Threat Quality Press

There’s a theater company here in Philadelphia called “Gas & Electric Arts” that do some wildly innovative, good work.  But they just recently sent me an e-mail inviting me to participate in their “forum theater” class, and I’m not going to do it.  I have some problems with Forum Theater, and I haven’t met anyone who’s ever addressed them effectively.

Okay, first of all, one of the biggest problems that I have is that the people involved in it tend to use words like “conflictual.”  Now, technically speaking, “conflictual” is indeed a word.  The problem with it is that its a word that, especially when used in it context (“Forum theater deals with conflictual issues in communities…”), has the sound of that touchy-feel, team-spirit-building consultancy unspeak that so predominates in those industries where results have to be intuited rather than measured.  Any place where your success can be at length justified and explained is a place where words like “conflictual” find their use.

This is my actual problem with “Forum Theater,” though, and let me take a second to explain what I’m going on about.  Forum Theater was invented by a fellow named Augusto Boal, who won was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize (the lecturer who introduced me to Boal’s work is going to have to answer some questions, now).  The idea behind Forum Theater is that it’s a play that the audience creates collectively, as it is performed.  Actors get up onstage, the audience shouts out things for them to do next.  It’s a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure, Whose Line Is it, Anyway? approach to the theatre, and it’s theoretically supposed to give a voice to The Oppressed–i.e., people who don’t get to see themselves onstage very often.

The lecturer that I mentioned, who introduced me to the Forum Theater, was evasive when I had questions for him.  “How well does it work?”  I asked him.  “Oh, it works,” he said.  “Augusto Boal won a Nobel Peace Prize!”  Hur hur.  “What happened after you did the play?  How did people react?”  “Oh, they’d never done anything like it.  They were thrilled.  They were energized an galvanized.”

Unspeak.  This doesn’t just mean nothing, it serves to obscure the actual meaning.  The actual meaning being:  Forum Theater doesn’t work.

Now, there’s some debate as to whether or not Art has to do anything.  Oscar Wilde famously believed that art was it’s own purpose, and that was that.  Bert Brecht believed that art was “not a mirror held up to nature, but a hammer with which to shape it.”  Whatever, I don’t care.  I have my own ideas about it, but I mostly just care that you’re consistent.  If you believe Art is a tool for social change, then you’d damn well better be able to show me how you’re changing society with it.

There are a number of reasons that Forum Theater doesn’t work, but here’s the big one:  Forum Theater is part of the Theater of the Oppressed, and is designed to give a voice to people who are suffering this oppression.  But the Oppressed don’t go to the theater.  The Oppressed watch television.  See, Forum Theater worked fifty years ago in Brazil because the relationship between theater and the public was different in that place, and at that time.  Here, in the United States right now, the theater is something that you go to because you want to be smarter, not because it is a regular thing to do.  (I’ve excepted Broadway from this evaluation; I generally consider even the best that Broadway has to offer to be little more than New York City’s Epcot Center.)

So, you’re doing Forum Theater here in America, but the people that you’re trying to help with it aren’t seeing it, because they don’t care about it (especially, but OH ESPECIALLY! if you’re doing it on a college campus).

And why don’t they care about it?  Because it’s boring.

Here’s the thing:  when you see something, or hear something, or attempt to “follow an idea,” your brain is doing exactly that:  following it.  Kind of tracing the idea inside itself, parsing it out into familiar bits and chunks.  When you feel like an idea is familiar to you, it’s because the route that the idea takes through the web of neurons in your head has already been carved out.

The value of art, and the pleasure that we take in new ideas, comes from forcing our thoughts to carve out new, different routes, from surprising us by veering left when familiar paths turn right.  From carving out new channels.

Forum Theater does exactly the opposite of that.  By returning authorship to the audience, they give up the ability to offer new ideas to them–instead, the action and character of the play necessarily conforms to the thoughts that the audience already has.

Now, of course, if you’re a theater major, you’ve probably had amazing experiences with Forum Theater, and if you tell me about them, I’ll want to punch you.  Here, again, is why:  your anecdotal experiences were selective.  You were doing Forum Theater with regular theater-goers (i.e.:  not The Oppressed), you were doing it fellow students, under controlled circumstances.

Maybe you really were doing it with some poor kids from the South Bronx.  And maybe you felt like it was amazing (theater artists are often amazed), and maybe you did learn so much.  That’s because you didn’t know what the audience already did:  what it’s like to be The Oppressed.  But here’s the thing:  art isn’t for you.  Art is not about you and your spiritual journey, it’s not about you and your quest towards enlightenment.

Theater artists, and actors in particular, are the only people I’ve ever met who seem to regard their jobs primarily as vehicles for personal growth.

Dear theater artists:  I don’t care about your psychic evolution.  Which is why, no matter what you feel like you’ve learned from Forum Theater, I don’t care about that, either.

This entry was posted on September 22, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Braak, poetics with tags Braak, poetics, theater, Things That Bug Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.