By Christos Karystinos

Theater of the oppressed and prisons

Anarchists consider prisons to be the embodiment of suppression of the state. Nowadays, part of the prisoners in them are political prisoners, people who followed their ideology of resistance to their oppression and they were found guilty of offending the law and now are trapped in small cells or solitary confinement in order to regret for their “sins”. One of the biggest values of anarchists is solidarity to the political prisoners, even if the state recognizes them as political or not. No matter if you agree or not with the action a political prison took, as person believing in a free from oppression world, you can only imagine a world without prisons.

So what is the role of theater of the oppressed in prisons? Boal talked about his experiences in prisons and experiments he did with mixed workshops with prisoners and guards and presenting forum plays in the prisons. I have read various projects which take part in US and around Europe which use ToO in prisons as a tool for empowering the prisoners. However, someone should first consider the reason why would someone do theater of the oppressed in prisons and if ToO in prisons is liberating for the prisoners or plays the role of “reshaping” the prisoners to fit the society? This question really troubled our collective in Greece and we found ourselves in front of the chance of getting into prisons and doing ToO.

Two opinions were strongly opposed. The first was stating that prison as an oppressive institution, would not enable a really liberating process to take place such as ToO and if it did then probably ToO does not work in liberating the prisoners rather than playing with them. Moreover, a forum play in prison has so many restrictions as the prisoners cannot really speak an act freely as they would do outside of prison. The second one stated that we all live in an oppressive system and prison is one of them and trying to change something inside it is part of a broader struggle of transforming the current society in order to liberate the oppressed people. ToO will work indeed as a liberating tool not to the extend that inmates will start revolting but to the extend that inmates will realize that it is unfair for them to be in prison.

Finally part of the collective went on with doing the workshop for some months in the prison and came up with a forum play that refereed to the problems prisoners had in prison such as private space, bad lawyers and violence in between them. Someone could agree that these topics do not necessarily demonstrate the systematic oppression of prisons but indirectly show the lack of solidarity in between prisoners. Being in the process during these months, one could say that these prisoners shifted from a more individual thinking to a more collective one and recognized their oppressions as prisoners in contradiction to the beginning where most were stating that they were fairly put into prison, no matter if they did the crime they were accused or not.

In the process of reflecting on our choice and the results of the workshop, we felt satisfied with our political choice of entering the prison to do a ToO workshop as we did more good than harm. This action of solidarity (we were not paid to do the workshop), created connections between people in the prison and outside and liberated, not practically but mentally, the prisoners from part of their oppressions without normalizing their imprisonment, without healing their mental wounds from prison but on the other hand through analyzing the oppression of the prison and their role in it. Someone would say that the first steps of the pedagogy of the oppressed as explained by Freire happened, the realization and the analysis of the oppression. In a similar way in a forum play, before we go on with trying to solve our oppressions, we analyze our oppressions and identify our roles inside them.

Conclusion

Instead of a conclusion, I would like to close with some open questions for dialogue: What would you do in your group to minimize internal oppression? Which new principals and tools would you use to become a more “equal” facilitator? And most important of all: Why are we doing Theater of the oppressed and what kind of world we dream of?

30.8.2018

Christos Karystinos