ring and a gun at an Atlanta pawn shop.

FORUM THEATRE:

This represents the highest performative end in Boal's work. A short scene or one-act play is presented. The dramatic work has been developed through collaboration and addresses a specific issue or moment of conflict. After the scene is played, it is repeated from the beginning. However, at the moment of crises (Boal's moment of oppression), the spect-actor audience may yell "Stop!" and then physically replace the actor playing the oppressed character. In the most elaborate performances this extends to costumes, make-up and other theatrical devices of character and acting. The other actors, trained to always seek the original outcome, present the challenge for the new spect-actor. When all interventions of this sort are completed, discussion may follow or replacement of the Antagonist may be allowed. Versions have been adapted to many circumstances by theatre companies who use Forum as their sole method of production.

Currently available in a TCG edition. Call a good bookstore and order it, or call Dramatists in NYC.

Rainbow of Desire, 1995, Routledge.

The newest book by Boal, this covers more about what he calls "cop in the head", referring to the more internal oppression of Western culture. He has begun to refer to "cop in the head" in a series of techniues called "the Rainbow of Desire". [He called the Brazillian incarnation of his techniques "cop in the street", in contrast.]

Games for Actors and Non-Actors, Routledge.

Although this book is organized horribly, it does contain some good descriptions of some of Boal's exercises and many of the techniques in the repertoire of "Theatre of the Oppressed". However, you still need to see the stuff in action to get a sense of leading it to its most affective end.

Other books, not by Boal, but considered essential reading are:

Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy and Activism; Schutzman, Mady and Jan Cohen-Cruz ed.; 1994; Routledge.

A great book by two wonderful people, and the two most expert people in the United tates on the theatre of Augusto Boal.