Theatre of Good Intentions

Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change

D. Snyder-Young

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137293039
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

Theatre of Good Intentions examines limitations of theatre in the creation of social and political change. This book looks at some of the reasons why achieving such goals is hard; examining what theatre can and can't do. It examines a range of applied and political theatre case studies, focusing on theatre's impact on participants and spectators.

Part I

Impacting Participants

1

Theatre of Good Intentions

Privilege: an acknowledged challenge

Crawling with Monsters is a documentary theatre piece by Eric Wiley (with interviews conducted by students and alumni of the University of Texas-Pan American) describing experiences of everyday violence in Reynosa, a small city just across the US/Mexico border from McAllen, Texas. Its framing device focuses on the process by which the play came to be created. It begins with a well-intentioned White professor’s desire to make a Spanish-language play for young audiences to tour towns and cities on the border between the United States and Mexico, and focuses on her emerging understanding of just how little she actually knows about the conditions in Reynosa.

This White, non-Spanish-speaking professor works to inspire the Latino cast of the Spanish language play. She is the only White actor onstage, visibly at least 15 years older than the Latino/a actors in the ensemble. While she tells the audience of her commitment to critical pedagogy and advocacy for the programming of Spanish-language plays in her theatre department’s season to connect with the culture of her students, she admonishes her students to ‘cover your ears’ when she says anything she thinks might be construed as controversial. She advocates for what she believes to be her students’ needs in the same breath as she infantilizes them, and she does not even think of engaging them in fighting for their own interests. Wearing an oversized grey blazer and black jeans, she stands in a spotlight and speaks directly to the audience, taking her words very seriously, while the rest of the ensemble play monsters, crawling on the floor in the shadows around her:

Remember, most of these kids have never seen a play before. And this might be the only play they ever see, ok? It’s not a joke. Right? This is the theatre and we want these kids to feel the power of the theatre. To remember it, to respect it. So that when they’re older, it could save their lives. The way it saved mine, and maybe yours.¹

(Wiley 2011: 6)

This encounter satirizes, but encapsulates, the ‘good intentions’ of many privileged theatre practitioners. We perceive a social problem, an inequality, or an underserved audience, and want to use our theatre-making skills to improve the lives of those we see as having ‘less’ than we do. At the performance of Crawling With Monsters I saw at the 2011 American Alliance of Theatre in Education (AATE) Conference in Chicago, IL United States, an audience of drama teachers and educational theatre researchers laughed heartily at the well-meaning professor in this play who does not see the irony in her desire to make a play in Spanish for a Spanish-speaking audience when she, herself, does not speak Spanish. She does not recognize that as a non-Spanish-speaking teacher living safely across the US/Mexico border in a violence-free city, she might not be the right artist to make such a project. Her commitment to the power of theatre is admirable, but appears naïve.²

As the play progresses, and the situation in Reynosa is made clear to her, her idealism clings to the audience like a dense fog. Her lack of understanding is explained, for there has been little to no media coverage in the United States of killings, shootings, and kidnappings across the border in Mexico. She does come to understand what is actually at stake, why taboos against discussing the details of the violence exist, and why it is actually dangerous to undertake a theatre project addressing the violence directly. Schools have been closed after gunmen have sought shelter in them when outnumbered by soldiers. Sixty journalists have been killed in the last ten years. Through her journey, the AATE audience of mostly White, mostly middle-class North American educators and scholars learns just how dangerous naïve idealism can be.

Part of the dramatic effectiveness of this character for this audience is that artists interested in creating applied theatre are trained to recognize our relative privilege. This character is clearly going about it all wrong. This audience can laugh at her with a subtle sense of superiority, siding with her students who admonish her to ‘cover her ears’ and directly comment to the audience, ‘It’s like being taught by children’ (Wiley 2011: 13).

On the whole, applied theatre practitioners are aware of our privilege, openly acknowledging both it and our status as outsiders in many of the communities in which we work. In their introduction to The Applied Theatre Reader, Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston acknowledge ‘there is no mystery or magic to the processes of applied theatre that are subject to the same discourse of power that contain all the other cultural endeavors of humankind’ (2009: 14). Imbalances of power occurring in the real world are replicated in the theatre workshop and facilitators strive to even the playing field as best they can. Following Freire, the relationship many practitioners strive to build with their participants is, as Marina Henriques Coutinho and Marcia Pompeo Nogueira put it ‘a partnership of mutual exchange’ (2009: 172) between those sharing theatre-making expertise and those sharing personal expertise in local contexts. Dialogue, participation, and collaboration are often valorized as solutions to problems of practitioner privilege and outsider status. After all, participants are experts in their own lives and can teach facilitators about their experiences just as facilitators can share theatre-making techniques with participants.

This chapter is about the problem that acknowledging practitioner privilege and committing to participatory projects cannot erase real imbalances of power embedded in many applied theatre sites. It examines an example from my own praxis facilitating Theatre of the Oppressed with teenagers in an urban school alongside discourse from multiple scholar/facilitators of Theatre for Development (TfD), exploring ways in which understandings of global privilege manifest similarly in contexts that, on the surface, appear very different. It will focus on ways privilege, hegemony, and institutional agendas intersect in applied theatre sites to limit projects’ abilities to fulfill goals of democratic decision-making and transformation.

The desire to change the world through theatre

Boal ironically characterizes the political theatre his company began making in the 1960s:

It seemed right to us, indeed a matter of great urgency, to exhort the oppressed to struggle against oppression. Which oppressed? All of them. The oppressed in a general sense. Too general a sense. And we made use of our art to tell Truths, to bring Solutions. We taught the peasants how to fight for their lands – we, who lived in the big cities. We taught the blacks how to combat racial prejudice – we, who were almost all very, very white. We taught women how to struggle against their oppressors. Which oppressors, why us, since we were feminists to a man – and virtually all of us were men. Nevertheless, the intention was good.

(1995: 1)

Boal and his collaborators, like many artists today, were privileged and idealistic. They saw injustice in the world and wanted to combat it with their aesthetic tools. Boal tells a now-iconic story of an encounter following a performance of a play in which he and his company sang ‘let us spill our blood’ in revolt against wealthy landowners. One peasant, Virgilio, approached the group after the performance, excitedly advocating, ‘We’ll have lunch, and afterwards we’ll all go together, you with your guns, we with ours, and send the colonel’s bullyboys packing – they’ve taken over a comrade’s land, set fire to his house and threatened to kill his family – but first, let’s eat…’ (Boal 1995: 2). The actors panicked; their guns were but props, and they did not really intend to engage in violent revolution – nor did they intend for their audiences to run head-first into violent altercations and get themselves killed. This experience, Boal explains, prompted his development of an interactive Theatre of the Oppressed, designed to engage actors and audience members alike in strategizing solutions to problems (1995: 3).

Boal treats interactivity and participation as solutions to the problem that privileged artists cannot really know struggles that do not actively oppress them. Artists may not have answers, but they can use theatre as a symbolic language with groups of people to work out possible solutions to the problems those people encounter in their daily lives. Boal developed his techniques in the 1960s and 1970s in Brazil, in a political context in which the divisions between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ were clear and obvious. Yet, in contemporary contexts in industrialized Western nations, oppression is more slippery and less clear-cut. Participants in Theatre of the Oppressed and other applied theatre projects in North America, Western Europe, and Australia often belong to groups that have historically been denied access to resources. Yet these participants live in wealthy nations, and most have access to inexpensive food (if not healthy, inexpensive food), the escapist entertainments of television and popular culture, and cultural myths of social mobility (if not structural and economic resources facilitating actual class mobility). In this, they have a degree of privilege many of Boal’s rural Brazilian peasants did not enjoy.

Many applied theatre facilitators aspire to build critical consciousness in their participants; when working with relatively privileged populations, such as university students, this often includes an interest in facilitating participants’ understandings of their own privileges. However, privileged people who are aware of their privilege and recognize the injustices of late capitalist societies often want, as Boal did, to combat those large social problems, even if they, themselves, are not their direct victims.

This poses two key problems for applied theatre work. The first problem is that self-aware people with some degree of privilege will often want to tackle large social problems that do not impact them directly, as awareness of their privilege makes their own problems appear small by comparison. In practice, participants choosing to attend workshops entitled ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ or ‘Theatre for Development’ and students engaging in larger investigations of privilege in tandem with applied theatre projects often encounter this problem. I will return to this problem later in this chapter, focusing on an image theatre piece about the problem of ‘Global Poverty’ made by an ensemble of Black and Latino teenagers living in an economically depressed city in the United States. The second problem – the one Boal faced – is that people living with privilege have a hard time understanding the actual constraints people without privilege must live within. Boal’s solutions to make theatre that poses problems rather than offers solutions and to make theatre with rather than for members of marginalized groups are often treated by applied theatre practitioners as the ‘right answers’ to both of these problems.

Guilt

While this chapter is concerned with the problem that self-aware people with some degree of privilege will often want to tackle large social problems that do not impact them directly, I do want to acknowledge the danger, when using Theatre of the Oppressed or other applied theatre techniques with privileged populations, that participants who are not so aware of their own privilege will mischaracterize conflicts in their own life as ‘oppressions’. After all, as Bruce McConachie points out, ‘politicians and pundits encourage middle-class Americans to see themselves frequently as victims and to misperceive the genuine oppression of others’ (2002: 254). McConachie may write within a US context, but this dynamic plays out in many industrialized nations. For, while this chapter concerns itself with artists and students who are aware of their own privilege, to have this problem, artists and students need to have done the hard work of pushing through hegemonic discourses to get there.

This process often involves experiencing a degree of guilt about one’s privilege. As one of McConachie’s students puts it, ‘It’s hard to let go of the white, middle-class attitudes that are instilled in us from such an early age. Society teaches us that we should feel guilty about all the oppression others feel, and that we are selfish if we think of our situations as oppressive’ (qtd in McConachie 2002: 253). Guilt is a common element of learning to be aware of one’s own privilege. I do not want to pretend that I did not spend my first year studying applied theatre paralyzed with guilt over my own privilege, afraid it negated my ability to speak or act. Many artists and students have similar experiences. This guilt is part of why many artists and students who are aware of their privilege often want to work on problems distant from their own. Their own problems feel so very small.

McConachie characterizes this as a ‘double bind’: people who are aware of their privilege feel ‘guilty’ identifying oppressions in their own lives, and this guilt forms an obstacle to standing in solidarity with those who lack their advantages (2002: 253). A desire to avoid guilt also makes it difficult for artists and students to find points of real connection between the privileges they enjoy and their own covert or unintentional participation in oppressive structures. To assuage guilt, many artists and students focus on people with problems that seem large and profound – that is, people whose problems are different and distant.

Good intentions or altruism

Helen Nicholson views applied theatre as ‘a way of conceptualizing and interpreting theatrical and cultural practices that are motivated by the desire to make a difference in the lives of others’ (2005: 16). With a tinge of irony, I characterize this desire to make a difference as ‘good intentions’, following Nicholson’s reminder that, ‘good intentions to be good citizens are not always good enough’ (2005: 31).

Nicholson navigates nineteenth-century philosopher Auguste Compte’s development of the term ‘altruism’, highlighting how:

there is still an uneven balance of power between altruist and reci pient, with the uncomfortable implication that, however well-intentioned, some acts of altruism may have the effect of keeping ‘other’ people in their place. Because practitioners often work in contexts in which they are outsiders, for all kinds of reasons their good intentions about ‘helping’ others in ‘need’ may be construed as patronizing or autho ritarian, contributing to keeping ‘others’ on the margins rather than taking centre stage. Although this would be very far from the intentions of the egalitarian practitioner, the concept of marginality has become the cause of resentment.

(2005: 30)

Altruism, though coming from a place of ‘good intentions’, can reinforce existing imbalances of power. Nicholson suggests practitioners find ‘points of connection between acts of altruism and self-interest’ and acknowledge ‘the reciprocal relationship between self-interest and other-regarding acts’ (2005: 31). This seemingly simple suggestion – identifying ‘what’s in it for me’ – is a crucial first step, if not the entire solution, to the paradox of practitioner privilege. It cannot redress systemic inequalities, but it can add a helpful degree of clarity to relationships fraught with imbalanced power dynamics.

James Thompson (2003) can be particularly blunt when describing some of what he ‘gets’ from doing applied theatre with ever-more-exotic subaltern participants. In free verse, Thompson ladles on the irony. ‘Theatre in the places to stop the dinner party cutlery mid-mousse. / Theatre in prisons, done that darling, but with child soldiers – ooh and aagh’ (2003: 191). He goes on to acknowledge his ambivalence at sharing stories of exotic applied theatre praxis, ‘My ethics clink and clank with the forks and the knives’ (191). Thompson certainly does not assert that the only (or even the primary) reason he works with subaltern parti cipant populations is to be able to tell witty stories at dinner parties that make him and his work sound deep, important, or exotic – but he does acknowledge that these status-raising byproducts are indeed real things applied theatre practitioners get from the work.

Status, job security, profile in the field, grant money, flexibility, ability to recruit desired students and collaborators – these, too, are real things artists get. They are some of the unintended byproducts of applied theatre work. They do not benefit project participants and do not help make the world more just. In written descriptions of applied theatre projects, scholars/facilitators routinely acknowledge their privilege, their relationship to participants, how they came to engage in the project. It is also routine to acknowledge limitations – that the facilitator’s presence impacts the conversations that happen, that she makes sense of what she witnesses and experiences as best she can, and that her understandings are rooted in her lived experiences. But scholars/facilitators rarely offer, ‘I did this project to get tenure’ or ‘I structured my project in this way to be near my family’,³ or ‘this grant helped me pay off my student loans’.

Global Poverty

In the autumn of 2007, I co-facilitated a 12-week-long Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) residency in the drama classroom of an urban college preparatory school in a small impoverished city in the northeastern United States, operating as a teacher/researcher gathering data for my doctoral dissertation. I worked with Jessica Lisboa, the school’s full-time drama teacher, who teaches a TO residency every year. During the 12 weeks, the eight high school seniors participating in this process – five African American girls, one Latina girl, and two African American boys – created frozen images and short plays in which an oppressed protagonist fights against an oppres...