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What kind of people usually take (and have taken) Augusto Boal's workshop and what are the common games played in these workshops?

Hi-

I'm the administrator of the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) http://www.toplab.org in New York. We were founded in 1990 and have presented workshops facilitated by Augusto Boal annually (and several times twice a year) since then. We also present monthly workshops during the academic year on various aspects of TO, and these are open to the general public. In addition, TOPLAB faciliators have presented workshops throughout New York City and across the United States for specific constituencies and communities, and we have also led workshops in Mexico, Guatemala, Cuba and Canada.

We are a collective of eight facilitators (plus myself, the administrator)  who present these workshops. Most are based in New York City, although others are in Massachusetts, Ontario and Maine.

[I will have to submit this form to you several times due to space contraints.]

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part two

What kind of people take the workshops? All kinds. TOPLAB is a radical organization dedicated to using TO to help bring about social justice, peace and radical social transformation; as such, we tend to emphasize Augusto Boal's Marxist approach to cultural activity. Our workshops are designed primarily to be training sessions for political organizers and these are the people we try to attract into our workshops. So, over the years, we have gotten numerous people who are involved in labor and community organizing, peace and justice activism, anti-racist and immigrants' rights activism, feminist, Marxist, socialist, anarchist political organizing, GLBT advocacy, etc. etc.

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Nonetheless, while these are the people to which we make appeals, and who form the bulk of our constituency, over the years we have also had appreciable numbers of teachers (college, high school and elementary), social workers, psychologists and others in the human services professions, medical workers (particularly those involved with AIDS and diabetes), religion-based activists (both clergy and laity), students and professional actors (Augusto Boal is fond of saying that "anyone can do Theater of the Oppressed--even actors!"). All these types of people have come to the Brecht Forum http://www.brechtforum.org where our public workshops always take place. But in addition to those workshops for the general public we also present workshops elsewhere for specific organizations, schools and colleges, community groups or specific constituencies who have contracted with us for training sessions. These have included psychologists' and mental therapists' associations, AIDS advocacy groups, theological seminaries, labor unions, peace, justice and social change organizations, pedagogical and teachers' organizations, communities of immigrants (both documented and undocumented) and immigrants' right advocates, homeless people, and at for an assortment of groups involved in anti-racism work, lesbian and gay rights, rights of the diasabled/handicapped and a whole assortment of others.

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A high percentage of our participants are people of color, people born outside of the United States, youth, lesbian, gay, bi, trans and queer people, and people on the political left. Most of of modest income. Nonetheless, all sorts of people have attended our workshops. They have ranged in age from teens to mid-80s; all economic classes have been represented, as have numerous nationalities and ethnicities, and people coming from all kinds of cultural backgrounds.

Our eight facilitators (all women) come from a range of cultural and national backgrounds--black and white, south Asian, Filipino, straight and lesbian. All are cultural workers and activists (actors, artists, etc.), some are academics (college teachers), some are community organizers, one is a nurse, one is involved in a biodynamic farming project. All are committed to radical social change; all have trained extensively with Augusto Boal.

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As to the common games, we incorporate the body of games and techniques developed by Boal, particularly those contained in Games for Actors and Non-Actors, as well as techniques developed by us over the years. We present training in basic Image Theater (currently we are doing a series of four Image Theater workshops that began in September and will finish in December), Forum Theater (starting in January), and the other techniques such as Cop-in-the-Head, Rainbow of Desire, and, every so often, Invisible Theater. Each of these techniques contains games, exercises and methodologies that overlap, but also contain games that are unique to each specific technique, and we use most of them. In addition, we are incorporating the theoretical dimension concerning the aesthetics of the oppressed, which Boal is currently developing. Most of all, we try to be flexible and adaptable, applying the various games and exercises in the most appropriate way in order to address the needs of each workshop or constituency, or to deal with specific situations as they arise.

Workshops are presented mostly in English, though a fair number have been in Spanish, and smaller numbers have been conducted in French or Tagalog (Filipino).

I hope this has answered some of your questions. If you need more information please feel free to contact me at toplab@toplab.org

Regards-

Bill Koehnlein, Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory, New York, toplab@toplab.org

end of answer--good luck with your thesis!

Thank you so very much for your detailed answer to my question! it has been very helpful and I think I will be able to use most of that information for my essay and thesis. i just have a couple more questions that i need answered if its not too much trouble:

Does TOPLAB have any records or interviews of the actors that took these workshops that I'm able to use to compare with the one that I am soon to do?
And if possible could you give me details or instructions on how you preform the specific gams amongst the actors/non-actors that participate in the TOPLAB?

thank you again for your help I really appreciate it!