ROBERTO MAZZINI’S COMMENT ON “THEATRE OF RELEVANCE”   BACK

FOR MANJUL :


Here is my comment to your document titled “Theatre of Relevance”. Sorry for my bad English, you can of course correct it if you ever wanted to add this part to your book.
I completed agree with your concept of theatre as a medium of change that should take its own responsibility with social issues.

I am not really an artist. I feel myself as a political activist. I want help people to change this world. Because I don’t like the direction it has and I am convinced that as much as I can do it, as much I will be happy in my life and I will be able to change my own conditions of life.

I believe we are so connected that my liberation passes through yours and others’ liberation.

I share the Friere’s thinking (a Brazilian philosopher, involved in adult education as political activation) that “I cannot make me free alone; nobody makes free nobody else; together, we make us free”.

I also agree with Boal’s thinking (the creator of theatre of the oppressed) who states “we should have the courage to be happy”, because for being happy we need to know what we want, to fight for that and to overcome oppression together with others.

Another point strictly connected with that is your wish to enlarge the fields where theatre can be used and useful.

Me too, and my company, we believe and we’re trying to put theatre in as many places as possible. We perform in schools, prisons, psychiatric centers, but also streets, bars, supermarkets and railway stations…

We go where people are and not just standing waiting the audience. Our best projects include theatre actions in public spaces, not only in official spaces for theatre. That has a great impact to the people that normally or do not go to theatre either they don’t know it.

We suppose that it will be possible to create rituals by means of theatre where social groups, communities, people could recognize each other as part of the whole and take up the power and responsibility to be protagonist in their life. It’s our dream.

I also am interested in your comparison of processes relating with actor, sufferer (oppressed), writer and director. I think that frame helps to make closer theatre with human life and overcomes the separation between different areas such as art, pedagogy, politics, social work, therapy.

As Boal says, Theatre of the Oppressed (T.O.) is a research at the edges among such areas, it works out at the frontiers, the borders; it links what our culture divides. I support that sometime that can bring some confusion, but we have to take such a risk, during the creation of a new culture for the humanity.

Furthermore you mention that theatre is identified in performance for 80% and we also believe that process is much more important in this sense of theatre, a theatre with a full meaning and not only for entertainment.

No doubt that theatre means also analysis of theatre, discussion, documentation of processes, and involving audience too. T.O. has a special way to involve the audience: Forum – Theatre is the main tool in this sense. Simply the story is performed once in front to an audience and a second time the spect-actors can go on the stage and replacing the character, which they are identified with. In this way each intervention can lead to a solution or enriching the debate to analyse the conflictive situation.

How TOR (Theatre of Relevance) involves the audience? But to agree is one side. There are also questions, doubts and disagreements. For instance you say theatre is a way to express themselves and expression is so fundamental for the human well being that Theatre and life are, in this sense, strictly connected.

My question is: What do you mean with the word “expression”? Because I would prefer “communicate” that, means to me “be in relation with others” while “expression” seems to me more connected with individual need to push out emotions.

Is expression a kind of catharsis? Or is it something like to be present in the world, existing, telling people, who you are? As Freire says “saying his own word to the world”, naming the world. Or something else?

About working with exploited and exploiter, some remarks:

I do not want to say society is exactly divided in two parts. I guess the same person can be exploited in a situation and exploiter in another. Nevertheless I suppose that few people who are powerful in the society are more responsible than others respect social problems and so also about the chains of oppression as Part Patfoort (a Dutch peace-researcher) says.

I think it’s a delicate question to choose the people who want to work with or not. I am open to work with all people want to make themselves free. But I think it should be clear what are the objectives of your work when someone calls you as an Institution and not as a person. When we are called to intervene at school, students are not asked about that, they just receive our intervention. The same happens in prison, in psychiatric context, in therapeutic communities. How to deal with that?

You enter in a situation that has not a balance of power: someone can decide and impose his monologue to others that cannot “speak” in the sense of Freire. It’s risky do not perceive that you are entering a power structure, where people who call you are may be interested not in liberation but in manipulation; or they just want to entertain people in order to make them more quiet. So it’s not so easy to say “I work with exploited and exploiter” in my opinion. What are the phases of work that your method has?

The writer, like the director, the animator, the teacher and the like, has a great power. And a great responsibility if we agree with a theatre for change. My colleagues and me do mainly theatre of the oppressed from Boal, because we found in this method a great respect for the people’s knowledge, culture, personality.

According with Freire each person and group has its won culture and value; not only who was well educated is reach of knowledge; lower classes have a great knowledge about daily life problems, how to manage them. May be their knowledge is fragmented, implicit, not systematic, but still exists.

So T.O. is a fantastic tool for increasing the consciousness of people because it starts from the people’s image of reality. First step is the question “how do you perceive your daily life” (or a specific issue related). And people are the ones who construct their own images of reality. If the group is socially and culturally homogeneous, easily these images will be similar. And then knowledge starts to increase throughout the dialogue among the group.

This process, both theatrical and pedagogical, goes further, more and more, by the means of theatre language. Boal supposes that theatre is basically the power to perceive ourselves in action. Human being characterizes himself for this skill and theatre only improves, makes bigger that.

When a person acts on the stage, this special “esthetic space”,as Boal call it, he/ she has the change to see him/ herself in action. To play with elements (space, time, objects, feelings), to see the several possibilities to act that you have in each situation; in few words, to invent your future looking at your present and past. When you are on the sage, Boal says, you are divided into 2 persons: person A, the actor, with his own story, skills, desires… and person B, the character, with an other story, wishes, fears… You are the same physical person, but in the same time you are two; this let you see better your potentialities to act in different ways. That enacts you to invent your life instead of simply to react to the stimulus.

But for doing that, theatre animator must let people to create their own scenes, their own reality, without any manipulation or authoritarism. How Theatre of Relevance deals with this issue? Don’t you think that T.O. should be the core of your theatre? What do you think about Freire’s thinking? I think it’s really connected with out common research. I do not discuss the technical aspects because they are not crucial for me now and I prefer to stay on the methodological level and discuss about aims and values of our theatre. With many thanks for sharing your research. And giving me the chance to intervene.

Roberto Mazzini
Director of Giolli Center for Researching on Theatre of the Oppresses and Paulo Freire’s Conscientisation
Viale Carducci 113, 57121 Livorno
e-mail : ceg1264@comune.re.it, giollli.tdo@tin.it
Phone : 0586-424311 (English, German, French, Spanish)
Out planet, Osnabruck (Germnany) the 4th March 2001.    BACK