Theatre of the Oppressed:
TheorY & Practice
Lectio visceralis uses the embodied and self-reflective learning methods of an activist art-form called Theatre of the Oppressed.
Lectio visceralis uses the embodied and self-reflective learning methods of an activist art-form called Theatre of the Oppressed.
Origins
Augusto Boal was a Brazilian dramatist and activist who died in 2009. In 1960’s Brazil, he and his colleagues created Theatre of the Oppressed (or TO for short) by combining the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire; the Marxist theater of Bertolt Brecht, and the character acting methods of Konstantin Stanislavski. From Freire Boal learned to help people re-present their own reality to themselves, so that they could investigate it together. From Brecht he learned how to break down the “fourth wall” between actor and audience, and how to create theater that instigated conflict instead of resolving it. From Stanislavski he learned how to help people dig into their body memories, in order to generate performances that are both beautiful and true to life.
Through decades of political exile and international work, Boal and others (including his wife Cecília, a trained psychoanalyst; and his son Julian, a community organizer) developed TO for use in prisons, health clinics, schools, and community groups, especially in under-resourced and Global South contexts. Since the early 2000's, ministry leaders and practical theologians have also begun using TO with young people, adults, and seminarians (Babbage 2018).
The "Stages of TO"
The first stage of TO is to come to know the body in a new way; the second, to make the body expressive; the third, to use theatre as a new language for action and thought. Good facilitation takes practice, but even novices can participate or lead in fruitful ways.
First stage exercises build a sense of “theatrical communion.” Through moving and speaking in unaccustomed ways, participants become comfortable with each other while simultaneously uncovering and breaking down muscle and mental habits.
Second stage games drill players in physical meaning making, improvisational problem-solving, and creative intervention.
Third stage performances collectively dissect and re-imagine social situations. Onlookers take charge of their own learning, becoming “spect-actors” rather than passive spect-ators (Babbage 2018).
The Wisdom of TO
TO has shaped my convictions as a critical teacher and a critical liturgist. Here are the main things I have learned:
Humans are natural-born artists. Creative; expressive; critical problem solvers: these are the characteristics of every good artist, and of every human being who is fully alive.
Our thinking is always embodied.
It's more effective to act our way into new ways of thinking, than to think our way into new ways of acting.
Our body/minds are constrained and canalized by work, habit, and social norms. Breaking out of our physical habits can help us break out of our social and mental cages.
Spontaneous expression provides rich material to analyse so that we can gain deeper insights into ourselves and our settings.
Every expression or insight is like an artwork: it can produce multiple interpretations, and we must discern carefully which meanings and options make sense in real life.
If we look for the hurt, it can lead us to the truth.
Slow down and notice what our body, our senses, and the S/spirit are saying, this also can lead us to the truth.
Practice new and revolutionary habits. We need to practice them if we want them to stick.
The personal and the pastoral are political. Like many techniques, the tools of TO can be used to analyze and undermine social injustice, or they can be used to analyze and maximize worker outputs and profits. Our choices will make all the difference. Which topics will we choose to examine? Which tensions will we choose to dig into during a particular class session, ritual, or discussion?
Other Sources
Lectio visceralis also draws on the work of Victoria Rue, a scholar of performance and religious studies; and on the “Bibliodrama” work of Peter Pitzele. Rue’s work focuses on performance and embodied teaching methods for the college and university classroom; as a religious studies instructor, she encourages students to feel their way into the spiritual experiences that they are studying. Pitzele’s work has taken root mainly among US Jews, and in Christian and interfaith circles in Europe; a Roman Catholic version (Candelario et al., 2009) has been developed by catechists in South-East Asia. It is based in psychodrama, role play, and "midrashic" (or elaborated story-telling) approaches to Scripture (Rue, [2005] 2010; Pitzele, 1998, 2013).