The pandemic led to a startling increase in cybercrime against women all over the world. According to National Commission for Women India (NCW), 54 cybercrime complaints were received online in April 2020 in comparison to less than 21 complaints in February earlier in the year.

While over the past year we have seen how the internet has increased accessibility and freedom for many, it has also given a false sense of power and security to its users. The 'Bois Locker Room' incident and the 95 per cent spike in consumption of sexual abuse content amid lockdown according to the India Child Protection Fund Report 2020 amplified how this entitlement can manifest itself through digital chatter.

Easily share-able memes, videos, images, links, cryptic text messages and emojis across Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram and now Zoom can become visual markers of this oppression as well as tools for harassers to continue reinforcing these oppressions. The digital is a constantly fluctuating public and private space that can be claimed and reclaimed. We knew we wanted to explore these blurry boundaries in the context of harassment. Unmuted attempts to use these online modalities to mirror, problematize and find possible interventions to the communications that occur over this new-age, free-for-all internet, especially for women.

The spect-actors are also the real stakeholders of the unsolved problem. Role-playing their decisions through Forum Theatre ensures a higher chance of them replicating those actions in their own life. A Forum Theatre scene ends with a protagonist unable to successfully solve the problem so as to stimulate dialogue amongst the ‘spect-actors’ in the form of possible interventions.

I have trained in the Forum Theatre dramaturgy under Julian Boal, the son of Augusto Boal and applied the same with communities in India and abroad. Vandana is also a practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) and has practised TO games with communities in India. When I met Vandana (virtually in May 2020), I realized we shared a mutual curiosity to digitize a methodology that had shaped our personal practices. When I met Shubham, Vajid and Devika, I realized that we had a team big and passionate enough to begin our experimentation!

Since we were exploring how virtual tools can be markers of oppression, we integrated them into our process. In order to understand the background of our characters and their relationships with each other, we created their social media accounts. Through our rehearsal process, we posted selfies, wrote bios and even interacted with each other as our characters on these platforms. We sent each other emojis via DMs, posted comments, ‘liked’ ‘disliked’ each other’s posts in an attempt to have fun and explore each character’s mindset! Sharing below a glimpse into our virtual world:

Shiksha samvaad foundation

ruhi mahant

Lead Facilitator

karan sethi

Founder

Saquib khan

Designer

aastha sachdeva

Social Media Intern

In order to create a play about online safety, we had to first ensure that we were practicing the same within our rehearsal space. Beyond Unmuted many of us collaborate across different personal and professional spaces. When we began online rehearsals for this project in May 2020, our unclear boundaries with each other became even more apparent. We were not always successful in setting these boundaries but we gradually did develop a few safety principles that helped:

• • We maintained a consistent weekly schedule of at least 2 rehearsals a week (1.5 - 2 hours long). If someone would be unable to attend a rehearsal, they would inform the group a week before and we would adjust timings accordingly.

  • Virtual rehearsal time is limited and sacred. Initially, we realized that we were struggling to improvise our scenes because we were distracted. We would spend 15-20 minutes catching up with each other at the beginning of our call and then delay or stretch our work (leading to Zoom fatigue). This would affect the quality of our scenes and add to the stress of completing our project on time. Not to mention the constant connectivity issues that made recording our final Forum scenes such a challenge! Halfway through the process, we set two rules -

- Each of us agreed to do an individual focused warm up before joining the Zoom call. This warm up was to help us clear our own mind, transition out of whatever was happening in our personal lives and enter the headspace of our character.

- When we all saw each other on Zoom, we did a group warm up for our bodies and voices. The intention of this was to build a collective energy for our improvisations of the day and warm up our full physical selves (that can often feel restricted on Zoom and in our private spaces)

• There were several moments in rehearsal when we would address each other as our characters, instead of our real names. Initially we didn’t feel there was any issue with these unconscious slip ups. We were talking about our own characters and their world so deeply that it was quite natural for us to sometimes get confused! But then, during a rehearsal Vandana shared her experience of how these boundaries were blurring for her and leaving her frustrated:

“After the first survey when I read spect-actor responses like, ‘the S.S.F. team is unprofessional’ or ‘Ruhi shouldn’t fiddle with her hair on the call.’ or ‘they talk to each other very informally,’ I became really self-conscious (as Vandana). How do I sit during my Zoom calls? Am I fiddling too much with my hair? Am I sounding too unprofessional? I had begun to take the spect-actor responses personally. There were even times while improvising scenes when I wouldn’t really know if it is Ruhi reacting to the stimulus or Vandana. I would feel a strong sense of dislike for Karan (the character) and it would reflect in my interactions with Shubham.”

We realized soon enough that the emotions of our characters in the scene can leak into the reality of our interactions. This can cause miscommunication and misunderstandings which would negatively impact our relationships. We thus needed to establish a clear aesthetic space between the actors and their characters, between the story and our process (as mentioned earlier in the ‘Methodology and Digital Divergences’ section). So, before we began any improvisations, we set small sensorial rituals like holding objects, wearing costumes or using music cues to mark transitions between ourselves and our characters. After emerging from our improvisations we put our videos off, renamed ourselves and greeted each other one-by-one with our real names before entering any interactive space as a team.

• • • Once we were ready with the basic framework of our project, we created our own vision boards and shared them with each other. This was an attempt to create a guided process to address individual and collective goals. One such common goal that emerged was the importance of process over product. Our individual learning processes as educators, artists, psychologists and TO practitioners was very vital to us and we didn’t want the pressure of creating the performance to limit that. This goal allowed us to indulge in readings and videos about TO and conduct workshops with each other that went beyond the scope of Forum Theatre. While intentionally creating learning spaces for each other did slow our process down, it also made room for us to forgive each other, to make mistakes, to celebrate the small wins, and most importantly to ask hard questions without feeling the need to always provide answers. That we stayed with unanswered questions led to us critically thinking about our own work, reaching out to mentors for support and constantly re-evaluating our vision and purpose of doing this project. Vision sharing also exposed us to each other’s strengths and areas of discomfort. Considering that many of us had only met each other virtually, this assessment was important in helping us assign tasks (i.e video editing, content writing, acting etc.) and providing support to each other.

    • Some days had to be non-Unmuted. The pandemic has made life challenging financially, emotionally and physically for everyone and all of us met after long work-days to rehearse in the evening. So we mutually decided to take extended week-long breaks periodically and when we returned we didn’t jump back into the project right away. We spent quite a few sessions playing games and chatting about random happenings of the world and our lives. These random sessions really helped us feel safer with each other.

• • • • While we started Unmuted from a space of familiarity (our own recent experiences encountering harassment online), we were not well-versed with the legal and ethical conversations around the same. So we spent the initial few months of this project consulting multiple individuals and groups working in the fields of sexual harassment, sexuality education, women’s safety and data protection, to start from an informed space. In January, Akhila attended a legal conversation on sexual harassment in art pedagogy and practice with diversity and inclusion advisor Asiya Shervani. The webinar hosts later shared with us resources including a government handbook and a list of mental health and legal support for victims of online sexual harassment (shared under the ‘Resources’ tab).

      • Creating clear and realistic deadlines for the release of our videos allowed us to spend time on scripting and improvising the scene, so that the quality of the Forum would not suffer. We emailed the first draft of every video to Radha and Ravi Ramaswamy, two TO practitioners and educators who gave us feedback on the dramaturgical elements of the Forum and the survey. We made sure we had time for our own reflections as a group after we received their feedback which allowed us to re-work and question our creations constantly.

      • Documentation also enabled us to keep pushing the quality of our work, to reflect on our own learning (which was constantly changing) and to keep track of the various possibilities of digitizing the Forum that were emerging. Our documentation happened in two ways - one was the ‘minutes of the rehearsal’. These included conversations, discoveries, visuals and tasks that happened during our rehearsals. For example, while Vandana, Akhila, Shubham and Vajid would improvise scenes as their characters, Devika would be taking a note of moments that were working and possibilities of complicating the narrative. The second kind of documentation was recording ideas that emerged for us beyond our rehearsals - these included analysing the spect-actor interventions that we received as data on Survey Monkey, notes from webinars and workshops that we were attending, feedback from our mentors and finally our personal questions. In fact, a combination of both has given rise to this blog!

• • • While engaging with a topic close to us, we would often encounter triggering moments. Shooting and re-shooting a scene that depicts oppression can be extremely draining as we have to repeatedly feel those emotions. At one point, Vandana, who played the role of Ruhi the protagonist, asked if we could stop our improvisations as she was feeling overwhelmed by Ruhi’s helplessness against Karan. In that moment, we all decided to collectively check-out from the story instead of continuing to shoot the scene. We encouraged each other to step out and express our needs when uncomfortable.

    • In addition to that, we created a space where we could take care of our physical and mental wellbeing by collectively deciding on the trajectory and pace of our rehearsals.

• Why is it not possible for Ruhi to have called out Karan in that moment?

• Does an action need to be repetitive to be considered harassment?

• Do informal work cultures facilitate harassment?

• Does the problem go away just by Ruhi asking for consent? Or by Karan deleting the picture? Is S.S.F. ready to discuss consent? How?

• How can Aastha and Saquib play more active roles as possible allies?

• Should Ruhi re-check Karan’s message for negative intent? If she does, does she appear confused? If she doesn’t, does she appear delusional?

• Is this a Zoom problem or a workplace problem? Where and how are these two spaces intersecting?

• Is the burden of change falling only on Ruhi? What are the consequences of that?

• Is it important for a victim of harassment to be mindful of their tonality when expressing their discomfort? How easy is it for someone to do so? If Ruhi does express herself in a composed manner, as some of the spect-actors want her to do, would the oppression go away?

• If this was a live forum, would the spect-actors be able to keep their tones balanced while acting out their intervention - as they have suggested Ruhi to do in their responses? Is suggesting interventions on a survey causing spect-actors to speak from a space of ‘advice’ rather than ‘empathy’?

• What is stopping Saquib from being an active agent of change?

• We still don’t know how the characters really feel about each other. If we do, how would it impact the investigation?

• What made the majority of the spect-actors mention third parties (lawyers, organizations) and move beyond the interpersonal relationships between Saquib, Ruhi, Aastha and Karan? How do interpersonal relationships contribute to systemic oppressions and vice-versa?

• Can someone’s emotional investment in their workplace make them susceptible to harassment?

• Should we leave the final video as an invitation into the world of our characters or should we provide a definite answer? Do we even have a definite answer? Is it important?

About the Content:

1. When it comes to harassment, does the intention of the harasser matter?

2. How can people’s emotional investment in their work influence their response to harassment?

3. How can the creation of safe workspaces be a collective versus individual responsibility? Is it the responsibility of the victim to initiate this collective action?

4. Can there be a uniform definition of safety that can be applied across all workspaces and mediums (online and offline) ?

About the Form:

1. Where is the digitization of Forum supporting the interventions and where is it increasing the aesthetic distance between the spect-actors and the problem?

2. Can a spect-actor virtually embody a protagonist’s inner conflict?

3. How can collecting spect-actor interventions as digital data points support the research of dismantling oppressive systems?

When we sent emails to the spect-actors with the scenes of Unmuted we also added a ‘Curious to Know More’ section which included resources both on the issue of harassment and the Forum methodology:

About the Content:

Here are a few resources shared with us by beej Mumbai’s and Kri Foundation’s UnMute program on the possibility and procedures of third party interventions within organizations like S.S.F.:

• An Ethical and Legal conversation on patriarchy, misogyny and sexual harassment in art pedagogy and practice with diversity and inclusion advisor Asiya Shervani.

• A handbook issued by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Govt of India.

• A list of mental health practitioners and legal support for victims and survivors. This list will be updated regularly in order to build a support database from all over India, if not globally. In case you know of people that could be a part of this list, please share this link with them.

In case you or anyone you know needs help with forming an ICC (selecting members, training them), creating policies and code of conducts, awareness training on organizational ethics, POSH, diversity, inclusion and leadership, you can reach out to Asiya Shervani on asiya.shervani@gmail.com.

About the Form:

Forum Theatre can often be a complex methodology to explain and experience virtually. We tried to break down its essentials by sharing the following:

• Introduction and Dramaturgy of Forum Theatre: Pages 241-277 of Games for Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal:

• Examples of Forum Theatre by Centre for Community Dialogue and Change in Bangalore

• An interview on Forum Theatre with Sanjoy Ganguly, Artistic Director of Janasanskriti Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed

This project is part of the 25 x 25 Initiative by India Foundation for the Arts, supported by lead donor Kshirsagar-Apte Foundation, and philanthropy partners Titan Company Limited, and Priya Paul and Sethu Vaidyanathan.

At almost every step we also needed an outside eye to help us articulate our purpose and process. This could not have been possible without the support of:

• Radha and Ravi Ramaswamy at CCDC (Centre for Community Dialogue and Change)

• Liz Morgan at TONYC (Theatre of the Oppressed New York City)

• The digital spect-actors who engaged with our videos and surveys.

• Bindiya, Rijul, Ashima, Preeti and Kanishk who were our first ever digital spect-actors in our live online forum rehearsal.

• All the grantees of 25 x 25 Initiative by India Foundation for the Arts who inspired us with their meaningful and inventive projects.