[Communique: 08.11.03]

This book attempts to show that all theater is necessarily political, because all the activities of man [sic] are political and theater is one of them.

Those who try to separate theater from politics try to lead us into error -- and this is a political attitude.

In this book I also offer some proof that the theater is a weapon. A very efficient weapon. For this reason one must fight for it. For this reason the ruling classes strive to take permanent hold of the theater and use it as a tool for domination. In so doing, they change the very concept of what "theater" is. But the theater can also be a weapon for liberation. For that, it is necessary to create appropriate theatrical forms. Change is imperative.

... First, the barrier between actors and spectators is destroyed: all must act, all must be protagonists in the necessary transformations of society. This is the process I describe in "Experiments with the People's Theater in Peru." Then the barrier between protagonists and choruses is destroyed -- this is the "Joker" system. Thus we arrive at the poetics of the oppressed, the conquest of the means of theatrical production.

- Augusto Boal, Forward to Theatre of the Oppressed

I keep thinking of Chery teaching us folk dances in Intro Dance. Something of that was stirred up in me when Joanna started the warmups at Double Edge with a group shaking movement, everyone in a big circle, and eventually transformed it into a folk dance. Something very important is there and I'm pretty sure that it's precisely what is missing from both the Actor's Studio and the Ecole Lecoq.

Central is the idea that everyone can participate. I first encountered this idea in theater with Bread & Puppet and was never satisfied with its results. I went to a one-hour "Theater of the Oppressed" workshop at the NYC Social Forum last year and found it uninteresting. Always I have steered away from the idea of working with children, with labor unions, with the unskilled. Yet at the same time I have more and more avoided working with "actors" because of all the shit that brings with it. As a result of this paradox I have ended up quite without performers, and am now thinking of revisiting The Dark Ages (solo performance) because there is no one I want to direct.

Maybe this was the central ambiguity that appeared in both neverland and the desert. I didn't want to work with "normal" actors. Only with great reluctance did I put a listing in Backstage magazine, and I was always looking in auditions for people who were something other than actors. I was looking for "real" people, in other words I wanted people who seemed to have some kind of stake in life. The trouble with the people I think of as "actors" is that they don't seem to have their own personal high stakes at all. I was reading today that Lecoq said: Commedia has nothing to do with those Italian troupes who export precious entertainment. It's about misery, a world where life's a luxury. This is quite the opposite of the impression I have gotten from Lecoq babies like Theater de la Jeune Leune and The Flying Machine. So much theater is so trivial, and there is nothing I hate more than triviality in art. I loathe frivolous theater, theater where (as Greg Barlowe would put it) "everything is there."

Yet I am not ready to work with non-actors. I am not ready to teach, not ready to organize, not ready to bring "my" theater to the anarchists and unionists because in fact I have no theater. I have no strong technique or form, only strong commitments and ideas. Thus I end up with the strange paradox of my "unscripted theater pieces." On the one hand, I wanted my performers to be onstage as themselves, as real people, and not as actors. I wanted them to work out of their own feelings and thoughts about terrorism, fantasy, and queerness. But on the other hand, since I had very little to give them in the way of technique, I had simultaneously to ask them to be responsible for the form. I was requiring them to be actors and non-actors at the same time, and I had no idea how complex that demand was! I wanted them to work spontaneously from their whole human selves, but I also wanted the product to be informed by their performative skills. If I had really wanted non-actors then I shouldn't have had auditions!

Boal's words are a great relief to me. Someone out there has been developing theater as a weapon. Someone out there has been working on theater as a visionary and cultural and martial form, an art of combat, a deeply aesthetic dance with very real physical power -- like capoeira or tai chi.

Word.

I want to have a technique strong enough that I can bust out of the theater world and still be a theater person. Yes, truly I have no desire to work within the theater world. Truly I want to get out of those proscenium boxes and work with laborers, CEOs, students, immigrants, families, and revolutionaries. But to do all that you have to have a form to carry with you. Otherwise what makes it theater? What you need above all in order to teach the art of the samurai to peasants is kata.

My impression of Boal's work is that the theatrical form it draws on is that of story, dialogue, character, and scene work. I think these are the tools that he takes into the field. I want to go into the field with a different set of tools, something more like action instead of story, song instead of dialogue, archetype instead of character, and ritualized performance instead of scene work. I want them to be sweating in circles as in a folk dance. Or maybe I just want Boal's kind of theater to be informed by the innovations of experimental theater from Grotowsky to Radiohole.

In any case, I am taking a three-day workshop with Boal in September. So we shall see...