Day 2 at the Theatre of the Oppressed in Xela

This is going to be one whirlwind post peeps. I'm afraid that I was way too tired yesterday from all the exertions so you get an abridged post today.

After a little debried yesterday on how our first day had gone, Olivier, our facilitator, took us through some basic stretches. Then we got into the theatre games. Oh joy! No irony here. First one was called "casa,terremoto, morador" (meaning house, earthquake, inhabitant). I'm not kidding. In a land where earthquakes reign, we played a game with it. Two people are the house, one is the inhabitant. When the facilitator says house, the people who comprise the house run around seeking a new partner and a new dweller. When the facilitator yells dweller, the inhabitant runs around looking for a new house. When he yells earthquake! we all run around like chooks with our heads cut off.

Fun and games I tell ya.

The next one is more of a physical theatre exercise. We stand in a circle, and the first person becomes a cog in a machine that fabricates one emotion, eg: hate. Every other participant then joins in, making a sound and an action in that same vein. In the end you have a machine that makes hate noises and movements. The interesting part was when we became the opinion machine, on the subject of life in Latin America. I jumped in and swam upstream. Other people became working peasants on the land. Others dancers, others cooks, others paramilitary troops, others politicians. It was a sight to behold, but we couldn't see it ourselves. You can watch parts of it on Ustream at the conference website.

The next game was to pair up and lead our partner through an imaginary trip, using our imaginations. My partner led me on a mountain climb up the Everest. This wasn't entirely clear to me. I just knew I was walking, I was holding onto a surface and I couldn't let go. That part was interesting. It had become clear that I had to hold on or perish.

The next one was an exercise in semiotics: giving banale objects a new meaning or context. We were given a bottle, an orange cloth, a table and a chair. My partner and I enacted a kidnapping. Yes, a bit drastic, but we our task was to show a social issue current in Latin America. Two girls enacted a birth, they started out the traditional, horizontal position for birthing, and ended up in the indigenous style: standing up.

Forum Theatre was up next. We had an example of it, by putting four actos up who were marching in unison and a fifth actor dancing and singing. The marchers then tried to pummel the dancer into submission. The group was then asked to give several alternatives to what had happened. What could the dancer do to achieve their desire to dance and sing? Some people came up with mass demonstrations of dancing and singing, others tried to make the marchers dance and sing and I pulled in two members of the audience after pretending to cower from the pummeling to help me divide and conquer.

Following that we worked on the dramaturgy of Theatre of the Oppressed. It works slightly differently to the usual 3 act structure. Although we begin from the protagonist - antagonist conflict, the narrative arc begins by establishing the backstory with the unfulfilled desire of the protagonist. This then escalates into a Chinese Crisis (danger coupled with opportunity), where the protagonist has the chance to turn things around, but the eventual ending is failure. The audience then has to provide alternatives.

Stay tuned, up next is my review of a one man show from Colombia on torture in the eighties and a Mexican Forum Theatre performance called 3000 women.