Intro — Wander around the space and say hello to everyone, without touching them. Continue wandering, but this time say hello non-verbally. Continue wandering, but this time shake hands with someone. Let this play out for a while, then pause and say that now everyone is to do the opposite of the command. Continue for a while and then shift the energy by saying some new commands — shapes, letters and numbers.
People get into the shapes, letters and numbers. Co-existence — in pairs, one A and one B. B follows the gentle movements of A. Swap over. Group work — put enough pieces of paper on the floor so that everyone can just stand on it. Everyone gets up and stands on the paper. Then take half of the paper away and repeat the exercise. Gradually diminish the paper. The conference is an annual festival for colleges and universities across the United States, an opportunity to come together to share their productions, take workshops and seminars, participate in staged readings and devised theatre projects.
It had been scheduled for the last day of the festival in the afternoon, so I was anticipating a slim turnout. Starting on a Tuesday, the KCACTF conference is a whirlwind of strenuous activity; students move into the weekend exhausted to the point of delirium.
In other words, what did they think were reasons for our national avoidance in talking about climate change? They trotted out mostly unsurprising answers: climate change had become politically charged, causing them to avoid bringing it up and instigating heated political arguments. Most in the room agreed, however, that more conversations should happen. As the Festival serves theatre people, and the majority of attendees are either actors or have some acting experience, I skipped the first exercises built to introduce basic performance ideas to non-performers and jumped into the rules of the game.
The Rules following Boat : First, they were to come up with a scenario, which they would then perform before the entire room. I had explained to them that I wanted a scenario having something to do with issues of climate change, but that—for the purposes of our game—they need not have experienced the scenario themselves. They could draw from any stories including, of course, their own having to do with changing temperatures, mass extinctions, food or water insecurity, dramatic weather events, mass migrations and so forth.
We all took a few moments to shout out different possibilities; then, the different groups split off and got to work creating their own scenarios. I had supplied pens, markers and paper for them to take notes and make outlines, or create makeshift props. I gave them between twenty and thirty minutes to work in their groups, during which time I floated from group to group to answer questions, help them finetune a scenario idea and remind them to get on their feet and rehearse a few times.
I articulated this rule after early workshops—in which participants consistently failed either to begin or end their scenarios—demonstrated my need to do so explicitly. It is these failures built into the scenario that can prompt engaged responses, inventiveness and collaboration in arriving at possible solutions, ways they—and ultimately, communities—can fix failures in real social or political systems.
Cast and Rehearse: It seemed self-explanatory that if groups were going to perform their scenarios they should fold enough time into their process to cast and rehearse. These include reading articles together, or rhythmically, or alongside related actions or missing data. In one technique, two contradictory or symptomatically revealing stories are read alongside one another, such as gourmet meals with malnutrition.
News can be combined with historical sources, to compare relationships, such as to liken the boss-worker relation to the master-slave relation. Or news can be combined with other performances, such as miming an action or singing a song — for instance, singing the national anthem while reciting news of poverty.
Meanings can also be contested and redefined through the use of rhythm, repetition, cross-readings of different contexts, improvisation, and so on. Where repetition has desensitised people to the emotional impact of stories, they can be supplemented by concrete images or actions. The justification for this technique is that news is always somewhat fictional, or discursively constructed.
Boal argues that newspaper theatre makes visible the use of fictive or fictional techniques in the production of news stories. It demystifies the media of its appearance of impartiality. In Categories of Popular Theatre , Boal suggests that the motivation for newspaper theatre is to counter the neutralising effect of newspaper coverage. Newspaper Theatre teaches people to read newspapers in ways which counter these false appearances.
It uses techniques of demystification and deconstruction of journalism, but can also be used with other texts. Participants rearrange the narratives, run the stories set in different situations e. Sometimes they act out the basics of the story before seeing the written version. When they encounter the written version, they are inoculated against its naturalisation. The idea of this exercise is to make people read texts more actively. Myth Theatre retells myths or narratives to reveal hidden truths.
This can include exposing the subtext of a myth. Monsters and bogeymen might turn out to be capitalists or landlords for example. Myths and urban legends are taken to be mystifications of a hidden truth which can be revealed. Characters are broken down into their social mask and rituals. Different masks or symbols can be combined to produce different versions of situations. What effect does this have on the rituals and structures of the role? The symbols are reshuffled to show how they affect the same situation differently.
A cop-robber story for instance is varied by giving the robber a top hat, or a revolver, or a Masonic symbol. The point of this exercise is to show that some actions are caused by class, rather than psychology or human nature. In this method, symbols separate the protagonist into attributes.
Analytical images show either submissive or subversive resisting aspects of a protagonist. The protagonist seeks to either intensify subversion or shake off submission. Other techniques work with images of situations. Differences in images of the same situation often reveal social differences. For instance, participants usually model unemployment as a queue of sad people. In Denmark, they instead pictured the queueing people smiling and spreading pamphlets.
Boal says that this is because unemployed people in Denmark get more money and engage in more social activities as a result. There are also social variants, in which participants add and subtract from the images of reality and of an ideal until it expresses a consensus.
Exercises in bodywork are used to induce people to take bodily positions which they never take in their everyday lives. For instance, two participants might have to walk as a single person, walk as a four-legged monster or roll together as a wheel.
These kinds of exercises work to relax or stimulate muscles which someone does not usually use, so as to reduce mechanisation.
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