METHODOLOGY
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Games and exercises |
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Image Theatre |
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Forum Theatre |
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Invisible theatre |
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Newspaper theatre |
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Mytho-theatre and Street performing |
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Legislative theatre |
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Participatory budgeting |
Exciting games and exercices allow to foster interactivity and participation, to act on our every day life issues in a playful and very positive way.
they are used to:
- facilitate everybody’s expressivity;
- create a dynamic group where oppressions can emerge;
- allow everybody to discover, while playng, its relational tendancies.
Participants express an issue with their body, interacting with other people’s body. Images are created silently and are a kind of frozen statue that reveals physically an oppressio.
This language is metaphorical and very allusive. It allows to express complex situations, physically, before the intervention of the intellect.
only afterwhile participants will interpret it and project their issues on it.
This tool can adapt to very diverse situations: to understand prejudices that allow a disease to grow, to study the origins of an oppressive situation…
Image theatre is a very precious tool to clearify tricky situations and for problem solving.
Images are also used to create a forum theatre play where the audience will be allowed to intervene.
Le scene che vengono presentate in pubblico sono brevi e vengono recitate due volte. Durante la prima il pubblico scopre e identifica problemi ed errori.
Poi il facilitatore (il Jolly) chiede agli spettatori come si può far evolvere la situazione. La scena riparte una seconda volta e il pubblico può interrompere quando gli sembra più opportuno, per proporre delle alternative, sostituendosi ad uno dei personaggi o creandone uno nuovo.
Il pubblico scopre così quali sono le conseguenze delle nuove proposte. Dopo ogni intervento, il facilitatore (o jolly) pone delle domande al pubblico per stimolare la partecipazione e la ricerca di soluzioni.
Alla fine dell’evento, il facilitatore riassume le alternative e le soluzioni che il pubblico ha considerato più pertinenti.
Invisible theatre is another option of public performance. Although rehearsed as a normal play, it is performed in a public place without anyone knowing that it is a play. It is intended to provoke debate and to clarify a problem that is not recognized as such. Actors will play extreme characters but also pretending passers by who voice strong, contrasting and often erroneous opinions on the subject.
The goal is to encourage the real passers by to take sound positions and eventually to foster action against injustice. Once again the goal is not to impose some views but to smooth the progress of.
The etymology of IN-FORMATION means to insert, impose a shape, a form, a structure. Newspaper theatre aims to reveal the frame of mind that media are tending to impose on us. Different tools tend to show the gap between what happens and what is reported. A performance allows spectators to analyse what causes us to interpret some world events in a certain way.
A newspaper theatre can precede or take place during a forum theatre or an invisible theatre show. The goal is to trigger understanding of the system that informs us and to decide collectively how to face it, and to determine what kind of lifestyle and communication we want.
MYTHO-THATRE AND STREET PERFORMING.
Conducting Mytho-theatre means to create scenes using myths and ancestral stories, known by everybody, to integrate them in the present day to discover what meaning they will get: what would Cinderella’s story look like today, with what kind of shoes and transport would she go, and to what kind of party?
Mytho-theatre is particularly relevant in the street where archetypical characters are lead to face those of our era…
That’s why our Mytho-theatre trainings always take place, at least partially, in the streets. This allows participants to study how to occupy streets and public spaces, how to take advantage of the different decors of the city, how to attract people and how to involve them.
Legislative theatre is complementary to forum theatre. In a forum performance, the audience has tried solutions and made decisions. With legislative theatre people are invited to propose laws. These proposals are then studied by lawyers, technicians and representatives and then voted. Successful proposals enter in the institutional process to become laws. In Brazil 13 laws come from legislative theatre.
The participatory budget is a moment where the administration involves citizens in defining projects, priorities and public spending in order to improve life in the territory. Thus part of the public spending can be decided collectively. This is of course a risky process that can end up being long and confusing. That’s why we use participatory drama tools to facilitate identification of the problems and the hierarchy of proposals.
In the 9th municipality of Rome we have used image theatre which proved to be very appropriate. People could present a problem in a physical way, for example creating a statue, with their body or with our actors. That way, even shy people were immediately at ease. People could also comment the statues to deepen their understanding of the issue. Overall the attention was never focused on one single person: The speaker was not the one observed and it was not necessarily the best speaker that always imposed his viewpoint. No one could monopolise the scene and therefore the sessions were very dynamical.
These techniques allowed people to list the problems of the neighbourhood very quickly. Within 30 to 45 minutes we could list the proposals in order to vote on them and decide which were the priorities for each quarter.
