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Abstract
While policy think tank discourses have often privileged “detached” expertise, legislative theatre attaches the breathing, emotionally rich body to the function of the think tank. This article explores how one 2004 legislative theatre project, Headlines Theatre's Practicing Democracy (inspired by Augusto Boal's legislative theatre work in Brazil in the 1990s), constituted an embodied social services think tank. The author argues that Practicing Democracy's forum theatre performances constructed collaborative, dialogic exchange of expertise as a vital citizenship practice. Ultimately, the article pans out to identify questions of power and access that beg consideration when deploying forum theatre as legislative theatre methodology.
Acknowledgements
The author is especially indebted to Jill Dolan and Sonja Kuftinec for their rigorous, specific engagement with multiple drafts of this essay. Her thanks also go to Karen Mitchell, Harry Brod, Emily Paskewitz, the anonymous TPQ reviewers, David Diamond, Carrie Gallant, Sandra Pronteau, Charlotte Canning, Deborah Paredez, Stacy Wolf, Omi Osun/Joni L. Jones, Sharon Grady, Katie Dawson, Mary Celeste Kearney, and Ann Cvetkovich, as well as Martin Zimmerman and her other student colleagues in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. Portions of this piece were presented at the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in May 2007, and at the Conference on Social Theory, Politics, and the Arts at New York University in October 2007. This essay is derived from the author's ongoing research for her dissertation, Adapting Boal's Legislative Theatre: Producing Democracies, Casting Citizens as Policy Experts.
Notes
1. Frances Babbage synthesizes the joker's function: “to mediate between actors and spectators and in all ways possible assist the latter's participation within the dramatic action. Boal has described the joker as a ‘midwife’ whose task is to facilitate, but not control, the theatre event” (CitationBabbage 143). Diamond, like many other jokers, consciously adds provocateur to this list of joker roles (Theatre 83).
2. Boal reflects on his work as a vereador in Legislative Theatre (1998).
3. I learned about Practicing Democracy after it closed. My only spectator experience with it has been through the March 6 recording.
4. This research has been approved by the Internal Review Board of the University of Texas at Austin. Diamond, Gallant, and Pronteau knew they were being interviewed as part of a scholarly research project, and they all signed consent forms on which they specifically selected the option of being quoted by first and last name.
5. Since the turn of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, think tanks have largely been understood as sites dedicated in some way or another to policy analysis (CitationAbelson “The Business” 216).
6. Political science scholar CitationDiane Stone implies that early think tanks have been imagined by some policy theorists as largely apolitical bastions of specialized knowledge.
7. While I argue that Practicing Democracy dismantles “rational” expertise, Vancouver-based geography scholars Geraldine Pratt and Caleb Johnston found through interviewing councilors and a city planner that the city's responses to the project largely upheld a distinction between rational expert and irrational amateur (“Turning” 97). CitationPratt and Johnston's analysis of those interviews is persuasive, but it also highlights legislator response in a way that subordinates the forums themselves. This essay instead focuses on Practicing Democracy's forum theatre in performance.
8. Education scholar Jacqueline Kennelly cites Practicing Democracy as a model of civic engagement that could invigorate Canadian citizenship education. She suggests the project exemplifies a “democratic public sphere,” which provides a “space for communicative exchanges, engages with the plurality of views and experiences that mark society, and disrupts the modernist tendency to retreat into segregated enclaves that foster a politic of obliviousness” (542).
9. Boal offered these thoughts in May 2008 in Omaha, Nebraska, at a workshop on how to use his Rainbow of Desire techniques to create forum scenes. In other moments, however, he did note his sense that democracy is a utopia—unachievable, but worth striving for.
10. As Kuftinec and CitationCohen-Cruz have demonstrated, “community-based” is a contested term. When I refer to Headlines’ work in that way, I mean that it often belongs to “a field in which artists, collaborating with people whose lives directly inform the subject matter, express collective meaning” (CitationCohen-Cruz 1).
11. For more on systems theory and TO, see Diamond (Theatre) and CitationWarren Linds.
12. Practicing Democracy underscored the state and its power even as it tried to dismantle entrenched state processes of decision-making.
13. In his interview with me, Diamond insisted that although Vancouver contributes to Headlines’ general operating budget, no city monies were used toward Practicing Democracy. He said project money was raised from a variety of other grants, organizations, and individuals. To an extent, his distinction felt like hair splitting, but I lean toward considering the point moot; Headlines seemed not to soft-pedal their (or the forum participants’) demands for the council's respect and attention.
14. By the time Practicing Democracy's workshops were underway, the province had announced significant exemptions to the two-year time limit, so the project would address chronic poverty and social service policy more broadly (Diamond “Practicing” 31).
15. See CitationPratt and Johnston (“Putting”) for a nuanced description of the initial workshop's ethical conflicts. Some participants thought the workshop, which used TO and Theatre for Living techniques, privileged subjects like “public violence, drug addiction and prostitution” over “more ‘mundane’ or everyday experiences of poverty” (“Putting” 74). While some participants did not share those concerns, to others the workshop felt “sensationalizing, undemocratic and exploitative” (75). One woman referred to Headlines as “poverty pimps” (74).
16. Individuals selected as actors worked with Diamond to shape characters and scenarios that combined their own experiences with images, phrases, and experiences shared by the initial workshop's participants.
17. Sharing their knowledge, actors performed what Kennelly—quoting Hannah Arendt—calls their “‘who-ness’ in the public sphere of appearances” (556).
18. Kennelly acknowledges this problem of privatization and the value of privileged citizens learning about the harsh realities other citizens face. It is also important, however, that the forum was a space where marginalized citizens could learn more about each others’ experiences.
19. Davis and O'Sullivan's critique best addresses forum theatre, where one person intervening on behalf of another can lead to individualist problem-solving strategies. At the 2008 Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference, however, Julian Boal, Paris-based TO practitioner and son of Augusto Boal, argued that forum need not aim for individualized solutions. The younger Boal (whose current praxis feels more overtly Marxist than his father's) insisted that forum should instead be approached as “collective investigation” and “collective analysis.”
20. For more on the implications of Practicing Democracy's use of performance as qualitative research, particularly in the large-group workshop, see CitationPratt and Johnston (“Putting”).
21. Gallant's report did not directly propose the homelessness and sex-trade worker advocate. Rather, Diamond and Councilor Tim Louis initiated that motion, as Diamond explained at the 2008 Masks Conference in Vancouver (Diamond and Gallant “Practicing Democracy: Legislative Theatre”). After realizing the initial report was not resulting in policy change, he and Louis thought the suggestions might move farther along if there were an advocate who could shepherd them through red tape at City Hall.
22. An unnamed city councilor's comments to CitationPratt and Johnston hinted at perspective shifts that could alter this nebulous “policy-making environment”: “You're never going to look at a homeless person the same after hearing that person's story” (“Turning” 105).