Our Workshops
Our workshops are titled "Breaking Patterns, Creating Change". As human beings we often find ourselves trapped or frozen in modes of behavior and patterns of thought that impede real communication with our fellow human beings. Theatre of the Oppressed workshops will provide an opportunity to ‘unfreeze’, and to rehumanize ourselves. The workshops will be fun, but also challenging. They will encourage participants to put their bodies to work, and through their bodies learn about themselves and the world around them.
The goal is to create a sharper, greater sensitivity to our inner impulses and our motivations, to provide opportunities for self exploration, and through these, to generate possibilities for changing our world.
No two workshops are ever the same.
Even where we give a proposed list of games and exercises for the workshop, the facilitator is very likely to make alterations to the content or the sequence in response to what she sees as the needs of the group.
We offer a variety of workshops to suit varying needs of participants. To get an idea of the kinds of workshops we offer, click here.
Objective of the workshop
Our workshops aim to give participants an experiential understanding of theatre-based pedagogic tools which can be used for:
discovering the body’s potential for harnessing knowledge through non verbal communication
using this knowledge for gaining insights about ourselves, people and the world around us
DEVELOPING CRITICAL THINKING
furthering community dialogue on a range of social issues
Components of the Workshop
These lay the foundation for the work. Games and exercises will be chosen from the vast body of work developed by Augusto Boal. These will be done in every session, and threaded through all the work. In most worshops, the educational ideology embedded in the games will be explained through references to Boal’s work
Images form the backbone of this work, and these will be introduced early in the workshop. Other larger structures, which also use images, will be introduced gradually. These include structures such as Image Theatre, Forum Theatre, Cop in the Head and Rainbow of Desire.The structures build on each other, in cumulative fashion. Participants will learn how the structures were developed in response to events and experiences in Boal’s own theatrical practice, and how they reflect the pedagogic philosophy of Freire as interpreted by Boal.
As a part of the 6 day facilitator training, a short workshop is arranged with a community in order to give participants an experience of TO in the 'real' world, outside of the training environment. They may also get an opportunity to facilitate some exercises.
For benefits of the course to be realized fully, we encourage all our participants to take off their teacher, trainer, boss, parent, or whatever other 'hat' they may be used to wearing, and to experience the workshop for themselves. We do not wish to make the work seem too difficult or complicated, but we do give participants as full an understanding of the context, theory and philosophy of Boal's work as possible. This is done during the debriefing sessions, which follow almost all games and exercises. The time devoted to discussions and debriefing will depend on the duration of the workshop. In addition to this, the six-day facilitator training includes a session every day to discuss facilitation issues.