By Richard Schechner
University Professor of Performance Studies
Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
1.
Consider: theatres of crisis and the theatre in crisis. In crisis, because what might the theatre do after the decline in importance of the artistic theatre, the experimental theatre, and the commercial theatre? Once not so long ago, from the last decades of the 19th century through to the 1970s or thereabouts, the artistic, experimental, and commercial theatres were dominant. But since the 1970s, and increasingly since then, the theatre of crisis, the "social theatre," has been growing exponentially. Social theatre may be defined as: Theatre with specific social agendas; theatre where aesthetics is not the ruling objective; theatre outside the realm of commercial success or the cult of the new that dominates the avantgarde. (Not that social theatre need shun innovation or never be seen in a commercial venue.) Social theatre goes by different names and a variety of practices including: Community-based theatre, theatre for development, theatre/drama therapy, theatre with/for marginalized, imprisoned, and institutionalized people, theatre in times of, or immediately after, war (as in Palestine, Kosovo, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and elsewhere).
There are two levels of theatres of crisis. The first level is that of alleviation or remedy-using theatre as social first aid. This kind of theatre gives voice to the voiceless, allows them to express their pain and their hopes, to tell their stories in their own words and means. It also broadcasts calls for help, accuses the oppressors, and re-enacts the specific circumstances of crisis. This first level of theatres of crisis is widespread because the number of people in crisis is increasing. Think of how many war zones, prisoners, inmates, and patients there are; a population of oppressed, deprived, or threatened people. Such people comprise both the makers and the receivers of social theatre. Such people are an enormous and widespread population, numbering in the 100s of millions in 100s of places around the world.
The second level is that of the endemic and consciously structured inequities that characterize today's and I fear tomorrow's global economic, political, social, and military systems. There is, and will continue to be, no lack of supply of oppressed and threatened peoples. That is, hopes for either a successful revolutionary struggle leading to a just world order; or for a steady evolutionary development towards a just world order are at present unfounded. Changes will occur, of course. Some of today's fortunates will become tomorrow's victims; and some of today's oppressed will become tomorrow's tyrants. But the sum of inequities will remain roughly the same for a long time to come.
A few more words concerning "structural inequities." They are of course a necessary component of free market capitalism. But more than that, these inequities are rooted in the "theory of slavery," the fact that not only is human labor available on the market, but also that human beings in their totality, body and soul, can be bought and sold. From the 16th century to the middle of the 19th century, the period of African enslavement, slavery was structured into the economies of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Slavery as a fact and slavery as a theory made colonialism possible and profitable. Even though Asians were not enslaved in the same way as Africans were, the theory of slavery drove the relationship between Europe-North America and Asia just as it did the relationship with Africa and Latin America.
Level two structural inequities cannot end until a new structure emerges. They don't go away as a result of high hopes or even the dedicated work of people of good will. They go away only when it is to the advantage of those who operate the levers of power to replace them. The slavery of the 15th-19th centuries was not ended by the brave struggles of the abolitionists, but by the emergence of the machine-driven factory, steam power, and electric power. Slaves were less efficient than wage laborers operating machines and therefore slavery was abolished. Today, after the failure of Marxism-Communism, the emergence of the "new world order," and the ease by which people can be transported, some kinds of slavery flourish: child labor, sweat shops, domestic slaves, and sex slaves.
Social theatre operates at both the remedial and structural levels. The social theatre that is "in the field" operates at the first level; the support for social theatre in the field comes largely from operators on the second level. This is a paradoxical situation. The very powers that create the structural inequities - that depend on the inequities for power and profit - also pay for programs to alleviate the pain caused by the inequities. Follow the money. From where does the United Nations, the GOs, and the NGO get its money a tiny bit of which is used to support social theatre? Who underwrites the great foundations - Ford, Rockefeller, whoever? Who pays for the universities? While the right hand holds populations down, the left hand doles out a modicum of funds and other resources allowing for a certain amount of artistic and academic expression, social theatre, and other means of alleviating the sufferings of the oppressed.
If you follow the money you will soon discover that the governments, the NGOs, the foundations, and the universities, etc., are the very ones who, in other guises, maintain the structural inequities. It is immoral to not face that. "Bad faith," as Jean-Paul Sartre once reminded everyone, "is the sin of the privileged class." That doesn't mean we stop our work. That doesn't mean we don't take the money. That doesn't mean that our work won't, in the long run, be part of the process of deep change within, among, and between societies.
Thus, ultimately, those who cause and maintain the global inequity, which by name is called "globalization," and those who tirelessly work to alleviate the sufferings caused by globalization belong to the same system. We are not in absolute opposition; we are only in a game-like opposition. We are engaged with our the sponsors of our sponsors as if in a sporting match when two teams oppose each other but both belong to the same league and follow the same rules.
This circumstance of being in the same game, the same net, the same system does not negate or make less necessary the work done by people whom we have heard from at this conference and others doing similar work among threatened, war torn, imprisoned, and otherwise deprived oppressed or marginalized people. That work is both good and necessary.
2.
What kind of theatre has been described at this conference? It is practiced under different names: applied theatre, community-based theatre, drama therapy, theatre for development, theatre of the oppressed, and many other names. Taken together these names suggest a convergence and emergence of a movement of great strength and diversity whose basic aim is to enable individuals acting with and/or part of communities to devise performances that express their particular needs within their particular historical circumstances. In other words, within the global system social theatre deals with the local consequences of the global situation.
Social theatre is a hybrid. It is not imported wholesale; but neither is it entirely indigenous. The first may be thought of as commercial theatre and the second as ritual theatre. Social theatre is neither of those. Nor is it a theatre that tours too well. Sometimes it is necessary to bring social theatre out of its home context in order to convince those in the sponsoring societies that such a theatre is worth supporting. Sometimes social theatre is toured for entertainment reasons - in roughly the same mode as when the French imported Balinese dancers to Paris for a colonial exposition. But even these kinds of shows can sometimes serve some unexpectedly positive purpose. The Balinese so fascinated Antonin Artaud that he wrote portions of The Theatre and Its Double based on his experience, and helped reform Western theatre.
Last night after dinner several of us, Guglielmo Schinina, Sue Jennings, Marina Barham, James Thompson, Roberto Ricco and I found ourselves in a very well established squatter community on Via Morigi. It was one of those fortunate accidents. We were just looking for a quiet place to talk. Next to a restaurant there was a courtyard and we walked in and joined a group of people drinking wine and talking. Women, men, a few children. At first, I thought this was an extension of the restaurant. It turned out to be a squatter community that had been there for forty years! Sixty people in all. The ones in the courtyard were extremely relaxed, friendly, and politically sophisticated. "We're all communists here," one of them said. I answered: "I used to wear those clothes." They invited us to sit down. We bought some wine from the restaurant and we talked for a few hours. We talked about the possibilities of the social theatre - "teatro sociale" - movement. We told the Morigi squatters about the conference and invited them to join if they wanted. We reiterated how widespread the social theatre movement was; and that it was growing.
Because we were engaging people who did not know what social theatre was, we had to define it. What we came up with was: Social theatre is concerned firstly with societies not with individuals. Societies occupy an actual and a conceptual space between the individual and the globe. Social theatre is not for financial profit. Social theatre does not solely or even mostly exist to make art. It is, as Sue Jennings put it, a specific theatre made for specific people in a specific time and place. I would add: those people, those times and places, are in crisis.
3.
While battles rage, people think first of surviving. If someone took a machine gun and started spraying this room with bullets, most of us would hide. No one would improvise a theatre piece while under fire. And when there is extreme material deprivation - absence of water, food, shelter, and medicine - people think first of acquiring these.
Now, having made these two obvious observations, I want to question them. Are they really true? Before during and after battles people pray and perform rituals, hoping to God that they will survive. These are not theatrical works but they are performances. And during lulls in the fighting, combatants entertain themselves. As Annabelle Melzer's research shows in her recent article in Theatre (2001), during World War One many different kinds of theatrical performances took places in the trenches. Carnage, entertainment, and ritual are not contradictory practices. We know also that in the extermination camps there were two kinds of theatrical performances: those forced on the inmates by the Nazis (orchestras serenading the condemned as they entered the gas chambers); and subversive shows put on by the prisoners as acts of resistance and shows of humanity.
Thus the most extreme circumstances do not terminate peoples' need for theatre; they find ways to provide it and/or have access to it. This need goes beyond enacting rituals. People want to express, and share with others who do not have these experiences, how it is to live in violence or under the threat of violence. At the same time, they want something opposite: to invoke and act out alternative realities. Such alternative realities are not "just pretend." They comprise a program of possibilities, propositions for a better life. Even more, the action of performing is in itself living a "better life," one which includes cooperation, creativity, and sharing with the community and with strangers. If much social theatre takes people away from the horrors and terrors of their daily lives, we must admit the possibility that much of "ordinary reality" is thrust on people; it is not something they freely choose. Maybe it is through theatre (and the other arts) that humans learn about a finer existence. Perhaps art is what is most "real." As Clifford Geertz once observed, "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" (1973:5). That's what societies in crisis may be like experienced from within. From the outside, the situation is very different. The concept of "a theatre of war" is not a new one because the "real thing" involves killing and dying, military training must at one and the same time be realistic and relatively harmless. Indeed, training, war games, and maneuvers are fundamentally performative. But even the real thing is a performance when viewed on CNN or other media. The entertainment value of "real life drama," including war, is not to be under-estimated. On media where advertising is run side-by-side with the news, the news takes on theatrical qualities ranging from melodrama to tragedy, with occasional comic relief. It is by shaping events as viewed to tropes of drama that events are made coherent. A specific sequence is followed: 1. on the spot reporting; 2. human interest stories (individual or family dramas, often tales of loss and woe); 3. policy pronouncements by "world leaders" or whoever is directing the action; 4. interpretations of the events by "experts" (usually on the payroll of the networks) - retired generals or diplomats, historians, newspaper columnists, etc. Taken as a whole, this sequence arouses interest and fears, makes global or strategic events more personal, and finally makes sense out of what otherwise may be chaotic or simply terrifying. Of course, this "sense" is not objective but reflects the outlook - political and economic - of the networks and those behind the networks. Even when "all sides" are given a chance to express themselves, the tilt one way or another is obvious. All this adds up to a wholly theatricalized public sphere. We live in an era where our playwrights are not Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Molière, or even Dario Fo - but CNN and other media, press secretaries, the UN's Kofi Annon, and general statespersons such as the US Secretary of State (and former hero-general) Colin Powell.
4.
There are several ways of playing a role in the big picture, the world drama. First you can be "on the spot" - in the right place, where the action happening. Also "on the spot" is an American colloquial expression that means, "You are being tested, you have to make snap decisions." Second, you can be "in the spot," caught or trapped. This is different from being on the spot where you are on top of things, in control, making decisions. To be in the spot means that you are enmeshed, you are surrounded, things are to some degree out of your control; you don't know what's going to happen next. Third, you may be "from the spot." To be from the spot means either you're only there temporarily, you can get out when you please; or that you are not on or in the spot at the moment, but you used to be: "I am from there...." To be from the spot qualifies one as a first-hand witness to events that you experienced not as an outsider (a reporter, anthropologist, aid worker) but as a "local," a "native." The murder in 2002 of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl becomes big news because as a journalist Pearl should have been treated as someone reporting from the spot, free to leave whenever he wanted to, not someone trapped in the spot. Pearl's murder makes headlines while the deaths of Afghans don't.
Finally there are those watching at home. "Sometimes 'at home' is a few kilometers from the action and sometimes it is 13,000 miles away. But in any case, the viewer feels positioned outside the action; the viewer is a spectator. When the World Trade Towers were attacked on September 11, 2001, hundreds of millions of persons were "at home" in relation to this event. Even some of us very close, watching it live from the streets and apartment houses of New York City, felt more in a spectator than participant relationship to what was happening. Many people reported that events that day seemed 'like a movie'."
These prepositions - on, in, from, at - point to specific locational relationships to performed events. Each preposition announces its positional qualities, even responsibilities. Those "on the spot" are participants by virtue of their jobs - soldiers, medical teams, diplomats, journalists, and so on. They are not free to leave: their life roles demand that they remain on the spot until relieved of their duties. Those "in the spot" are mainly civilians, local persons, and people trapped and engulfed. The "spot" is larger than they are. Mostly, those "in the spot" wish either that the crisis or war was somewhere else or that they were somewhere else. They want the spot to disappear or be relocated. People "from the spot" are those who bear witness to what is happening. They may be residents or reporters, anthropologists or spycams. Journalists often begin their reports with phrases like, "I am reporting to you from..." Many social theatre workers sent into a hotspot are working are either "on the spot" or "from the spot". They even go back and forth between homebase and the spot where they work. Over time, like reporters, social theatre workers get assigned to different spots - they become experts in devising theatres of crisis, theatres that deal with crisis. Finally, there is "at home away from the spot". What the reporters report, the information disseminated at conferences concerning social theatre, novels, dramas - and hosts of other epiphenomena that develop out of crisis experiences function, sooner or later, to educate and/or entertain the people "at home." Those "at home" both vicariously enjoy the thrill of "being there" and thank their lucky stars that they are not there. The terror of terrorism is its ability to suddenly transform "at home" into "in the spot". Frequently, a single individual plays several prepositional roles at the same time. For example, Marina Barham, who is Palestinian, is both "from the spot" when she reports on her work in the Occupied Territories to a conference on social theatre and "in the spot" when she is doing theatre in Palestine. She may even be "at home" from time to time in the midst of the struggles.
5.
At their most immediate, local level, theatres of crisis are "human interest" stories. No longer are audiences satisfied with learning about fictional or semi-documentary "tragedies of ordinary people" such as were once provided by playwrights from Ibsen (Hedda Gabler) to Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman). What appeals to today's "at home" spectators are the mini-dramas - tragic, sentimental, comic, farcical, heroic -that actual life offers to the camera and the microphone. Those at home usually don't see the events underlying these mini-dramas firsthand, but only through the testimony of participant-survivors as framed, edited, and interpreted by reporters, camera persons, and video editors at CNN central headquarters. These mini-dramas are real enough, but they are also fictionalized and packaged so as to fit between slices of advertising, the nearly ubiquitous commercials of television. Without the mini-dramas of "news" people would not watch TV; and without commercials, TV could not make a profit. It is therefore necessary that "news" be reported in such a way to attract viewers who arrive for the mini-dramas and stay for the commercials.
Once there are the mini-dramas and the commercials, there is very little room for detailed discussion or socio-political or economic analysis. In fact most people "at home" are not particularly interested in political analysis or social critique; they do not pay much attention to the big picture. Most people are involved with the human-interest aspect - so that is what dominates the airwaves. How many times have we been witness to the grieving mother, the wounded child, the heroic soldier or doctor? What remains hidden, because they are abstract and not "good hard-hitting theatre," are the power operations that create the situations that generate the violence that makes the human-interest stories. Causes are concealed, results are played.
6.
Another complexity concerns the relativity of language. One group's "murderer" is another's "martyr". "Terrorist" or "freedom fighter"? This is not a new problem. The same struggle to control the vocabulary of struggle was enacted during the wars of colonial liberation (or rebellion). To the British the Kenyan Mau Mau and the Israeli Irgun were terrorists; to the Kenyans and Israelis they were freedom fighters. The question of "who these people are" cannot be answered one way or another. The answer varies according to cultural context and political agenda. A person cannot be a terrorist or a freedom fighter in any settled or absolute way. The same person, the same act, will be both. This situation is very different from that of ordinary warfare where the roles of most of the combatants are known. One may say, "These soldiers are on my side and those soldiers are my enemy" and know that the enemy is saying the same thing reversed. There is a solidity about it. Identities are confirmed by uniforms, flags, and defined if contested territories. Furthermore, there is a certain reciprocated "respect" that goes along with conventional warfare. "Soldier" refers to a role that transcends particular nations. The word "soldier" by itself doesn't tell you if I mean a French soldier, a Chinese, or whatever.
But if I say "martyr" and nothing else with regard to Israel-Palestine, you know what side of the Intifada struggle I am on; just as you know what side if I say "suicide bomber". But paradoxically, at the same time, in the ongoing struggles in Palestine-Israel, Sri Lanka-Tamil Nadu, Indo-Pak Kashmir, Northern Ireland, etc., there are no clear "rules of engagement" or defined battlefields. The lines between civilian and combatant have evaporated. What's left are the manoeuvrings of nation-states that appear clumsy and inefficient with regard to what's happening; a barely effective United Nations; fear and rage on all sides; and the human interest stories - keeping myriads in the world distracted and entertained.
7.
Many kinds of theatre are practiced in times/places of crisis. The list that follows is not meant to be complete, but to point out what I consider the most salient varieties of theatre in times of crisis:
* Testimony: when victims tell/enact their stories. Testimonial performance can range from artistically embellished productions to documentary dramas (and media) to formal judicial processes such as South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The purposes/functions of testimonial performance ranges from expressing feelings to documenting events to healing rifts in society. Some testimonial performances accomplish all these purposes. The power of testimonial performance comes from the quality of first-hand experience, the assertion that: "I was there; I saw what happened; this happened to me and those close to me." Testimonial performance has a forensic quality: the reconstruction of events by means of evidence and eye-witness accounts. Yet however moving and effective, testimonial performance suffers from the "Rashomon effect," the slipperiness of recollection. People and groups recall and swear to their own version of events. Assigning roles such as "victims", "oppressors", "perpetrators", "heroes", and "enemies" depends to a large degree on who is testifying. This is not to deny that great crimes have been and continue to be committed, but to agree on what happened is not easy.
* Accusation: During Argentina's "dirty war" (1976-83) thousands of left-wing activists or other perceived enemies of the military regime were kidnapped and murdered by the police and the military. The precise circumstances of all these murders could not, and still cannot, be determined on a case-by-case basis. Some were thrown alive from airplanes flying over the Atlantic Ocean. Pregnant women were allowed to give birth and were then killed, their babies adopted by members of the same group that murdered the mothers. Many were tortured. The military junta in power would not say anything concerning "the disappeared". Even after the end of the dirty war, the former rulers, soldiers, and police would not speak about what happened to the disappeared. After the restitution of civilian rule, the new government was more interested in "going forward" than in investigating, bringing to justice, and punishing those guilty directly or indirectly of torture and murder. In fact, many of the guilty continued in positions of influence in the government, military, and business.
But from 1983 onward, a group of "Madres" (mothers) dressed in black have marched in a silent circle each Thursday afternoon around Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo. The Madres demand to know the fate of their children. They carry photos of the disappeared, wear handkerchiefs on which are written the names of the disappeared, and point their fingers accusingly at the Presidential Palace. The weekly appearance of the Madres combines Christian imagery, the powerful Latin American cult of the Mother, and political theatre. Their solemn appearance punctually each Thursday is a very strong instance of the theatre of accusation.
On a more official level, war crimes trials are theatres of accusation. From the trials at Nuremberg after World War 2 and the spectacle of Adolf Eichmann sitting in a bullet-proof glass enclosure in Jerusalem in 1961, to the current trial of Slobodan Milosevic in the Hague, these kinds of trials are as much theatre as they are judicial proceedings. There is also a dark side to such "show trials" - as exemplified by the Moscow trials of the 1930s, the 1951 trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the USA, and the recent trials of Jews in Iran.
* Action: The best example of theatre of action is Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO). Because Boal has written so much about TO in detail, I will but briefly touch on it. TO exists in several varieties - Forum Theatre, Invisible Theatre, Legislative Theatre, etc. In each of these, Boal and his team's aim is to allow individuals and groups to identify, express, and act out alternatives to situations and systems that are oppressing them. In legislative theatre, Boal actually served as a member of the City Council of Rio de Janeiro. He used Forum Theatre staged in a number of Rio neighbourhoods to identify issues that the local population wanted to bring to the attention of their elected representatives. Boal was defeated in his bid for re-election. Those opposing him mounted a major campaign to bring him down. A big difference between TO and theatres of testimony or accusation is that those enacting TO are not always in the midst of an immediate crisis. What is oppressing them is often endemic and systematic. Sometimes people are not even aware that they are being oppressed. Part of TO's work is to raise consciousnes.
Other theatres of action include a vast panoply of issue oriented performances - from the guerrilla theatre work of groups like Greenpeace to the orchestrated protests against the World Trade Organization. These groups often provoke a crisis in order to call attention to a particular issue.
Action theatre can also be sheer propaganda: "My side" is right, "your side" is wrong; a theatre of glorification and denigration. Action theatre can transmit information vital for the ongoing struggle.
* Alleviation: People in crisis need help at many levels. They need peace, food, water, medicines, shelter, and sooner or later, jobs. In other words, they need community-building. But along with both the short-term and long-term projects, people need to understand and deal with what has happened. When these needs come to the fore, various kinds of arts therapies can be extremely helpful. Drama, music, and visual arts therapies give people the tools not only to make testimony, but to elaborate their experiences, to transform their experiences into understanding and art (not exactly the same thing). Sometimes what cannot be expressed directly as "raw testimony" can be comprehended by means of artistic intervention. The goal of arts therapy, however, is not to make "great art," but to use art to help individuals and communities. This must be born in mind, if therapists are not to unwittingly turn into exploiters.
In a longer time perspective, theatre of alleviation also includes the many kinds of theatre for development and community-based theatre. Various programs and information concerning health, land usage, education, and so on can be effectively communicated by theatre. At the very least, awareness is raised preparing the way for the work of different specialists. Also, and especially if members of the community actually devise the pieces or at least perform in them, community-building itself is accomplished by means of performance. In the USA there are many examples of this kind of theatre including the Swamp Gravy project of Colquitt, Georgia (see Geer 1996), the Steelbound project of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania (see Brady 2000), and the Community Gardens project of New York (see Rosenthal 2002).
* Aesthetics: Finally - and who knows precisely when this can take place? - horrific experiences can be transubstantiated into more "universal" or "aesthetic" works. Greek tragedy specialized in this: Euripides' The Trojan Women, for example. Picasso was able to accomplish this with his Guernica and Goya in his Disasters of War.
* Entertainment: This can range from performing traditional theatre, dance, and music to both local popular and imported "lite fare". These kinds of entertainments - traditional, popular, and global - are indications that things are "getting back to normal." We ought not to forget that in times of crisis both rituals and entertainments are important ways of getting away from the daily grind and ways of temporarily forgetting. If remembering is crucial to testimony, accusation, and certain phases of healing, forgetting is necessary for the resumption of everyday life and for long-term healing. Entertainment in a crisis situation can have the positive effect of letting people temporarily forget where they are and what's happening to them. That's good, this kind of collective sleeping and dreaming.
These varieties of theatres in times/places of crisis can be reduced to four groups that have a sequential and logical relationship to each other:
1. Theatre for alleviation of misery.
2. Theatre that takes action.
3. Theatre that builds community.
4. Theatre that transforms experience into art.
Although these kinds of theatre can happen simultaneously, they often unfold as a sequence leading from the alleviation of misery through action to community building and art. They are logically connected because without alleviating misery and taking action there can be no community; and without at least a semblance of community there can be no art.
Brady, Sara
2000 "Welded to the Ladle: Steelbound and Non-Radicality in Community-Based Theatre," TDR 44, 2: 51-74.
Geer, Richard
1996 "Out of Control in Colquitt: Swamp Gravy Makes Stone Soup," TDR 40, 2:103-30.
Geertz, Clifford
1973 The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books. Melzer, Annabelle
2001 "Performances at the Western Front 1914-1918" Theater 31:1, Winter 2001.
Rosenthal, Cindy
2002 "The common green/common ground Performance Project: The Personal, the Political, the Gardens, and NYU," TDR 46, 3: 132-64.