Stories Through Theater
Theater can be a powerful tool for building, shaping, and developing stories. The use of theater is especially useful with groups in breaking through language and cultural barriers. It does not require background experience in drama, nor does it involve literacy skills to be effective. Often theater communicates with the whole person as it appeals to our emotions, prejudices, and aspirations using mime, dance, and images. Theater can be used to make us face up to aspects, tensions or conflicts in our own lives that we often try to ignore.
Theater has been used in community development in various ways. Some of the most effective theater was developed by Brazilian theater specialist Augusto Boal, where his Theater for the Oppressed is now used extensively across the world in building social movements, in teaching, and as an empowerment model to support marginalized communities in developing a ‘voice’.
Theater can be used to turn personal and collective stories into public dramas, that support advocacy or as a way for the participants to engage more readily in the issues raised. Theater does often ignite a desire for people to respond and take action on issues they feel are important to address.
How Does Theater Build Meaningful Stories?
Dramatic action allows ideas to come to life. This particular technique allows participants to experiment with their own ideas so it is, in a sense, automatically person-centered. Topics that can be raised through theater can include; marriage, friendship, environment, health, employment, conflict, community tension, land disputes, elections, anxieties and many more. In using forum theater, invisible theater, and playback theater it is easier to raise awareness of choice and action because cause and effect can be explored safely through a fictional framework.
Benefits and Opportunities:
Helping People Develop Their Own Stories
Stories help individuals and communities make sense of their place in the world. Facilitators planning to use theater with a community need to spend time building relationships with individuals. Finding an interesting way of encouraging people to talk about themselves is often a good start. Participants could be asked to bring to a meeting an object or photo of personal value. They could be asked, in turn, to share the histories and stories of those objects. People could also be asked to sing culturally-specific folk songs, tell traditional jokes and explore the use of proverbs in their communities. These may then be used to create short drama pieces. By the sharing of stories, important and relevant aspects of the community will gradually emerge.
You can begin simply by getting people in pairs or small groups to tell each other stories. The listener can retell the story they just heard to another person. Participants could pass one story around a circle, with each person making slight changes each time the story is retold.
Introductory Theater Activity
This activity does involve movement and therefore encouraging groups to wear light and comfortable clothes, to warm-up and use voice exercises helps in making people feel more at ease with themselves. Participants then divide into two groups and form two circles – an inner circle and an outer circle, with each inner participant facing one outer participant. The inner circle participants begin a story. It helps to provide them with a suggestion. For example, “Tell a story about a special moment that happened to you this week.” Each person than creates a one-minute story and tells it to their outer circle partner.
The outer circle move around one place and then passes on the story they have just heard to their new inner circle partners. This time, however, they add something new in the story. Have the outer circle move around one place again to the next inner circle person, who will repeat to them the story they have just heard. Continue this process of moving the outer participants one place each time. They will alternately listen to a story, passing it on to another person each time, always adding one new aspect to the story. When all outer participants have partnered with those on the inside, stop. Stories will be jumbled up, but this is part of the fun!
By the end each person will have a unique final story, which includes input from the others. Now divide participants into several smaller groups. Each person tells their final story to each other and decides which story is most preferred. What is included in the stories will reveal a great deal about the group as a whole – what is important to them, how they are interconnected, how they feel, what they believe, or what has happened to them in the past week, for example, and how they might relate to others in the community.
Turning Stories into Theater
Participants should agree which story to choose to develop into a play. How ‘good’ the performance ends up becoming relates to the amount of ownership that the group feels towards the material they have created. As facilitator you may need to highlight issues concerning what is possible to act out, as discarded stories may also be incorporated into the chosen story. They may want to embellish aspects of the story and/or add characters, events, and situations taken from real life. At the same time it is okay to use made-up events, as this is a creative process and allowing participants to take ownership and feel in control is a key aspect of using theater.
Exploring Issues, Local Culture, and Audiences
Often delicate and sensitive issues that are difficult to discuss can be explored through the use of dramatic action. Role Playing of a different character enables people to say things that would be difficult to do in their own voices. Humor can often help share difficult issues in ways that are easy to understand and make sense of. However, starting out more lightly and working towards more difficult subjects takes time and patience, and therefore it is worth allowing time for groups to become more comfortable with each other and confident in their abilities to use drama before stepping into controversial or difficult subjects.
Participants do not always have to base theater around their own life situations. Imagining different cultural settings can also be used, as can the use of local culture.
Cultural forms such as dance, storytelling, games, music, visual images, and foodways traditions and customs can be strong components of using theater. Cultural activities often encourage lively participation and communication.
Give careful thought about how to involve the audience. Could they be involved as other actors? As participants? Through follow-up activities? Wherever possible, people within the community can be identified who can be involved to support the process to be sustained by the community.
Exploring Issues with Role-Play
Role play asks participants to improvise a scene or character. They may create a scene about a topic they choose, such as violence, power relations, child soldiers, health, birth, death, or sickness. Other participants can interact; when they recognize a scene, they can shout “Freeze.” The scene becomes frozen and the participant can then enter the scene. The facilitator and the two actors continue the improvisation. The facilitator can freeze the scene again and ask, “What is missing from this scene?” They can invite suggestions from other participants or audience members. This process can be repeated until a scene is complete. This dramatic action highlights issues for discussion within the group. The activity can then go on to be developed as these stories emerge.
Using theater to build collective stories requires patience, trust, and active participation. This encourages groups to get to know one another, interact with one another, and to know that it does not matter how good an actor is, but that taking part is what counts. Here is a simple warm-up exercise you should consider using for newer groups and for people that have met for the first time.
Crossing the Circle and Building Trust
Participants form a large circle facing inward. Participants identify someone standing opposite him or her. When you say “Start,” each participant must close his or her eyes, walk across the circle and stand in the place of the person opposite them. All of the participants involved do this at the same time. People get muddled and mixed up, but eventually will sort themselves out and find their opposite partner. Although fun and lighthearted, the activity encourages participation, interaction, and solidarity-building. Participants can be asked how they felt doing this with their eyes closed and how the exercise relates to real life stories and personal experiences.
Follow-Up and Feedback
Encouraging people to write up their experiences on the chosen themes will allow for people to be able to make sense of many of the issues explored. It will also allow the group itself to explore solutions to difficult themes and complex ideas. You may want to ask each group member to complete a personal journal, and look at creating a short script, poem, or short play as a result of what they have learned. This can be fictional or based on an aspect of the story they have just played out. This is also a form of creative nonfiction, where theater may be used to transform real life stories.
Theater can be a powerful tool for building, shaping, and developing stories. The use of theater is especially useful with groups in breaking through language and cultural barriers. It does not require background experience in drama, nor does it involve literacy skills to be effective. Often theater communicates with the whole person as it appeals to our emotions, prejudices, and aspirations using mime, dance, and images. Theater can be used to make us face up to aspects, tensions or conflicts in our own lives that we often try to ignore.
Theater has been used in community development in various ways. Some of the most effective theater was developed by Brazilian theater specialist Augusto Boal, where his Theater for the Oppressed is now used extensively across the world in building social movements, in teaching, and as an empowerment model to support marginalized communities in developing a ‘voice’.
Theater can be used to turn personal and collective stories into public dramas, that support advocacy or as a way for the participants to engage more readily in the issues raised. Theater does often ignite a desire for people to respond and take action on issues they feel are important to address.
How Does Theater Build Meaningful Stories?
Dramatic action allows ideas to come to life. This particular technique allows participants to experiment with their own ideas so it is, in a sense, automatically person-centered. Topics that can be raised through theater can include; marriage, friendship, environment, health, employment, conflict, community tension, land disputes, elections, anxieties and many more. In using forum theater, invisible theater, and playback theater it is easier to raise awareness of choice and action because cause and effect can be explored safely through a fictional framework.
Benefits and Opportunities:
- Gives ‘voice’ to marginalized people and communities.
- Provides a mirror to concerns in the community and creates a forum where these issues can be explored.
- Presents attitudes and behaviors which may seem difficult to imagine for communities affected by war, conflict or division.
- Introduces models that meet challenges and difficulties experienced as a result of conflict and provides a “way out.”
- Deals with sensitive subjects such as justice, peace, conflict resolution and reconciliation, as well as conflict prevention, which are often difficult subjects to tackle for communities affected by instability and crisis.
- Promotes discourse, dialogue, and agreement as an ideal to follow, acting as a catalyst for change.
- Highlights traditional artists and tradition-bearers living in conflict regions as a way to engage in the process of collective community story-building through theater.
Helping People Develop Their Own Stories
Stories help individuals and communities make sense of their place in the world. Facilitators planning to use theater with a community need to spend time building relationships with individuals. Finding an interesting way of encouraging people to talk about themselves is often a good start. Participants could be asked to bring to a meeting an object or photo of personal value. They could be asked, in turn, to share the histories and stories of those objects. People could also be asked to sing culturally-specific folk songs, tell traditional jokes and explore the use of proverbs in their communities. These may then be used to create short drama pieces. By the sharing of stories, important and relevant aspects of the community will gradually emerge.
You can begin simply by getting people in pairs or small groups to tell each other stories. The listener can retell the story they just heard to another person. Participants could pass one story around a circle, with each person making slight changes each time the story is retold.
Introductory Theater Activity
This activity does involve movement and therefore encouraging groups to wear light and comfortable clothes, to warm-up and use voice exercises helps in making people feel more at ease with themselves. Participants then divide into two groups and form two circles – an inner circle and an outer circle, with each inner participant facing one outer participant. The inner circle participants begin a story. It helps to provide them with a suggestion. For example, “Tell a story about a special moment that happened to you this week.” Each person than creates a one-minute story and tells it to their outer circle partner.
The outer circle move around one place and then passes on the story they have just heard to their new inner circle partners. This time, however, they add something new in the story. Have the outer circle move around one place again to the next inner circle person, who will repeat to them the story they have just heard. Continue this process of moving the outer participants one place each time. They will alternately listen to a story, passing it on to another person each time, always adding one new aspect to the story. When all outer participants have partnered with those on the inside, stop. Stories will be jumbled up, but this is part of the fun!
By the end each person will have a unique final story, which includes input from the others. Now divide participants into several smaller groups. Each person tells their final story to each other and decides which story is most preferred. What is included in the stories will reveal a great deal about the group as a whole – what is important to them, how they are interconnected, how they feel, what they believe, or what has happened to them in the past week, for example, and how they might relate to others in the community.
Turning Stories into Theater
Participants should agree which story to choose to develop into a play. How ‘good’ the performance ends up becoming relates to the amount of ownership that the group feels towards the material they have created. As facilitator you may need to highlight issues concerning what is possible to act out, as discarded stories may also be incorporated into the chosen story. They may want to embellish aspects of the story and/or add characters, events, and situations taken from real life. At the same time it is okay to use made-up events, as this is a creative process and allowing participants to take ownership and feel in control is a key aspect of using theater.
Exploring Issues, Local Culture, and Audiences
Often delicate and sensitive issues that are difficult to discuss can be explored through the use of dramatic action. Role Playing of a different character enables people to say things that would be difficult to do in their own voices. Humor can often help share difficult issues in ways that are easy to understand and make sense of. However, starting out more lightly and working towards more difficult subjects takes time and patience, and therefore it is worth allowing time for groups to become more comfortable with each other and confident in their abilities to use drama before stepping into controversial or difficult subjects.
Participants do not always have to base theater around their own life situations. Imagining different cultural settings can also be used, as can the use of local culture.
Cultural forms such as dance, storytelling, games, music, visual images, and foodways traditions and customs can be strong components of using theater. Cultural activities often encourage lively participation and communication.
Give careful thought about how to involve the audience. Could they be involved as other actors? As participants? Through follow-up activities? Wherever possible, people within the community can be identified who can be involved to support the process to be sustained by the community.
Exploring Issues with Role-Play
Role play asks participants to improvise a scene or character. They may create a scene about a topic they choose, such as violence, power relations, child soldiers, health, birth, death, or sickness. Other participants can interact; when they recognize a scene, they can shout “Freeze.” The scene becomes frozen and the participant can then enter the scene. The facilitator and the two actors continue the improvisation. The facilitator can freeze the scene again and ask, “What is missing from this scene?” They can invite suggestions from other participants or audience members. This process can be repeated until a scene is complete. This dramatic action highlights issues for discussion within the group. The activity can then go on to be developed as these stories emerge.
Using theater to build collective stories requires patience, trust, and active participation. This encourages groups to get to know one another, interact with one another, and to know that it does not matter how good an actor is, but that taking part is what counts. Here is a simple warm-up exercise you should consider using for newer groups and for people that have met for the first time.
Crossing the Circle and Building Trust
Participants form a large circle facing inward. Participants identify someone standing opposite him or her. When you say “Start,” each participant must close his or her eyes, walk across the circle and stand in the place of the person opposite them. All of the participants involved do this at the same time. People get muddled and mixed up, but eventually will sort themselves out and find their opposite partner. Although fun and lighthearted, the activity encourages participation, interaction, and solidarity-building. Participants can be asked how they felt doing this with their eyes closed and how the exercise relates to real life stories and personal experiences.
Follow-Up and Feedback
Encouraging people to write up their experiences on the chosen themes will allow for people to be able to make sense of many of the issues explored. It will also allow the group itself to explore solutions to difficult themes and complex ideas. You may want to ask each group member to complete a personal journal, and look at creating a short script, poem, or short play as a result of what they have learned. This can be fictional or based on an aspect of the story they have just played out. This is also a form of creative nonfiction, where theater may be used to transform real life stories.
The conviction that there is an actor in each of us is the driving force behind a form of drama that seeks to awaken consciences and change lives."
—Augusto Boal