Number of participants:. Participant selection:. Back to top. Site by Effusion. How and why do people participate? How do I evaluate a participatory process? How do I facilitate a participatory process?
How do I make the case for public participation? How do I plan a participatory process? It has been used successfully in many different places and formats around the world. Forum theatre is a wonderfully flexible method. In close consultation, we can produce a play which resonates with challenges faced by the student audience. Alternatively we can work with the student audience to create and present their own forum theatre productions.
Essentially, a scenario relating to a specific practice dilemma is enacted by actors. Subjects for example can be as diverse as basic communication skills, breaking significant news and psychosocial interventions in psychosis. For the spectator, the fiction is real life; usually the performance will end without revealing otherwise. In Forum Theatre, the audience is aware of their involvement as protagonists.
First, the play is performed as conventional theatre of approximately minutes. In traditional Forum Theatre, this must only be a character depicted as oppressed, or one seen as struggling; in other versions this is extended to all characters.
They must then attempt to alter the course of dramatic action by trying alternative solutions. The actors within the scene must improvise responses to these interventions such that each proposed solution is confronted with realistic tensions and responses, and the consequences and drawbacks of each solution are explored live.
If an intervention fails, the play continues until another spect-actor stops the play again; if it succeeds, the audience is then invited to replace an oppressor character to find new ways to challenge the oppressed character. In either case, once the consequences of the change are played out, the actors return to the run of the play to allow for further interventions.
All of this is facilitated by the Joker, who explains the rules, corrects errors, encourages interventions, and draws out themes and realizations, all without imposing themselves on the process or dictating the course of events. In this process, Forum Theatre is created and performed concerning proposed laws, as a means to directly involve everyday citizens in policy-making. The recommendations so approved are then collected and presented to lawmakers.
Given the nature of the particular process, workshops and projects might run from two hours to two years. Theatre for Living is designed to represent all characters in their complexity and leave room for intervention and exploration of all characters and their potential motivations and possibilities. Rainbow of Desire: Boal developed this series of techniques later in his career to speak to oppressions to subjectivity and psychic life, after various projects with European communities revealed patterns of internalized oppression.
Forum Theatre has been shown to work successfully across a remarkable range of cultural, political, and social differences and demands. It has been used by peasants and workers, students and teachers, artists, social workers, psychotherapists, and NGOs, among others; in schools, streets, churches, trade-unions, theatres, and prisons. Every year since , Ashtar Theatre has been producing a Forum Play that targets the local audiences, especially those in rural areas; women, marginalized groups, and school students in accordance with the topics dealt with at the forum production of that year.
The project culminated in the presentation of three Forums by female and male prisoners and prison guards at the Carandiru Prison. Staging Human Rights included a research programme which gave evidence of an increased consciousness of human rights for a vast majority of the participants.
After this preliminary phase, 5 cast members selected from the original workshop went into production for a 3-week period, after which the finished piece will be performed to Vancouver and New Westminster community audiences.
Recommendations based on the Forum will be recorded and distilled by a Community Scribe into a Community Action Report. Headlines has the written commitment from the Mental Health Commission of Canada and the Greater Vancouver Regional Steering Committee on Homelessness to use the process and the Community Action Report as a part of their research for National and Regional strategies on mental health and homelessness.
The group was created to acknowledge two different types of interventions: i in the context of schools, with children of all ages and their teachers, aiming at prevention; ii in the context of hospitals, with psychotic or autistic children, or with other symptoms, e. Hundreds, if not thousands, of organizations and initiatives have used theatre as a development tool : for education or advocacy, as therapy, as a participatory tool, or as an exploratory tool in development.
Participatory theatre techniques have been used in organizational training workshops, including managerial and leadership training, sensitization, and problem-solving. Forum Theatre has proved extremely effective for addressing a wide-range of issues. However, there are certain elements that raise a number of questions and criticisms. The first of these is safety: in exploring delicate and contentious issues involving vulnerable communities, while the work is designed to empower and equip participants, it also inevitably brings to the surface hidden feelings, fears and traumatic experiences.
In doing so, facilitators must be particularly gifted at creating a safe context in which these raw emotions and experiences might be expressed and explored. Indeed, where Forum Theatre is used to generate public dialogue and community knowledge rather than as explicit therapy, community support such as a social worker or therapist must be available in some way to provide for those individuals left exposed during and after the Forum process.
This term is common within ethical discussions of community arts activism, and refers to processes that fail to be accountable and present for the longer-term effects of a singular event. As Forum theatre is usually used to address specific problems within a limited time-frame, it runs the risk of moving on after performances without community follow-up.
Here, relationships with the community in question and its various organizations and support systems might be developed and made visible during the Forum event such that community members are aware of available resources.
Linked to both of these risks is the criticism of Invisible Theatre in particular: designed to be provocative and perceived as real to bystanders, Invisible Theatre has sometimes presented at times violent and dangerous scenarios — domestic disputes and potential suicides, for example — which have led at times to emergency services interventions.
In London, this has led to a banning of Invisible Theatre on the Underground. The question arises as to the ethical limits and social responsibilities of Invisible Theatre performers; certainly, it begs caution concerning safety for any potential production. Adrian Jackson. London and New York: Routledge, Theatre of the Oppressed.
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