Theatre of the Oppressed and Environmental Justice Communities A Transformational Therapy for the Body Politic

Journal of Health Psychology Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore www.sagepublications.com Vol 13(2) 166–179 DOI: 10.1177/1359105307086710

Abstract JOHN SULLIVAN, SHARON PETRONELLA, EDWARD BROOKS, MARIA MURILLO, LOREE PRIMEAU, & JONATHAN WARD University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, USA

Community Environmental Forum Theatre at UTMB-NIEHS Center in Environmental Toxicology uses Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) to promote involvement of citizens, scientists, and health professionals in deconstructing toxic exposures, risk factors, and cumulative stressors that impact the well-being of communities. The TO process encourages collective empowerment of communities by disseminating information and elaborating support networks. TO also elicits transformation and growth on a personal level via a dramaturgical system that restores spontaneity through image-making and improvisation. An NIEHS Environmental Justice Project, Communities Organized against Asthma & Lead, illustrates this interplay of personal and collective change in Houston, Texas.

Keywords COMPETING INTERESTS:

None declared.

Correspondence should be directed to: Sealy Center for Environmental Health & Medicine/NIEHS Center in Environmental Toxicology, 301 University Blvd, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX 77555–1110, USA. [email: [email protected]] ADDRESS.

JOHN SULLIVAN,

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Augusto Boal
Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR)
drama therapy
environmental justice (EJ)
Project COAL
Theatre of the Oppressed

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Politics is the therapy of society; therapy is the politics of the person. (Augusto Boal) TOXICO-GENOMICS, oxidative stress, metabolic detoxi-

fication pathways: none of these areas of inquiry so essential to basic environmental health science conjure up easy associations with theatre, or the work of Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire. But the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston has turned this notion on its head in an effort to effectively reach communities with toxic exposure issues on the Texas and Louisiana Gulf coast. Because portions of these communities often share a fence line with point sources of pollution—petrochemical installations, power generation facilities, landfills or hazardous waste sites—various degrees of air, soil or water toxicity are facts of daily life. Health disparities in coastal EJ communities are starkly drawn and fence line neighborhoods often lack basic services and effective advocacy. The Public Forum & Toxics Assistance division of UTMB’s NIEHS Center uses Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) as a major outreach to fence line locales in a unique environmental justice experiment called Community Environmental Forum Theatre (CEFT). These Forum projects were designed as ‘translational interfaces’ to link current science in toxicology, epidemiology and clinical medicine with communities in need of this information. As public health shifts toward a more Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) model mandating wide spectrum involvement from neighborhood partners, CEFT also connects communities with assessment, implementation, and evaluation phases of what were formerly just academic studies, owned and operated by outsider experts. However, these Forums are also part of a subtle and deeper transformational process that alters personal perspectives of community advocates and scientists that fully participate. Ultimately, this embodied immersion in Theatre of the Oppressed plays its own variations on Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy to increase critical awareness of the tangled power dynamic overarching environmental justice. A matrix of Boal’s dramatic techniques, Freire’s democratic principles of group inquiry, and the community-based science (CBPR) paradigm inform commitment of research and advocacy efforts to partnerships that investigate root causes as well as addressing health and social outcomes of environmental injustices. The following analysis offers a broad stroke overview of

how TO connects with Freire’s critical praxis, outlines its use in environmental health and justice outreach, and discusses how the Forum integrates site-specific local knowledge with technical expertise in toxicology and risk assessment. The notion of TO and Freire’s pedagogy as intellectual-experiential frameworks promoting both personal and collective transformations frames a pervasive model for these changes, and suggests how renewal manifests in individuals and in the world.

What is Theatre of the Oppressed? Augusto Boal describes Theatre of the Oppressed as a dramaturgical ‘system of Games and special Techniques that aims at developing, in oppressed citizens, the language of theatre, which is the essential human language’ (Boal, 1992/2002, p. 253). The primary element in this system is the community intensive, a workshop comprised of physical games, image-making exercises, character creation and scene-building improvisational structures. Boal describes the components parts of the TO process as: • knowing the body—exploring limitations, balance, improvisational possibilities and social distortions; • making the body expressive—dehabituation, learning vocabulary and syntax of dramatic physicality; • theatre as language (and way of inquiry and knowing)—simultaneous dramaturgy, image theatre and the Forum; • theatre as discourse—thematic spectacles (fluid sculptures, spoken word, multi-voiced poems) (Boal, 1985, p. 126). The intensive usually culminates in the production of a public Forum. Forums give groups oppressed by social injustice an opportunity to represent these oppressions and engage community audiences in an interactive dialogue. To clarify—and theatricalize— what he means by oppression, or who he refers to as the oppressed, Boal offers, ‘the oppressed have lost the right to express their wills and needs, and are reduced to the condition of obedient listeners to the monologue [of power]’ (Boal, 1985, p. 143). While the primary focus of TO is very strictly collective; participation in the TO intensive workshop process provokes significant personal transformation— particularly through sensory re-tuning and trust exercises, and the ‘deep tissue’ image work that explores 167

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social power dynamics and the root causes of oppressions (Boal, 1992/2002, p. 251). Well-made Forum scenes resonate strongly with the daily life of community audiences and this energy compels the transformation of passive spectators into engaged spect-actors. These vital interactions encourage a wide spectrum of social outcomes: community empowerment and organizing, teaching concepts, building issue awareness and agendas, strategizing and rehearsing action, connecting citizens with movements, and widening coalitions. The Community Environmental Forum Theatre practiced by Public Forum & Toxics Assistance is structured primarily around techniques associated with sensory retuning, Image and Forum Theatre, which Boal describes as vital ‘trunk’ elements in the Tree of the Theatre of the Oppressed.

Dehabituating the habitual Boal’s process begins with ‘knowing the body’ and ‘making the body expressive’. Structured movement exercises promote change in habitual body patterns—modeling and tuning the actor’s instrument— to reshape how the body moves through space and reconfigure how the senses interface with the world. Boal describes this immersion in the vocabulary and syntax of physicality as a radical remodeling in which ‘we must start with de-mechanization, the re-tuning (or de-tuning) of the actor’ (2000, p. 32). Entrée into Boal’s dramaturgy involves first reconfiguring the basics: patterns of breathing and distributing muscular tension throughout the body, balance, walking, vocalizing, and improvisational use of space, objects, and mental imagery to influence and modulate physical actions. This divergence of behavior from pragmatic norms frees the actor’s musculature, and breaks internalized controls on expression that inhibit spontaneity. Because both image-making and Forum acting are improvisational skills, spontaneity is the sine qua non for effective participation. This focus echoes the centrality of true spontaneity in the dramatic methodologies of Jacob Moreno (Sternberg & Garcia, 1989, pp. 107–112). TO intensives follow a pattern of training similar to Moreno’s—warming to the task of change with muscular, sensory, memory, imagination and emotional memory exercises—to break down body/mind rigidity, and unlock improvisational resources (Boal, 1992/2002, pp. 31–37). Boal’s belief in the primacy of the body as an instrument for apprehending the world and, of 168

course, a liberating vehicle for action on the world, mirrors Freire’s statement, ‘It is my entire body that socially knows’ (Freire, 1998, p. 92). In addition, Boal’s system—thoroughly rooted in Stanislavski— also asserts the paramount importance of emotion; though the Forum may be less concerned with production values than mainstream theatre, Forum actors must still tap their store of emotional memories to express the consequences of oppression in a way that activates community audiences to intervene in their shared drama with novel actions. Buried feelings, particularly around the negative effects of living in chronically polluted communities, will invariably surface during Forum intensives. The Forum process aims to rationalize remembered emotional experiences, seeking both ‘how and why a person is moved, what is the nature of this emotion, what its causes are’ with special emphasis on social causes (Boal, 1992/2002, p. 36). These feelings serve as raw materials for analytic image work that deconstructs experience and allows actors the creative freedom to reconfigure images of power dynamics that perpetuate oppressions. The process is further distanced from the personal with infusions of toxicology and risk communication technique during the course of the intensive. This ‘tox & risk’ meta-structure grounds the bodywork, sensory-emotive exercises, image-making, and scene-work in practical, collective goals: raising the community’s informational baseline and expanding capacity for effective advocacy and action. The scientific content also lends environmental health science credibility to the Forum process and creates an interface that ‘blends subjective attitudes, and community-life ways into the mix of scientific tools, techniques and project relationships’ commonly described as Community-Based Participatory Research, or CBPR (Sullivan & Lloyd, 2006, p. 629).

Image Theatre: sharing a dialogue and crafting a common lens Boal describes Image Theatre as ‘a series of Techniques that allow people to communicate through Images and Spaces, and not through words alone’ (Theatre of the Oppressed/Techniques: Image Theatre, www.theatreoftheoppressed.org). Image Theatre exercises are loosely structured as conversations coded in a visual and kinesthetic language that allows participants to physically experience

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how it feels to embody both their own and each other’s oppressions, interactions, dreams, and triumphs. This silent dialogue of gestural signs constitutes the primary representational and analytic tool in the ‘arsenal of the Theatre of the Oppressed’, and its importance parallels the primacy of conversation, what bell hooks calls ‘the central location of pedagogy’ in democratic or libratory education (hooks, 2003, p. 44). The dialogic core of Forum imagery parallels concepts advanced in many systems of popular, or democratic pedagogy—from bell hooks to Henry Giroux to Thomas Dewey. The most important match, however, is always with fellow Brazilian, Paulo Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed translates smoothly into the embodied processes of community actors as they build images of the world as it is, and then modify them to approximate a world they would choose to inhabit. In Freire’s framework, engaged learners are transformed through immersion in active praxis, growing into critical awareness, enhanced presence, a sense of personal and group agency, and hope. Boal’s praxis is similar, but more spontaneous and, being of the theatre, entirely embodied. Community actors progress through a series of precursor exercises: learning to use their own body, that of a partner, and finally small groups to represent emotions, states-ofbeing, abstract concepts, and relational dynamics as sculptures. Exercises such as auto-sculpture (self), the image gallery (partners), the fishbowl (multiple pointsof-view), and small group images (multiple images of oppression, happiness, and so on) develop cumulative image-making skills as actors represent progressively more detailed pictures of reality. Boal has developed a massive repertoire of variations on the theme of images, transforming Freire’s analytic process into a dialogic ballet. Each variation approximates a special lens that diffracts reality from different angles of analytic regard. Image structures may be categorized by function as: • viewing reality from multiple points-of-view; • representing group dynamics/social oppressions; • making/modifying proposals for change; • animating freeze-frames to explore consequences and implications of stop action images; • building story-boards for Forum-lengths scenes. Images constructed by Community Environmental Forum Theatre actors focus almost exclusively on themes of risk, justice and basic safety (see Fig. 1). Actors sculpt representational or symbolic figures

Figure 1. Fence-line family ‘circles the wagons’ for protection after one of the children is diagnosed with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia (community In-Power & Development Association/Port Arthur, TX, 2004).

carrying the emotional burden of life on the fence-line: sorrow over disease in the family, fear of explosions or ‘upsets’ at the local industrial plant, rage at local government, industry, and pollution regulators, resignation, apathy, fatalism or cynicism in the face of apparent ‘unassailable reality’, or marginalization from the mainstream of power and civic life. Images of the local/regional power dynamic overlaying life in fence-line communities often depict coping with the effects of cumulative environmental and social stressors, lack of access to basic services, effects of political patronage, and lax regulation of polluting point sources. A brief sampling of dominant themes from previous CEFT sessions reveals how local concerns resonate through the content of images and the Forum: • Participants in the Barrio Segundo/Houston, TX Forum created images and a primary scene that portrayed community division over the siting of a new public school (Cesar Chavez High School) less than 2000 yards from the fenceline of an industrial point source of 1, 3 butadiene, a known carcinogen (2002). • Members of Mothers for Clean Air—5th Ward Chapter/Houston, TX depicted the developmental damage done to neighborhood children by heavy metal emissions (lead, cadmium, thallium, nickel) from a former local steel casting plant declared a National Priority Superfund site (2003). • Members of Citizens for Environmental Justice/Corpus Christi, TX constructed an elaborate image of various community reactions to a ‘cluster’ of congenital birth defects in a Latino neighborhood contiguous with local refineries (2004). 169

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Figure 2. ‘Fire in the Hole’—CIDA members create image of their worst environmental fear: an explosion and fire at the nearby chemical plant (Community In-Power & Development Association/Port Arthur, TX 2004).

• The Community In-Power & Development Association Forum in Port Arthur, TX produced a series of ‘worst environmental fear’ images that featured the physical and psychological effects of explosions, fires, and accidents at the nearby refining and chemical production plants (2004). • Participants in a post-Katrina/Rita environmental health hazards project—‘Hurricane readiness: A way of life on the Bayous’; Houma, LA—created a series of community storm hazard images, some of which portrayed the damaging effects of industrial channels cut through coastal marshland for easy access among petrochemical production sites (2006). • An east Houston group convened by Madres por aire limpio created images depicting the role of eminent domain and gentrification in dislocating low-income Latino families along a proposed light-rail corridor, as well as more predictable sculptures of lax air monitoring and regulatory responses (2007). By composing multi-character freeze frame tableaus to represent social conflicts, power imbalances, and stages in the transformation of social dynamics, community actors graphically recreate personal or collective experiences as three-dimensional snapshots; in populating these representations with fellow actors—carefully adjusting gestures, distributing body tensions, and modeling facial expressions— they also share the ‘skin of these events’: the sense of physicality and the emotions these human situation provoke (see Fig. 2). This educational process builds a network of shared support and solidarity within the 170

group. Boal’s image process elicits these pictures of ‘the world we see and the world we feel’ to use as raw materials for analyses of social subtexts, identifying root causes of oppressions. Manipulating these images with transformative image exercises—a Real to Ideal alteration, or 3 Fast Wishes (cycles change through rapid, successive approximations)—serves to objectify social situations and promotes re-envisioning their ‘unassailable reality’ as contingent situation. This corresponds to a drama therapy paradigm prescribed by Renee Emunah as a primary psychotherapeutic treatment goal: ‘the development of an observing self ... a function of collective witness and self reflection which creates images and scenes of all that could be, fostering a sense of hopefulness’ (Emunah, 1994, pp. 31–33).

Forum Theatre: a rehearsal for the rest of your life The Forum could be called the signature element in Boal’s overarching Theatre of the Oppressed dramaturgy. Community arts theorist, Arlene Goldbard, observes that ‘Forum Theatre has had the widest influence on community cultural development work [throughout the world]’ (2006, p. 119) and it is certainly true that the Forum—with some adaptations to accommodate traditional values—flourishes in a variety of cultural contexts. Forums are produced by participants in TO intensives, conducted by the workshop facilitator: Boal calls this role the joker, and the Forum conductor’s process, ‘jokering’. Forum scenes, crafted by community actors, are shared with a community audience, which naturally resonates with the local issues depicted in the scenes. The Forum presents a synthesis of many hours of collective ‘research’ into the nuanced inter-personal dynamics of environmental justice or other social issues. Forum scenes and their precursor images of the world as it is are called anti-models because they produce no satisfying closure and the oppressions and antagonists that dog the protagonist persist and continue to control the flow of events (Boal, 1992/2002, pp. 241–244). In Freirean terms, anti-models ‘re-present’ reality as a problem to solve rather than an eternal cross to bear (Freire, 1971/2000, pp. 109–114). The act of physically re-visioning models of reality that have proved dysfunctional or counterproductive—for example, reconfiguring social atoms or family sculptures, physically rehearsing necessary changes in

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habitual behaviors, or encouraging an actor to say exactly what s(h)e believes to an antagonist through a magic screen or as an aside (aka Sociodrama)—also has obvious congruence with various systems of drama therapy (Sternberg & Garcia, 1989, p. 72). Based on the idea that anti-models must convey the nature of social conflicts clearly, Boal offers a few general parameters for designing effective Forum scenes: Each Forum must present a clear question. A scene’s dramatic architecture must focus on the conflict of wills which express different social forces. All characters must be integral to this structure which must be centralized in a core conflict: the concretion of the central idea of the play. (1998, p. 62) The notion that clearly drawn issues, strong conflicts, obvious power imbalances in social relationships, and a glaring lack of closure potentiates audience interaction is a cardinal principle in building effective Forum scenes. Since environmental justice issues naturally lend themselves to this more or less dialectical treatment, Boal’s classic Forum is well suited to themes commonly addressed in Community Environmental Forum Theatre. The structure of the Forum incorporates the audience as co-participants—or spect-actors in Boal’s lexicon—‘setting up situations in which actors are not divided from spectators [who may] cross the invisible “fourth wall” of the theater and enter the action’, to replace the frustrated, confused or otherwise stymied protagonist (Goldbard, 2006, p. 119). Boal describes this process as ‘collective rehearsal for changing reality’ (1998, p. 57). TO and the more general field of applied theatre share a spectrum of common characteristics, including: • an affinity for incompleteness (anti-models’ lack of closure); • demonstration of possible narratives (multiple story threads, multiple points of view); • task-oriented focus (critical praxis is not a passive process); • emphasis on posing dilemmas (‘reality is a problem to be solved’); • interrogation of possible futures (spect-actors propose multiple futures); • provides an aesthetic medium that gives voice to communities (empowerment/demystification) (Taylor, 2003, p. 27). The ‘perfect Forum’ would leave actors, spectactors, and audience energized, actively vigilant, and dissatisfied with the world they have seen portrayed

Figure 3. Forum scene intervention: a young audience member enters the Forum scene to tell ‘Dad’ she’s worried about the effects of lead poisoning on his daughter, one of her classmates, ‘and also a good friend.’ (El Teatro Lucha por la Salud del Barrio/de Madres a Madres/ Houston, TX, 2004).

on stage. Freire calls this a state of ‘patient impatience’, while Boal is less ambiguous. There is no place for passivity at a Forum; Theatre of the Oppressed primes spectators to apply their powers of critical awareness to deconstruct what they see and ‘prepare for action’. In contrast with the conventional Aristotelian catharsis—which Boal dubs adaptive, disempowering and tranquillizing— catharsis in Theatre of the Oppressed is active and ‘dynamizing’. He describes this process as ‘a catharsis of detrimental blocks’ awakening the desire to act (Boal, 1995, pp. 72–73). Boal’s anti-homeostatic mode of catharsis closely parallels Jacob Moreno’s ‘catharsis of integration’, which liberates spontaneity, allowing the actor in a psychodrama—or less directly, participants in a sociodrama—access to formerly blocked powers of personal creativity. However there is a significant core difference: the locus of Moreno’s catharsis is more personal and specific. Boal’s catharsis envelops actors, spect-actors, and the entire audience in a web of issues and proposed actions (Feldhendler, 1994, p. 99) (see Fig. 3).

The Dance of Feeling, Science & Story—linking TO & EJ with the facts of environmental health In broad terms, the NIEHS-UTMB project in Community Environmental Forum Theatre uses Boal’s image-making and improvisational action 171

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techniques with environmental justice communities as a tool kit for characterizing and representing linkages among toxic exposures and health impacts. The Public Forum & Toxics Assistance TO practitioner provides basic toxicological information within the structure of Theatre of the Oppressed to collaborate with community environmentalists in building locally authentic anti-models of toxic challenges and cumulative risk effects in their neighborhoods. While initial image models help define what exists and how much it hurts in specific terms, modifying these images of cumulative community burden toward better approximations of health and community empowerment moves dialogue and action in the direction of hope and positive change. These urgent images or scenes from ‘lives, interrupted by damage’—all seen through local eyes unmediated by the careful intentions and precise methodologies of science—take shape with swift spontaneity. They legitimate the process and carry representational authority beyond the scope of professional experts to define, measure, and predict (Wiley & Feiner, 2001, p. 121). Forum actors from Mothers for Clean Air/5th Ward Chapter (Houston, TX) created a power dynamic image they named Us Watching Them Watching Us. This image incorporated a selfaggrandizing local politician—whose face was turned away from the neighborhood—and neighbors in various stances of denial, engagement, paralysis, despair, or rage. In the center of these frozen action figures, a mother pointed vehemently at the politician with a panic face while her child, a victim of lead poisoning from a former industrial site, lay listless at her feet. And above them all, elevated to a rarified level by education, technology, and funding, stood three detached scientists— watching, measuring, recording their data. A neighbor pointed upwards at the scientists, urging then to ‘come on down and see what’s happening, for real’. As the group modified their image, the politician was named, and environmental scientists warned that the neighborhood had been studied to death and now they wanted real action. A further modification—using 3 Fast Wishes—pushed the politician permanently outside the neighborhood, and brought the scientists off their pedestals to meet Mom and her stricken child, reflecting ‘the need for scientists to stand square in the middle of the community dynamic rather than outside, or above it’, a prime directive of community-based science (Fischer, 2000, p. 168) (see Fig. 4). 172

Figure 4. ‘Something here is very wrong.’ Image shows extent of a local congenital heart disease cluster and various community reactions—while an environmental health scientist quietly observes from outside the social dynamic (Citizens for Environmental Justice/Corpus Christi, TX, 2003).

While the didactic content of CEFT concentrates on the physical health of the community, focused image-making provides access to submerged feelings—what we call the affective subtext of environmental justice—that are normally suppressed in the interests of just getting by. Expressing the heart of these matters moves dialogue beyond the normal confines of pollution permitting, regulatory procedures, excess disease rates and risk factors, and into the realm where knowledge and solidarity transform despair and frustration into concrete action to influence policy. But this transformation of attitudes and aspirations would not find much traction in the real world of coalitions, advocacy, and tough negotiation without solid grounding in facts. Community Environmental Forum Theatre also uses the dramatic tools of Boal’s dramaturgy to help project partners build science literacy capacities (Sullivan & Lloyd, 2006, pp. 634–635). This ‘tox, risk, & stress’ curriculum incorporates basic (qualitative) toxicology, community ethnography, and social epidemiology covering concepts such as: • Tox: Preformatted participatory image structures and sociometry exercises illustrate toxicology concepts germane to community needs for information. The ‘tox’ component encompasses exposure pathways, dose response parameters—magnitude, duration, frequency, timing—susceptibility factors, vulnerable populations, bioaccumulation, bio-magnification, fate, transport and bioavailability, biomarkers of exposure and susceptibility,

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persistent-organic-pollutants (POPs), and chemical body burdens (Sexton, Needham, & Pirkle, 2003, pp. 38–45). • Risk: This component stems from an imagebased ethnography process in which participants build site-specific snapshots of exposure pathways, risk perceptions, risk & action priorities, personal experience with EJ and environmental health issues, community power dynamics, and create image maps of community assets, and stressors. Sociometry exercises allow participants to determine intra-group safety and toxic abatement priorities, as well as sampling the spectrum of group experience regarding the personal effects of toxic exposures (ATSDR, 2005, pp. 2(1)–2(16)). • Stress: Facilitator and participants create short scenes and improvisational exercises exploring the human effects of cumulative community stress burdens from chronic toxic exposures, environmentally induced health effects, lack of access to needed health care, and other socialeconomic indicators of health, opportunity, and justice disparities. The concept of multiple stressor effects, cumulative risk, and the influence of these factors on a community’s ability to recover from chronic toxic assaults closely guides planning scenes for the public Forum (NEJAC, 2004, pp. 5–40). Ideally ‘tox, risk, & stress’ instruction folds neatly into the sharing and validation of community stories. Actors expand their knowledge base and refresh their commitment to environmental health, while neighbors find new reasons to reconnect and organizations refine their advocacy and expand capacity to make a credible case and lead with confidence. These transformations stem from the encounter between objective analysis and reflexive subjectivity as community actors toggle through the process of evaluating and expressing the environmental framework that conditions and limits their lives. This process blends Boal’s expressive physicality and Paulo Freire’s critical praxis with Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR), a demystified practice of investigation and collaborative intervention in which ‘experts work cooperatively with the community to understand and resolve community problems, empower community members and democratize research’ (Fischer, 2000, p. 174). CBPR provides a platform for channeling and sustaining the bias toward effective action that flows naturally from the juices of the Forum. Without the influence of embodied pedagogy, these shifts of self and community would be more strictly cerebral, and the urge to act, less compelling. But

the structure of CBPR is equally essential; knowledge and passion need leverage to move the prevailing power dynamic, at best impassive, at its worst, actively antagonistic, toward inclusion and greater justice.

CBPR and CEFT—allies in a process of transforming horizons of the possible Defined as ‘a collaborative approach to research that equitably involves all partners in the research process and recognizes the unique strengths that each brings’ (Katz, 2004), Community-Based Participatory Research widens the angle of regard for public health activities, acknowledging that community networks and leaders, local knowledge of adverse social and economic consequences of environmental degradation, and community beliefs and attitudes are all vital factors that directly impact the efficacy of research and community outreach (Sullivan & Lloyd, 2006, pp. 629–630). CBPR carries with it a necessary mandate to ‘restructure the undemocratic expert–client relationship because hypotheses, analysis and interpretation directly affects the social power dynamic’ (Fischer, 2000, p. 172). This inter-cultural conversation among researchers, community advocates, and citizens is also rich as a paradigm for new information-laden relationships and action. Frank Fischer acknowledges this value-added aspect of CBPR, stating: ‘participatory forms of inquiry have the potential to provide new knowledge—in particular, local knowledge—that is inaccessible to more abstract empirical methods set in play by cultural outsiders’ (2000, p. 147). Dr Marvin Legator, a pioneer in genetic toxicology and avid promoter of popular epidemiology, rejected the ‘myth of scientific exclusivity’—a belief that the methods of science and fruits of research belong exclusively to scientists—in favor of a ‘methodological pluralism’ that directly incorporates informally trained citizens and public health advocates into population-based studies (Legator & Strawn, 1993, p. 3). CBPR methodology challenges the centrality of scientific experts, and openly acknowledges the political dimensions of knowledge production, and the role of knowledge—reinforced by educational disparities and institutional privilege—as an instrument of power and control. A community science practitioner ‘helps the community frame and answer its own questions on its own terms’ (Fischer, 2000, p. 149) and this 173

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relationship closely parallels Freire’s nonhierarchical alliance of learner and teacher, or Boal’s conjunction of facilitator and actors engaged in TO’s program of embodied inquiry. An NIEHS-funded environmental justice project linking a community-based social service provider, city advocacy groups, university researchers, and neighborhood health care centers in Houston, TX provides an example of how this Freirean process plays out in the real world.

Project COAL & El Teatro Lucha por la Salud del Barrio—a show, tell, and (above all) listening outreach to Latino neighborhoods on Houston’s near north side The NIEHS Environmental Justice Partnerships for Communication Program focuses on developing and testing methods for linking members of an environmentally impacted community with research and health care providers. Under this rubric, Project COAL—Communities Organized against Asthma & Lead/Comunidades organizadas contra la asma y el plomo—was officially launched in fall 2003 to develop a working environmental health partnership on Houston’s primarily Latino near north side. Project partners, de Madres a Madres/DMAM (social service provider), Casa de Amigos (Harris County direct health care provider) and University of Texas Medical Branch-NIEHS Center in Environmental Toxicology framed a multi-faceted plan to: • train and equip de Madres a Madres staff to conduct residential surveys, sample lead residues, asthma triggers, and identify exposure pathways; • educate parents on minimizing environmental health hazards; • develop population-based data on incidence and geographic location of asthma/lead exposure cases; • establish interactive communication channels for neighborhoods within the de Madres a Madres ‘catchment’ area (Ward, 2006). The project partners identified Forum Theatre as a suitable vehicle for interactive community dialogue and El Teatro Lucha por la Salud del Barrio ‘hit the boards’ in winter 2004. Boal’s congruence with the goals and methods of CBPR—particularly as a culturally appropriate ‘transitive communications 174

model’ linking the partners with local neighborhoods—made the Forum an easy fit for performers and their audience (Primeau & Sullivan, 2005, p. 2). DMAM recruited troupe members directly from the neighborhood. The size of this multi-generational teatro ranged between 10–14, ages spanned 12–64 years, with an average gender mix of 60 percent female to 40 percent male. Most members spoke fluent Spanish; some were recent immigrants while most were second to third generation Tejana/Tejano. Eighty percent of the actors derive from Mexico; the remainder emigrated from Central America. None of these recruits, including the coordinator-facilitator, also a DMAM staff member, were actors or had ever received any prior theatre training. One member of the troupe was a working visual artist. Teatro Lucha actors spent 10 weeks immersed in training: re-tuning their physicality, learning the rudiments of image-making, improvisation, and the mechanics of the Forum. In addition, the troupe completed an informal course in identifying exposure pathways, developmental effects of lead toxicity, asthma pathogenesis, and the respiratory effects of irritants and specific triggers of respiratory distress. The directors of Houston’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program and the Pediatric Asthma Center at UTMB/Galveston chose course materials and presented the sessions. This body of environmental health facts became integrated as ‘talking points’ into the content and packaging of various Forum scenes (Sullivan, 2005). During training, actors employed images and improvisation to confront local factors that contribute to the risks of living in their neighborhoods: aging, decrepit housing stock bearing residues of lead paint, absentee or unengaged landlords, high frequency of children with elevated blood lead levels, wide-spread respiratory distress, pervasive mold, high levels of ozone, proximity to traffic and industry, high percentages of adults and teenagers exposed to workplace hazards, crime, domestic violence, school failure: all the physical and social indicators of health and safety disparities that contribute to environmental injustices. While adult actors—especially DMAM staff and volunteers—were familiar with lead hazards, some of the younger troupe members were shocked to discover that children relatively close to their own chronological age were at risk in their own homes. Exercises such as multiple images of oppression and an informal Rashomon clarified the scope and age-related spread of these feelings, and developed a sense of variance in risk perceptions within

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Figure 5. El Teatro Lucha por la Salud del Barrio sets up a moving ‘fluid’ image during a community performance at Holy Name parish in near north Houston (Project COAL/de Madres a Madres, Houston, TX, 2005).

the group, while Real to Ideal image transformations allowed actors to create their own successive approximations of a safer, healthier neighborhood (Sullivan, 2005) (see Fig. 5). De Madres a Madres contacted local elementary schools to arrange performances at early morning cafecitos meetings—monthly gatherings sponsored by Houston Independent School District and geared toward an audience of mothers with young children. This audience was a target demographic because of the prevalence of childhood asthma and the dire developmental effects of lead poisoning. Teatro Lucha deployed in three sequential phases: • The first show assessed the community’s lead, asthma, and healthy homes knowledge base. Forum scenes offered situations that allowed community residents to demonstrate how they would approach their neighbors with advice on limiting exposure to lead or asthma triggers. Information from this interface enabled the partners to create a respectful, culturally appropriate intervention model for the next phase of the project. • This second iteration focused on developing risk communication skills to enhance informal, preexisting neighborhood networks. The Forum drew spect-actors into this effort to collectively discover a convincing rhetorical structure for presenting health and risk information. Spectactors used a variety of strategies to point antagonists toward new personal behaviors and to call them into active engagement with environmental health issues on both local and citywide levels. • Phase three devoted less time to actual performance and concentrated on delivering a combination workshop and opinion survey to four

cafecitos school sites in the neighborhood. Cafecitos mothers, their children, and school staff participated in a brief embodied sociometry session to establish a sense of the group’s interest in health issues and to clarify neighborhood development priorities. • The project culminates in a final intervention that melds theatre, tele-novella style film sequences featuring risk communication scenarios, and clips from past Forums, with a videotaped and audio documentary treatment of the near north side focused on Latino history and cultural assets, and the neighborhood’s role in Houston’s current growth and development. Preliminary data from Project COAL’s healthy homes survey confirms what staff at de Madres a Madres have always suspected: close to 25 percent of neighborhood housing stock presents a clear risk to children and adults for potentially dangerous exposure to lead dust or peeling paint. Add to that a 30.3 percent rate of respiratory symptoms predictive of asthma among children and the scope of this environmental health challenge draws into sharper focus (Ward, 2006). But what about the Forum experiment? The results of Teatro Lucha’s laborintensive outreach don’t translate so readily into quantities, beyond raw numbers of audience, scores on health and safety post-performance checklists, and audience members who registered postperformance for a healthy home survey. Another form of evaluation seemed necessary to document the deep impact of Boal’s process on the partner institutions and, most especially, on the community actors who brought the environmental health message directly to the community. Project COAL turned to grounded theory analysis to qualitatively examine the transformative effects on Forum actors of their sustained immersion in this drama-based public health outreach process. NIEHS Center investigators designed an interview protocol to assess personally transformative aspects of the TO process within the context of a ‘partnership for communication’. Each actor was interviewed and asked to evaluate how their participation in Teatro Lucha inspired personal changes in feelings, behaviour, and cognition. These possible transformations, summarized as broad categories, comprise: • leadership in the community; • knowledge acquisition and skills and development as health educator; 175

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• personal efficacy as Community Forum actor and process facilitator; • perceived efficacy of the Forum as an outreach modality (Primeau & Sullivan, 2005). Though results are still preliminary, the coding process identified three emergent thematic categories in the interviews: TO as Process, Personal Transformations, and Community Transformations. Close examination of TO as Process outcomes yields a positive ‘congruence of actor role with educator role’, a sense that ‘empowerment of others occurred through the process’ and general ‘enjoyment of participation in the training and performance process’. Personal Transformations include ‘enhanced feelings of self-confidence, selfesteem, and self-efficacy, increased knowledge, and improved ability to express concepts and feelings, both verbally and nonverbally’. Community Transformations proved more difficult for the actors to assess because their primary connection with the project was delivery rather than evaluation. Their training as actors, and role in the project as actor-educators provided them no objective platform from which to observe change in community behaviors. While variations in spect-actor Forum interventions always occurred from performance to performance, and audiences seemed more health and safety savvy as successive phases of Project COAL unfolded, there was no firm consensus on ‘project efficacy’ or ‘transformative community effects’ (Primeau & Sullivan, 2005). In regard to general efficacy, one actor commented: ‘you could potentially have had a negative health effect if they didn’t come [to the performance] or heard this information. And that’s enough.’ Attempting to assess the depth of Forum project effects on the community, another actor observed: I think awareness is up. I think some people will change their behavior as a result. And I think that even the participants think differently about themselves and, for that reason, will probably spin off into other areas, you know, be advocates for different things they believe in. (Primeau & Sullivan, 2005) While acknowledging the subjective bias in her appraisal, this actor captured the essence of Boal’s goal for Theatre of the Oppressed and the essential purpose of Freire’s critical praxis: to disrupt the habitual, to question the formerly unassailable answers, to activate and sustain the urgency. 176

Safety, structure, and sustainability in the transformational TO process Having witnessed a host of transformational moments in the course of Theatre of the Oppressed intensives, it’s difficult to disclaim that certain aspects of TO are undeniably therapeutic. While Boal adamantly asserts that ‘Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre of the first person plural’, and therapeutic effects of the Forum are alleged to be inclusive and collective rather than personal, individuals do experience real joy in physical expression of feelings and thoughts that were previously suppressed, deep anger, sometimes rage, at chronic injustice, significant turning points in attitudes and beliefs, and deeply vulnerable instances of self-revelation, doubt, and fear for themselves and their polluted communities (Boal, 1995, p. 40). Spect-actor interventions directly mirror central aspects of the Drama Therapy Role Method—particularly social modeling and role system shifting in which ‘clients play out a revised version of a dysfunctional role in order to influence others within their social sphere’ (Landy, 1993, pp. 52–55). Mady Schutzman emphasizes how tightly TO’s introspective and projective techniques may intertwine in practice, observing that: ‘Boal’s techniques have always interfaced with therapeutic [methods and outcomes]—he makes no firm distinction between his techniques appropriate for therapy and those for political action: he perceives his spectactor scheme as relevant to all social transformations’ (Schutzman, 1994, p. 137). But Boal sees no contradiction in his method; while acknowledging the congruence of his introspective techniques with certain psychotherapeutic practices, he still contends: We are theatre artists, not therapists. When a person tells us their particular story, using theatre as a medium of expression, it is the group that becomes the protagonist of the session, and not the individual who told (or donated) the story. (Boal, 1992/2002, p. 206) This telling process shifts fluidly between the collective and the personal and Theatre of the Oppressed, like drama therapy, needs a safe container or holding arrangement for full effect. The profound work of feeling, seeing, and modeling a better world out of the limitations we bring to TO demands secure perimeters of authenticity and trust (Chrislip, 2002, pp. 45–46). Boal recognizes this admixture of danger and opportunity in his method and warns ‘emotional

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operandi scrupulously during spect-actor interventions until one of these novel actions penetrates the oppressor’s social armor, or rhetoric of rationalizations (or both), and compels genuine change. Canadian TO practitioner, Warren Linds explains how he handles the delicate act of maintaining a safe container while the oppressed play their oppressors in his work with First Nations youth:

Figure 6. ‘No skin off my nose.’ A Johari’s Window exercise revealed lack of awareness and denial as impediments to effective community action on the environment; these finding were presented in a scene about commitment vs apathy (Mothers for Clean Air/5th Ward Chapter, Houston, TX, 2003).

exercises can be very dangerous unless we afterwards rationalize emotion with the aim of understanding the experience’ (1992/2000, p. 32). Short versions of Boal’s introspective techniques like Cops-in-the-Head or Rashomon offer views inside the uncertainties, stereotypes, and competing action agendas that garble dialogue around environmental justice issues (Boal, 1995, pp. 111–114). These deep structures are especially useful when community actors ‘play seriously’ at being their community’s perceived oppressor, or portray privileged outsiders who have the latitude to choose being a community ally, or not. Gestalt routines like hot seating and role reversal allow flexibility in probing—and assembling—unfamiliar perspectives or actually wearing the oppressor’s inimical point of view. Hybrid techniques like Talking to Power/Choosing Effective Allies improvise on Moreno’s concept of social atoms, while adding Sociodramatic techniques like ally doubling, the hot seat and the magic screen to develop characterizations and adjust for imbalances in social power dynamics (Dayton, 1994, pp. 46–53). Special focus image structures such as Johari’s Window allow actors to probe the submerged structure of their communities, shedding light on deeply buried issues, complex power dynamics, hidden assets, and historical resources (McCarthy & Galvao, 2002, pp. 37–39) (see Fig. 6). Playing the oppressor or a ham-handed potential ally carries the possibility of real pain: this means employing the tactics and privilege of the oppressor with realism, maintaining the character’s modus

For the sake of safety we emphasize to the people playing the oppressor that they are not playing themselves (although there are elements within us that we must draw on to play these characters). We emphasize that the success of the process depends on the oppressors being real. If the oppressor isn’t real then the investigation of ways to break the oppression isn’t real. (Linds, 1998) Linds also asserts that ‘playing the oppressor role can get at an understanding of white privilege’. Quite often, white academic facilitators must sit literally in the hot seat, acknowledging that race, age, gender, and economic status make one fully complicit with oppressor privilege. This is absolutely necessary because racism and class bias are the dirty core of environmental injustices. We must play the role of guide through a body of science concepts and dramatic techniques, as co-learners, and possibly effective allies, always accepting that we have no direct experience of the social and environmental injustices that daily eat away at fence-line communities. Forum projects require a strong connection with the future to sustain and nurture that characteristic bias toward action the process activates. Actors and communities leave a good Forum resolved to do something positive about their situation, and with a hopeful feeling that real change is actually in their stars. Describing how the Forum changes participants by modeling the positive as possible, Boal asserts: ‘The act of transforming also transforms she or he who acts. Theatre of the Oppressed uses the theater as a rehearsal for transformation of reality’ (Boal, 3 June 2005). But transformation without real world action will not persist, indeed, may morph into deep, paralyzing cynicism. The next step—a cardinal dictum of CBPR, labor and social justice organizing, alike—is creating and nurturing a structure for sustainable, focused action. Frank Fischer observes, ‘collective citizen participation is not something that can simply happen. It has to be organized, facilitated and even nurtured’ (2000, p. 143). Otherwise, citizens will find little value in Forums, coalitions, or any substantive engagement 177

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with community issues. The relationship of activities like Forum that activate and energize communities to outcomes that actually improve their environmental health or social-economic conditions is clear and unambiguous. A Forum should never represent the point of highest energy in any campaign for justice; rather, a Forum is a perfect precursor to jump-start the growth of critical awareness, magnify capacity of nascent grassroots movements, and develop agendas for future action. But never assume that a successful Forum, in itself, prefigures sustained action and ultimate success. Only through authentic engagement, however difficult it may be to nourish, maintain, and defend, can these hopeful dreams for justice be transformed from ‘viable novelties into historical concreteness’. Hope is indeed the jewel ‘at the core of the dialectical matrix of hope, itself, anger or indignation, and love’: what Freireans call the ‘engine of real change’ (Freire, 2004, pp. xxx–xxxi). Hope is the essence of the Forum, too, and Boal’s greatest gift to social justice. And that hope is also TO’s binding promise to stay connected after the show is done: to stay thick in the mix of dialogue and struggle as a resource with no strings attached, to stay eager and allied, always there, always open, always in it for the long haul.

References Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry. (2005). Public health assessment: Guidance manual. Atlanta, GA: US Department of Health & Human Services; Public Health Service. Boal, A. (1985). Theatre of the oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and non-actors, revised 2002. London: Routledge. Boal, A. (1995). The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy. London: Routledge. Boal, A. (1998). Legislative theatre. London: Routledge. Boal, A. (2000). The structure of the actor’s work. In L. Goodman & J. de Gay (Eds.), The Routledge reader in politics and performance (pp. 32–36). London: Routledge. Boal, A. (2005). Radio interview with J. Gonzales, Los Angeles, CA, Democracy now, 3 June. Chrislip, D. (2002). The collaborative leadership fieldbook: A guide for citizens and civic leaders. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Dayton, T. (1994). The drama within: Psychodrama and experiential therapy. Deerfield Beach, FL: Health Communications. Emunah, R. (1994). Acting for real: Drama therapy process, technique and performance. New York: Brunner/Mazel. Feldhendler, D. (1994). Augusto Boal and Jacob A. Moreno: Theatre and therapy. In J.Cohen-Cruz & 178

M. Schutzman (Eds.), Playing Boal: Theatre, therapy, activism (pp. 87–109). London: Routledge. Fischer, F. (2000). Citizens, experts and the environment: The politics of local knowledge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Freire, P. (1971). Pedagogy of the oppressed, revised 2000. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (1998). Pedagogy of the heart. New York: Continuum. Freire, P. (2004). Pedagogy of indignation. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Goldbard, A. (2006). New creative community: The art of cultural development. Oakland, CA: New Village Press. hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. London: Routledge. Katz, D. L. (2004). Representing your community in community-based participatory research: Difference made and measured. Preventing Chronic Disease [serial online], http://www.cdc.gov/pcd//issues/2004/jan03_0024.htm Landy, R. (1993). Persona and performance: The meaning of role in drama, therapy, and everyday life. New York: The Guilford Press. Legator, M., & Strawn, S. (1993). Chemical alert: A community action handbook. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Linds, W. (1998). Theatre of the oppressed: Developing a pedagogy of solidarity? Theatre Research in Canada/ Recherches Theatrales du Canada, 19(2) [online], http:// www.lib.unb.ca/Texts/TRIC/bin/get5.cgi?directory=vol 19_2/&filename=linds.htm, accessed 22 January 2008. McCarthy, J., & Galvao, K. (2002). ARTPAD: A resource for theatre and participatory development. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press. National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC). (2004). Ensuring risk reduction in communities with multiple stressors: Environmental justice and cumulative risks/impacts. EPA White Paper. Washington, DC: National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Primeau, L., & Sullivan, J. (2005). Evaluating transformative effects of theatre of the oppressed: An analytic process using grounded theory procedures. Paper presented at Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Conference, Los Angeles, CA, May. Schutzman, M. (1994). Brechtian shamanism: The political therapy of Augusto Boal. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), Playing Boal: Theatre, therapy, and activism (pp. 137–155). London: Routledge. Sexton, K., Needham, L., & Pirkle, J. (2003). Human biomonitoring of environmental chemicals. American Scientist, 92, 38–45. Sternberg, P., & Garcia, A. (1989). Sociodrama: Who’s in your shoes? Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. Sullivan, J. (2005). El Teatro Lucha por la salud del barrio: Theatre and environmental health in Texas. In L. Burnham (Ed.), Community Arts Network/Art in the public interest. http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2005/10/acrobats_of_the.php, accessed 21 October 2006.

SULLIVAN ET AL.: THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED Sullivan, J., & Lloyd, R. S. (2006). The forum theatre of Augusto Boal: A dramatic model for dialogue and community-based environmental science. Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, 11, 627–646. Taylor, P. (2003). Applied theatre: Creating transformative encounters in the community. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Ward, J. (2006). Project COAL: Communication channels in a community-driven environmental justice

project. Paper presented at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November. Wiley, L., & Feiner, D. (2001). Making a scene: Representational authority and a community-centered process of script development. In S. Haedicke & T. Nellhaus (Eds.), Performing democracy: International perspectives on urban community-based performance (pp. 121–142). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Author biographies JOHN SULLIVAN (Playwright-TO practitioner) co-directs Public Forum & Toxics Assistance Division of the Community Outreach and Education core in the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center in Environmental Toxicology at OTMB. He formerly served as Artistic Director of Theatre Degree Zero (Tucson, AZ) and Seattle Public Theatre’s Boal Wing. SHARON PETRONELLA co-directs the NIEHS Center Asthma & Children’s Environmental Health Outreach Division and works as a Center Investigator/Environmental Epidemiologist in NIEHS Asthma Pathogenesis Core. EDWARD BROOKS is the Director of UTMB’s Children’s Asthma Program, co-directs the NIEHS Center Asthma & Children’s Environmental Health

Outreach Division, and works as a Center Investigator in NIEHS Asthma Pathogenesis Core. MARIA MURILO formerly Coordinated Theatre Outreach for de Madres a Madres. She facilitates Forum workshops and performances, and leads El Teatro Lucha por la Salud del Barrio. LOREE PRIMEAU formerly chaired the Division of Occupational Therapy in the School of Allied Health at UTMB, and is now in private practice. JONATHAN WARD directs the Environmental Toxicology Division in Preventive Medicine & Community Health, is interim Director of UTMB’s NIEHS Center, and serves as Principal Investigator on Project COAL (Communities Organized against Asthma & Lead).

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