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RESEARCH FOR LIVING: FORUM THEATRE AS SECOND-ORDER CYBERNETIC ACTION RESEARCH
Tom Scholte
University of British Columbia
Inspired by the critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire (1996), “Forum Theatre” was originally developed by Brazilian director, activist and, later, city councilor, Augusto Boal as part of his program of the “Theatre of the Oppressed.” It has been developed further by, among others, Vancouver’s David Diamond, whose Theatre for Living has “moved away from the binary language and model of "oppressor/oppressed" and now “approaches community-based cultural work from a systems-based perspective; understanding that a community is a complexly integrated, living organism.” (theatreforliving.com). The Theatre for Living website describes the Forum Theatre component of their work as follows: In Forum Theatre, we show the audience the play all the way through once – the play builds to a crisis, and stops, offering no solutions. The play is then performed a second time, where audience members can then stop the action and enter the stage themselves, by replacing characters with whom they identify and try to solve problems or issues inside the story. The rest of the cast stays in character and improvises. […] The theatre becomes a creative laboratory where we can try ways to transform ourselves, our communities, and the world. (theatreforliving.com)
In addition to fully produced “main-stage” shows developed over several weeks, involving paid casts and professional designers and, often, performed in “soft seat” theatres, Diamond has evolved his one-week “Power Play” process through which he will take members of a community into which he has been invited to explore a particular issue of concern through an intensive workshop process culminating in the creation of a short Forum piece to be performed before other community members in school gymnasiums, community centers and other “non-professional” spaces. A substantial percentage of his work takes place within indigenous communities across western Canada and has tackled such “wicked problems” as homelessness, addiction, and family violence.
Even in the more “professional” Theatre for Living main-stage shows, deep personal engagement with, and knowledge of, the issue at hand is a far more important qualification for a cast-member than extensive acting experience. As an example, the cast for 2015’s maladjusted, a Forum Theatre piece about the mental health care system in the province of British Columbia, was composed of a retired psychologist, an active mental health and addictions nurse, as well as a number of past and present recipients of mental health services.
The parallels between the process described above and the description of Action Research within the call for papers of this SIG are not difficult to discern. And, indeed, Forum Theatre performances often provide, in the spirit of more traditional forms of Action Research, penetrating empirical insights into the systemic structures that perpetuate “wicked” problems and that, in the spirit of the “Legislative Theatre” employed by Augusto Boal during his tenure as city councilor, often find their way into policy recommendations via project reports that the company presents to the provincial government. There are, however, further facets of the Forum Theatre creation process and audience experience that, through the embodied role-playing it demands, further fulfills the reflexive promise of Action Research in a particularly second-order cybernetic fashion.
Larry Richards characterizes the second-order cybernetician, not as a scientist or engineer, but as “a potential craftsperson in and with time” who explores the role varying dynamics can play in “the reconfiguration of constraints (resources) in order to make possible what was not previously possible, including the avoidance of what was previously inevitable.” He goes on to make a further distinction of the second-order cybernetician’s craft that resonates with the art of Forum Theatre actors and the particular kind of audience learning enabled by their work.
Being a craftsperson in and with time is different from being an artisan, where one works with physical media –[…] Time is not a medium in the way that sound and paint are. Knowing when to say or do something in an intervention, how loudly or softly to speak, how fast or slowly to move, what rhythm to use, how to turn a flow into an event, when to emphasize or not – all of these involve a kind of craftsmanship in and with time.
These are, indeed, the kinds of self-observational distinctions brought into greater relief by Forum Theatre as it provides a studio experience in which all participants can sharpen their ability to make such distinctions and identify the new kinds of opportunities for action they afford. This transformation can be understood as a shifr from “first-order” to “second-order” observation as articulated by Niklas Luhmann.
The first-order observer lives in a world that seems both probable and true. By contrast, the second-order observer notices the improbability of first-order observation […] But as second-order observation it can at least thematize the improbability of first-order observation (including its own). It can comprehend more extended realms of selectivity and identify contingencies where the first-order observer believes he is following a necessary path or is acting entirely naturally.
This element of the Forum Theatre work to be discussed in this paper has been greatly enhanced by an engagement with the second-order cybernetic Enactive Management program of Osvaldo Garcia de la Cerda and Maria Saavedra Ulloa. (de la Cerda, 2009) centred around the use of their ontological tool, CLEHES, and its observational schema of six criss-crossing elements (Cuerpo [body], Language, Emotion, History, Eros, and Silence) rendering previously invisible distinctions visible to observers who can then go on to respond with the kind of dynamic sensitivity and craftsmanship identified by Richards.
Drawing on my own experience as a member of the mixed indigenous/non-indigenous cast of Theatre for Living’s šxʷʔam̓ ət (home) exploring the difficult path to reconciliation between Canada’s settler and indigenous populations and as director of Conflict Theatre @ UBC co-creating plays with a diverse group of employees at the University of British Columbia exploring blockages to authentic and productive communication in situations of workplace conflict, this paper will explicate the procedures of Forum Theatre as a form of Action Research featuring video clips of audience interventions at Forum performances and supported by empirical evidence of its efficacy in, not only, facilitating the co-creation of knowledge around particular systemic issues, but also, heightening such reflexive competencies as self-awareness, other awareness, self-regulation and relationship management in the midst of the challenging interactions resulting from the systemic structures at work. For, as Diamond insists, "[b]ecause Theatre for Living approaches the community as a organism [...] when plays are created, they are made to help us investigate ways to change the behaviours that create the structure, not just the structure itself.” “(Diamond, 2007 p, 38)
