ABSTRACT
The politics of performance and the possibilities embedded within radical performance pedagogies is intensely intriguing as one site for thinking through possibilities of intervention into the exploitative agenda of schooling and beyond. Social action theater, radical theater, transformative theater, and Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), although all diverse in their political praxis may be too easily dismissed as feel-good spectacles unless we are fully receptive to engage the lessons they bring. “Theater,” to me, signified a bourgeois world of leisure that could not deal with the immediacy of the assault that working-class, Black and Brown people faced. My skepticism peaked while working as program coordinator for the National Conference for Community and Justice. The organization secured a grant from the Massachusetts Governor’s Task Force on Hate Crimes for the purpose of constructing a project to counter the rising tide of hate crimes in various Massachusetts public high schools. The structuring of the project was placed in my hands. I saw the task before me as incredibly difficult on multiple levels. There existed a myopic ideological investment in “hate crime” as a notion bounded in legal discourse and individualized to the degree that the institutional, social, political, and economic conditions that give rise to waves of hate were totally abstracted. The parameters of the project would not allow us to envision the rampant attack and demolition of bilingual/bicultural education as hate motivated. The fact that Boston landlords are not proactively penalized for renting apartments with lead paint levels high enough to permanently damage the nervous system of children could not be articulated as a hate crime, for example. After presenting my curricular proposals for the project I was told that the exercises were too transgressive. Too great a focus was placed on institutional realities and not enough on interactions between people. One member of the task force stated that there were theater exercises developed by a Brasilian that engaged a third-party spectator into a hate crime scene. In his words, “it would be a great way to get kids to solve interpersonal conflicts that bring on hate crimes.” Boal became, for me, just another name associated with techniques that sought to digest human misery and solve it through a vomiting of de-contextualized human relations work.
