Pre- and Post-Conference Workshops

All Pre- and Post- Conference Workshops

• PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP: High School Legislative Theatre (3-days)
• PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP: Legislative Theatre (3-days)
• PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP: Education and Action through Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1-day)
• POST-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP: From Rainbow of Desire into Forum Theatre

Pre-Conference Workshops

High School Legislative Theatre (3-days) 
With Chris Vine and Helen White
Dates: Tuesday, June 24 through Thursday, June 26, 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Cost: FREE for High School Students
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Join other area high school students for a three-day pre-conference workshop that explores Theatre of the Oppressed’s Legislative Theatre. Jokers Chris Vine and Helen White will work with participants to create Forum Scenes for presentation on Thursday night in a full Legislative Theatre Session.

From The Forum Project’s website:

Legislative Theatre is an extension of Boal’s Forum Theatre techniques and functions to determine the need for, create, and enact laws.  Beyond community building and issue awareness, Legislative Theatre uses theatrical techniques to create concrete and specific socio-political impact.  “In the Legislative Theatre the aim is to bring the theatre back to the heart of the city, to produce not catharsis but dynamisation…The Legislative Theatre seeks to go further [than Forum Theatre] and to transform that desire in to law” (A. Boal, Legislatve Theatre  20).

During the workshop we will be exploring the topic of Education.  This opens broad areas of inquiry and representation, as Paulo Freire would have wished. Participants will then perform their pieces for the opening of the 20^th Annual Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed Conference on Thursday evening.

Legislative Theatre (3-days) 
With Chris Vine and Helen White
Dates: Tuesday, June 24 through Thursday, June 26, 1:00 PM to 6:00 PM
Cost: $250
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER
Join us for a three-day pre-conference workshop that explores Theatre of the Oppressed’s Legislative Theatre. Jokers Barbara Santos of the original Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro and Jose Soeiro, TO activist in Portugal, will work with participants to create Forum Scenes for presentation on Thursday night in a full Legislative Theatre Session.
From The Forum Project’s website:

Legislative Theatre is an extension of Boal’s Forum Theatre techniques and functions to determine the need for, create, and enact laws. Beyond community building and issue awareness, Legislative Theatre uses theatrical techniques to create concrete and specific socio-political impact. “In the Legislative Theatre the aim is to bring the theatre back to the heart of the city, to produce not catharsis but dynamisation…The Legislative Theatre seeks to go further [than Forum Theatre] and to transform that desire in to law” (A. Boal, Legislative Theatre 20).

During the workshop we will be exploring the topic of Education. This opens broad areas of inquiry and representation, as Paulo Freire would have wished. Participants will then perform their pieces for the opening of the 20th Annual Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed Conference on Thursday evening.

Education and Action through Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1-day) 
With Mariana Ferreira and Charles Adams
Dates: Thursday, June 26 from 12 PM to 5 PM
Cost: $50
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

Are you interested in engaging education and the arts in ways that might help transform your community, but may be apprehensive about the language of a method called Pedagogy of the Oppressed? Then come to this workshop, where we’ll work to de-mystify seemingly academic terms like praxis, conscientization, problematization, and pedagogy as powerful tools for building dialogue in your community, identifying problematic power relations, and working collectively for change.

We’ll look to Paulo Freire’s extraordinary career as both a literacy educator and a social activist to underline his theories of teaching, learning, and liberation, and explore practical applications and activities appropriate for both classroom and community situations. You will bring you own knowledge and experiences to the workshop to help identify problems in need of action and brainstorm specific actions intended to transform classrooms and communities into spaces of critical thinking and movement toward social and economic justice. You’ll leave with some concrete suggestions of activities you might facilitate in your own community context. Perhaps best of all, you’ll leave having made connections and built relationships with others.

Post-Conference Workshop

From Rainbow of Desire into Forum Theatre
With Julian Boal
Date: Sunday, June 29 through Tuesday, July 1
Cost: $250
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER

This innovative workshop combines two forms of Theatre of the Oppressed that are often regarded as separate and distinct. Join Julian Boal in exploration and discovery that builds on research Augusto Boal began but did not have time to complete.

Far too often, Rainbow of Desire and Forum Theatre are represented as two radically different strands of Theatre of the Oppressed. Historically, Rainbow has been thought of as a technique to explore our psychological subjectivities, our interior lives and how they have been shaped by oppression. Meanwhile, Forum Theatre has often been emphasized as a technique that pays less attention to interior life and more attention to analyzing and dismantling broader social structures. But social systems shape our subjective experiences of the world, and in turn our subjective experiences shape social systems.

This workshop will build on research Augusto Boal began but did not have time to complete. It will join these two popular techniques—Rainbow and Forum—with a specific purpose. Through games, Image Theatre, and Rainbow techniques, the workshop will allow participants to transcend the boundaries often imagined between Rainbow and Forum. What role might Rainbow techniques play in building compelling, politically complex Forum scenes? That is the dynamic question at the center of this hands-on workshop.