Active Inquiry

Power to the People? – Pluralising personal experiences!

14th March, 2011 - Posted by Gavin - Comments Off on Power to the People? – Pluralising personal experiences!

Another great session on Wednesday evening which enabled the group to use their newly gained “language of images” to explore personal experiences of disempowerment. The group was asked to portray an image of a time that they felt disempowered by “sculpting” other group members into images. The point of the exercise was not to uncover personal stories but to use the  language of theatre to make oppressions visible.

The group make images of times when they felt disempowered

Because this was a Forum Theatre workshop and not a therapy session, we used these individual images to create a group image of disempowerment using images that had reoccurred in our individual images. In this way we began to move away from personal stories and pluralise – we began to see how oppression operates to disempower people at a macro level!

The group create an image which combines all their images of disempowerment

We then explored ways this image could be changed to make the ideal image. This session raised many interesting questions about the nature of disempowerment as well as how we define what we mean by “oppression”? There was also some discussion about the fact that although images are a useful tool to analyse oppression, words and dialogue can be hugely oppressive too. A well-chosen word in a particular situation can be just as oppressive as any “action”. We hope to be able to explore all of these questions as we create our pieces of Forum Theatre. We have a lot of work to do but I am looking forward to it!