“Alternative Forms Of Citizen Mobilisation – Theatre as a Martial Art”
After our first week-long workshop at EcoDharma, participants decided to meet once again, this time in Paris, at the COP21 – December 9th-13th 2015…
“Globalisation is the death of the artist! Today, it is almost impossible to be an artist and survive in the cultural market – few manage it. If we want to help to change the world with our art – to change our country, our state, our street – it is imperative to work where art is not bought and sold, where art is alive, where we are all artists – in the places where the people live: in the streets, the favelas, the encampments of the MST, in the unions, in the churches. That is where we find those who need their own identity in order to liberate themselves from oppression, even when they are dominated by the dominant ideas, even when they are alienated. We must have hopes, but no illusions.”
“Theatre is both art and weapon. Today, more than ever, struggling for our cultural survival, the theatre is an art which reveals our identity and a weapon which preserves it. To resist, it is not enough to say no. It is necessary to desire! It is necessary to dream. Not the technicolour dream of television which takes the place of the black and white of harsh reality, but the dream which lays the ground for a new reality, a new reality where the quest is to unify Humanity, but not to make human beings uniform. Today, theatre is a martial art!
– Augusto Boal, Aesthetics of the Oppressed
In light of the ban on marches in public spaces at the COP21, new and innovative ways of protest need to be considered as tactics for mobilising, inspiring and promoting citizen’s voices in the streets, through the media and beyond. These workshops promoted theatre as a martial art, a weapon to be taken out into the streets of Paris to combat the monologue of globalisation, to evict the cops in our heads, and to enact our desires.
Workshops ran on the 10th December (10 till 2pm), 11th December (10 till 6pm) and then participants took to the streets to deploy the tactics learned on the 12th December (12 till 7pm). The organisers had elected the workshops to generate a ‘de-escalation bloc’ whose position would be between the marchers and the police and whose objective would be to assist to create an ‘escalation of joy and levity’ should the situation become more tense.
The first workshop built towards a session of mask exploration using masks brought by Lex for this purpose. The results were highly stimulating, and built off of classic TotO techniques around ‘mask and ritual’. Explorations looked at a neutral mask, a panda, and what the wearer explored as an ‘indigenous person’.
The second workshop was in two sections – the first section culminated in a ‘healing ritual’, spontaneously organised and enacted by the participants under the CD’s facilitation. During the entire process, it was obvious that participants at the workshop were looking for the opportunity to express themselves emotionally together.
The second part of the workshop examined organisational techniques to be deployed in the street and discussions on safety and what to expect. Again, this was done through interactive and dynamic techniques.
The workshops were an immense, intense, success. People engaged in meaningful, emotionally complex activities, blew off steam, connected more deeply, and did all the things you might hope for during a workshop. Organising a bloc of 40 people to go stand between 5000 pissed off protestors and the riot cops with nothing but the intention of dancing, singing and playing games should be seen as some kind of success.
Certain exercises such as ‘the machine of rhythms’ ended with a 60+ year old woman in sobbing, uncontrollable tears after chanting ‘daddy’ for five minutes. She had been abandoned by her father aged 10, and reported with gratitude afterwards that she had not cried like that ‘in years’.
The following ‘healing ritual’ was similarly powerful for another participant who had been recently bereaved.
The facilitators got to cooperate to work with a large, diverse group of people who largely did not know each other or have to remain if they did not enjoy the work.
Bloc-members on the street seemed confident with their role, and ‘de-escalation’ was achieved.
The role of preventing ‘escalation’ or confrontation with police is highly contentious in these fields. As an artistic project, I would not have volunteered for it had I known this was the intention beforehand. Initially, it was proposed to use the workshops to organise actions in public spaces in defiance of the ban on protest. However, by the time we arrived in Paris, the organisers’ intention had changed into something else. However, many people organised together on the streets and provided a function for an already crippled and largely castrated protest. Hopefully these will be transferable skills to more meaningful actions.
A cell within the larger bloc did progress to an illegal march later that day, and reported greater confidence and organisation by deploying some of the tactics prepared in the workshop.
