Forum Theater performancedemonstration, 619 NYC

a Performance-Demonstration of Forum Theater

Sunday, June 19, 2005 from 5:00 to 9:00 pm

at The Brecht Forum 451 West Street (West Side Highway, between Bank and Bethune Streets) New York City

Contribution: sliding scale--$6, $8, $10

Open to all; no pre-registration necessary

This performance-demonstration of Forum Theater techniques will be presented by members of the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory's 2005 Internship Program and TOPLAB facilitators.

If you've been wondering what this is all about but were not able to commit to attending an entire weekend workshop, now is the time to find out.

An innovative approach to public forums, Forum Theater is rooted in the Brasilian popular education and culture movements of the 1950s and 1960s. It is designed for use in schools, community centers, trade unions and solidarity and popular organizations. Workshop participants (the actors) are asked to tell a story, taken from daily life, containing a political or social problem of difficult solution. A skit depicting that problem is improvised and presented. The original solutions proposed by the protagonist must contain at least one social or political error. When the skit is over, the audience discusses the proposed solution, and then the scene is performed once more. But now, audience members are urged to intervene by stopping the action, coming on stage to replace actors, and enacting their own ideas. Thus, instead of remaining pbuttive, the audience becomes active "spect-actors" who now create alternative solutions and control the dramatic action. The aim of the forum is not to find an ideal solution, but to invent new ways of confronting oppression. In Brasil and other parts of Latin America, as well as in India and Africa, Forum Theater has been used with peasant and worker "audiences" as training in labor and community organizing and participatory democracy.

toplab at toplab.org

Democratizing technology: TOPLAB runs the GNU-Linux OS on its computers and is 100% free of proprietary software.

*****

"There is not the slightest notion of ethics, credibility, standards of justice, humanitarian feelings, nor of the elementary principles of solidarity and generosity in the world you seek to impose on us today. Billions of human beings live in subhuman conditions--starving, without enough food, medicine, clothes, shoes or shelter and without even a minimum amount of knowledge or enough information to understand their tragedy and that of the world in which they live."

- --Fidel Castro, in a letter to George W. Bush

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