Audience Participation in Theatre. Performing Urgencies #3
E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
ISBN: 978-3-89581-449-5
Verlag: Alexander
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Im Kontext heutiger Politik, Wirtschaft und sich permanent verändernden kulturellen Trends kommt das traditionelle Theater mit seiner Trennung von aktiven Darstellern und passiven Zuschauern immer mehr aus der Mode. Zeitgenössische Künstler emanzipieren ihr Publikum, laden es auf die Bühne und in die Performance ein, beleidigen und provozieren es und erproben verschiedenste Techniken der Teilhabe. Das Buch verbindet zahlreiche Beispiele von Publikumsbeteiligung mit Problemen der Partizipation in Demokratie und sozial engagierter Kunst.
The nineteenth century was a century of actors. The twentieth century was a century of directors. The twenty-first century is a century of spectators. With Jacques Rancière's The Emancipated Spectator (2009) being the most discussed theatre-related text of the last decade, there is an increase in scholarly and curatorial interest in the most mysterious, potentially dangerous and, in fact, most important participant of the performance, who stays silent, motionless, and hidden in darkness: the audience. And similarly, artists desire to finally 'meet the spectators': to let them speak, get into a dialogue with them, invite them to involve themselves in pursuing the performance.
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Theatre in Africa is one of the oldest means of communication which predates the mass media and on which colonisation relied heavily to pass on Western ideologies. Traditional theatre making had to adjust to new theatre from the West. Many embraced theatre for its diverse virtues especially for tackling development issues, which is why it was largely referred to as Theatre for Development. Batilloi Warritay argues that theatre has the ability to help defuse conflictual situations in an amicable way. Theatre has the potential to create critical consciousness among the people towards problems in their environment, hence triggering change. This becomes possible especially as theatre has an intrinsic value of participation. Participatory theatre relies on local languages to help communities understand development messages in a simpler way and certainly at low cost. In their study entitled ‘Women’s Voices and African Theatre: Case studies from Kenya, Mali, The Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe’ (2003), Article 19 sustained that: Theatre is the only art form in which the whole human being is actually employed as the instrument for expressing or investigating the human condition. As a result, it allows for a dichotomising of the self, or objectification of reality, so that human beings can observe themselves in action. This act of seeing oneself allows one to envision alternatives – particularly since theatre is in its essence a communal activity, which facilitates a sharing of knowledge and experience that may lead to it becoming a rehearsal for change. As such, theatre on the African continent has always been used for entertainment and beyond. The most recurrent messages covered in this theatre include health, religion, education, politics, social, or economic issues. Many believe that theatre for development gained its full potential when it started espousing participatory and liberatory philosophies from Paolo Freire and his student Augusto Boal with his Theatre of the Oppressed (1993). The latter was conceived to become a means of resistance for the people in general, and the most vulnerable social categories in particular. Boal wanted his theatre to be a transformational forum for people’s self-expression which leads to empowerment, both at individual and collective levels. Forum theatre, which is the core of this paper, is one type that subscribes to Boal’s framework of popular theatre. Although forum theatre has been adapted to fit to local contexts where it was applied, its initial idea lies in showing a play to audience members – referred to by Boal as ‘spect-actors’ – with a ‘joker’ who serves as a facilitator. Audience members are free to interrupt the play at any stage in order to step in and showcase how they think oppression should be dealt with. In that sense, the gap between performers and audiences that generally characterises classical theatre is broken. In its initial stages, forum theatre was meant to be a game changer against political oppression. In his assessment of community theatre’s efficacy in the South African context, Kennedy C. Chinyowa explains that forum theatre presents an ‘anti-model’ who is looked at as the oppressor and who is targeted by protagonists as the play rolls out in a bid to find a solution to the source of oppression. A plethora of researchers and reports have proven too laudatory by hailing the potential and the benefits that forum theatre generates in different settings despite some challenges inherent to any cultural production. The most recurrent field on the continent that amply harnessed forum theatre is certainly the fight against HIV/AIDS. UNESCO’s toolkit, ‘Act, Learn and Teach: Theatre, HIV and AIDS Toolkit for Youth in Africa’, offers one optimistic outlook of why and how forum theatre should be used in fighting epidemics. This organisation emphasises that forum theatre has the merit to be an equaliser in that it allows all audience members – without exclusion – to voice their needs and shape together their destiny. In his region-wide analysis entitled ‘Art and Conscientization: Forum Theatre in Uganda, Rwanda, DR Congo, and South Sudan’ (2015), Claus Schrowange warns against the tendency of some to reduce forum theatre to mere entertainment. Instead, he believes that when forum theatre is used ‘in a participatory manner with an authentic, believable acting style, involving both the audience and stage actor in a vivid and touching experience, the impact is immediately felt’. Many more researchers welcomed warmly the use of forum theatre for HIV/AIDS eradication which, up to now, seems to be the kernel of Entertainment-Education (EE) initiatives. Paulin Basinga et al found that, when used along with other classical education methods, forum theatre played a major role in increasing youth’s self-efficacy and readiness to use prevention methods, thus contributing largely to behavioural change among secondary school adolescents in Rwanda. In the same vein, in his analysis on how to use forum theatre to promote youth’s awareness of reproductive health-related problems including HIV/AIDS education, Dennis Francis elaborates that forum theatre has an invaluable potential to create openness and assertiveness, which are key steps in behaviour change in the context of HIV/AIDS. Used as a Problem Solving Project, forum theatre was found to be useful in a factory environment. Emma Durden and Dominique Nduhura’s analysis revealed that forum theatre presents a promising opportunity to the workplace where it allows engaging the audience in the drama process; raises awareness about HIV and AIDS; and empowers communities to talk about this epidemic. Magnet Theatre performing in a village near Malindi, Kenya, 2006 Forum theatre was used for many more purposes. In a different study on the use of forum theatre in fighting heterosexism and heteronormativity in a South African education, Francis discusses that this tool presents very satisfactory results. However, he is fast to nuance that forum theatre by itself would not liberate communities as there still subsists hindrances such as socialisation, privilege, and local context. The same optimism transpires from Nehemia Chivandikwa and Ngonidzashe Muwonwa’s analysis that concludes that forum theatre in Zimbabwe constitutes a privileged place to debate topics that in Africa are generally considered as taboo or very complex, such as sexuality and disability. In ‘Theatre for Development and Northern Uganda: An Avenue for Hope? Or a Lofty Ambition?’ (2005) Nandita Dinesh noted rosy results in conflict resolution where forum theatre brings communities to learn from each other, thus quelling the differences among them. Most importantly, forum theatre helped communities to interact and encouraged them to participate instead of using traditional top-down methods. Dinesh argues that, through interactions: Forum theatre promotes a higher-order questioning and analysis that really begins to empower transformation. Individuals begin to realise that their oppressions are man-made rather than the natural order of things, and that they have the ‘power within’ to change that reality. Yet the true value of forum theatre as a tool for empowerment is that it is also a ‘rehearsal for reality’; participants are able to actively practice the strategies and skills needed to alter the status quo in a safe-space before implementing them in real-life. In that, forum theatre is a powerful tool through which communities are able to ‘have fun and save lives’. Also, contrary to other communication tools, forum theatre can easily be taken to remote places where most African illiterate and poor populations live. On top of that, the whole process is accomplished at very low cost. Successful achievements were also recorded in other countries such as Rwanda, Burundi, Côte d’Ivoire, and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) where forum theatre was used by Search for Common Ground (SFCG), a US-based organisation. Sydney Smith and Elise Webb reported cases where SFCG used participatory theatre for initiatives such as implementation of land policy; promoting public voices of women on key societal issues; promoting entrepreneurship among the youth; unity and reconciliation; and peace and conflict resolution. More specifically, Ananda Breed highlighted SFCG success in Rwanda where forum theatre was instrumental to promoting justice and reconciliation among perpetrators and victims in the post-Genocide era. In Tanzania, forum theatre is also very popular. The Ideas Factory was a campaign that was initiated in 2006 to try and catalyse positive change in youth by including them in decision making, social entrepreneurship, and civic education. The campaign aimed at drastically transforming youth’s attitudes in order to bring younger generations to aim high and prepare to sculpt their destinies and their society’s. Social transformation was also at the heart of Ikusasa Lakho (2006), a theatre project in South Africa which aimed to change the youth whose past was tarnished by colonialism and apartheid. Worth noting also is the big number of projects based on drama for education and behaviour change on the continent, in which forum theatre was the cornerstone. These projects include for instance DramAidE which has used various participatory methods for HIV/AIDS education in South Africa since 1992; the Marotholi Traveling Theatre in Lesotho (1982–85); the Theatre for...
