A social movement is a network of people engaged in sustained, contentious, collective action, using methods beyond established institutional procedures such as voting (Tarrow, 1998: p. 3). For example, the global justice movement, also known as “globalization from below” (Brecher et al., 2002), or the anti-globalization movement by its detractors, seeks to oppose the disastrous effects of corporate globalization while building progressive, constructive, and dialogical connections between the people of the world. Performance, both public and private, is a key element in the formation, sustenance, and building of such social movements.
Hidden transcripts and the cycle of contention
Movements often form slowly, through the daily building of social networks, a growing awareness of a collective complaint, and an increasingly articulated conceptual frame for taking action. Even in periods of repression, people can build networks for potential social movements through the clandestine creation and nurturing of a “hidden transcript” (Scott, 1990). Hidden transcripts are the highly articulated and stealthily nurtured worldview and grievance list of the oppressed. They are the stories, rumors, complaints, and utopian visions that a subculture or counterculture keeps alive for the historical moment when, because of shifts in political opportunities and constraints, substantial mass liberatory action becomes possible. While Scott refers in his work to truly abject and dominated people in total regimes such as slavery or medieval serfdom, the idea of a less hidden but still separate and partially coded transcript still applies in the development of social movement narratives in more open societies.
Alternative worldviews need an alternative space in which to be developed and shared. Nancy Fraser argues that the oppressed create “subaltern counterpublics” as an alternative to the dominant bourgeois public sphere because they need:
[V]enues in which to undertake communicative processes that were not, as it were, under the supervision of the dominant group … to articulate and defend their interests … [and] to expose modes of deliberation that mask domination by absorbing the less powerful into a false “we” that reflects the more powerful.
(Fraser, 1997: p. 81)
Through this communicative process, counterpublics can develop a collective action frame, or a way of looking at the world that argues that mass mobilization for struggle is both possible and necessary (Tarrow, 1998: p. 21). The development of sophisticated subaltern counterpublics, including the nurturing of hidden transcripts and/or collective action frames, is a necessary precursor to the launching of a powerful social movement.
An example of this is the development of the civil rights movement in the US. Though locked out of the halls of power and civil society in the South, this movement was able to nurture resistance based in churches, civic organizations, and their own press and allied cultural workers (musicians, artists, theatre-makers, et al.). They also built coalitions across region, race, and class, sustaining their struggle against American apartheid over the course of decades.
A “cycle of contention” begins when the incentives for contentious collective action are raised, and/or when the costs of such action are lowered for various reasons, such as when there is a perceived split in the elites, a weakening of the state’s repressive apparatus, or a shift in the relative power of competing or allied forces, encouraging social movements to get active across an entire society (Tarrow, 1998: p. 24–25):
[C]ontentious politics is triggered when changing political opportunities and constraints create incentives for social actors who lack resources on their own … When backed by dense social networks and galvanized by culturally resonant, action-oriented symbols, contentious politics leads to sustained interaction with opponents. The result is the social movement.
(Tarrow, 1998: p. 2)
Social movements cannot preordain a top–down loosening of national policy in order to better facilitate their own actions, but they certainly have the agency to “seize the time” if they perceive a chink in the establishment’s order or a Certeauan “occasion.” When a historical opportunity for such collective agency presents itself, a cycle of contention may begin. To take advantage of the opportunity and to build group formation and cohesion, activists need to construct a cultural frame or a set of impassioned, shared meanings, which justify and motivate collective action. A cycle of contention gains momentum when social actors perceive that change is desirable, that the risks and costs of movement participation have lessened, and that the chance of victory has grown (Tarrow, 1998: p. 21–24). Without a sense of shared grievance, purpose, and possibility, an effective social movement cannot develop; but that sense of shared meaning, a role in history, and liberatory agency, can sustain resistance even when the tide has turned and danger has increased (Wood, 2003: p. 231–41).
Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) workshops can play a vital role during cycles of contention in helping members of a burgeoning movement to define their issues and explore possible solutions.2 Whether participants are seasoned activists or people who have never engaged in overt political action, TO’s Image Theatre techniques can help bring people together, in a common space, to creatively, nonverbally, and dialogically express and develop their perceptions of their world, power structures, and oppressions. TO’s Forum Theatre techniques provide a relatively safe space, protected from the actual ramifications of reactive state repression, to experiment with possible contentious methods. This is oppositional praxis in action. TO’s Legislative Theatre methodology can even help a movement to develop a parliamentary agenda. With its myriad variations, this body of practice can assist social movements in developing hidden transcripts and collective action frames.
Boal was not the first to call for decentralized, anti-authoritarian methods for building progressive movements. In fact, various methods of “rehearsing for reality” are a common staple of organizing manuals from way back.3 However, these manuals generally call for activists to discuss overall strategy, and to role-play and rehearse only the moment of action, public performance, and/or confrontation. For example, nonviolence training teaches activists, through practice, how to stay calm, centered, committed, and nonviolent in the face of harassment or abuse. Theatre of the Oppressed expands the role of radical rehearsal for reality, helping people at any level of political commitment not only to rehearse direct confrontation with the state, but to use improvisatory performance to decide what their problems are, what they want, and what they are able to do about it.
There is a long history of theatre at the service of social movements. But Boal’s unique, historic contribution is the inventive synthesis of these traditions with Freirian and anti-Aristotelian theory, and the established theatrical rehearsal techniques of sense-activation, improvisation, trust creation, and ensemble-building.4 The result is a powerful dialogical tool for building a movement. Boal denounces globalization, not only as a process of economic oppression, but also as the imposition of a top–down monologue upon the entire world. Influenced by Freire, Boal calls for dialogical resistance (Boal, 1998: p. 251): a director or auteur does not dictate the activist performance, but rather a joker facilitates the creative collaboration of a group. Jokering is not unproblematic, of course, but TO strives to minimize hierarchy. In his first book, Boal (1979) articulated the ways in which his theatre consciously resists Aristotelian catharsis. This is ideal for social movements’ development of collective action frames and tactical and strategic praxis. A social movement seeks to galvanize, to agitate, and to articulate dissent and dissatisfaction; the purgation of social complaint through catharsis is anathema.
Movements communicate with the greater public by using “culturally resonant, action-oriented symbols” (Tarrow, 1998: p. 2). The challenge with symbols is subtle: if a symbol is too conventional, tame, and general like the national flag, then it will not eloquently communicate the special identities and agenda that the movement wishes to project. However, if a symbol is so avant-garde that it is beyond what Baz Kershaw and others have called the “horizon of expectations”5 then it will not resonate outside of the ranks of the movement’s cognoscenti. The most effective new symbols do not solely evoke established symbolism, nor do they confound understanding. Rather, they stretch the horizon of understanding further; using, inverting, and twisting the given symbo...