THE THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED

Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is the Game of Dialogue: we play and learn together. All kinds of Games must have Discipline - clear rules that we must follow. At the same time, Games have absolute need of creativity and Freedom. TO is the perfect synthesis between the antithetic Discipline and Freedom. Without Discipline, there is no Social Life; without Freedom, there is no Life. 

TO was used by peasants and workers; later, by teachers and students; now, also by artists, social workers, psychotherapists, NGOs... At first, in small, almost clandestine places. Now in the streets, schools, churches, trade-unions, regular theatres, prisons...

Three activities used in the Theatre of the Oppressed to implement with our students:

IMAGE-THEATRE – Words are emptinesses that fill the emptiness (vacuum) that exists between one human being and another. Words are lines that we carve in the sand, sounds that we sculpt in the air. We know the meaning of the word we pronounce, because we fill it with our desires, ideas and feelings, but we don’t know how that word is going to be heard by each listener. IMAGE THEATRE is a series of Techniques that allow people to communicate through Images and Spaces, and not through words alone.

RAINBOW OF DESIRE – Many concrete oppressions provoke deep damage inside our subjectivity and psychic life. Under the general title of RAINBOW OF DESIRE, there are fifteen Techniques - complex, but not complicated! – which help us to visualize theatrically our oppressions, and deal with them more clearly: no one interprets anything, but all participants offer the Protagonist the mirror of the multiple regards of the others. We try to locate the Cops in our Head knowing very well that, if those Cops are there, they have come from some Headquarters outside us that spread them all around, into the heads of many more citizens. We try to discover the ideology of each Cop and not concentrate our attention on the particular individual.

FORUM-THEATRE — Music is the organization of sound in time; plastic arts, the organization of colors and lines in the space; theatre, the organization of human actions in time and space. Theatre is a representation and not a reproduction of social reality. FORUM-THEATRE presents a scene or a play that must necessarily show a situation of oppression that the Protagonist does not know how to fight against, and fails. The spect-actors are invited to replace this Protagonist, and act out - on stage and not from the audience - all possible solutions, ideas, strategies. The other actors improvise the reactions of their characters facing each new intervention, so as to allow a sincere analysis of the real possibilities of using those suggestions in real life. All spect-actors have the same right to intervene and play their ideas. FORUM-THEATRE is a collective rehearsal for reality.