Forum theater is the central method in Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, based on Paulo Freire's consciousness-raising and liberating pedagogy as critical practice for critical theory.

• Building statues
• Generative topics
• Suggesting forum topics
• Deciding on and developing scenes
• Rehearsing scenes and consolidating the sequence
• Deepening and securing characters in exercises
• Forum has always been a round table discussion

Unfortunately, fixed seating turns many theaters into lecture halls, and whenever everyone is supposed to listen to one person, all the chairs in the room are automatically arranged in rows, like in a movie theater.

I can't talk to the backs of people's heads. Chairs in a circle make some people anxious: You see everyone, everyone sees you.

One of my most memorable experiences: In the Senate Hall of the Bavarian State Parliament, we built the stage on the side wall for a forum theater evening, and the state parliament staff began to photograph and take notes on our setup: They had never experienced this before, and at first they didn't want to allow it, but now they want to try it occasionally for other events. During the subsequent renovation of the plenary hall, however, the frontal arrangement, supposedly designed for fire safety, prevailed once again.

Theater in the forum can bring our topics into conversation: Nothing for solo performers!

They always arise anew from the generative themes of the participants, and often in response to a simple question:

• What annoyed you most recently?
• Where do you feel most under pressure?
• What is a typical attitude of “being under pressure” for you?

if we add a counterpart, perhaps in a mechanical reaction of continuous repetition.

To do this, we sometimes need clues from the Joker (or, beforehand, information from the person setting up the scene) about the cultural horizons of thought and language in which the situation arose: age, role, bonds, prohibitions, etc.

Forum theater is the central method in the Theater of the Oppressed, developed by Augusto Boal in Rio de Janeiro, in exile in many countries in southern americas and europe. It presents the audience with a scene that ends badly and unsatisfactorily. A joker character encourages the audience to bring these scenes to a better ending through dialogue.

In forum theater, questions are raised primarily through exaggerated “model scenes”. The models are usually developed in open workshops from the generative themes of the participants.

Viewers can step into the scenes being portrayed and replace the actors playing the weak, discriminated, or disadvantaged.

This is about answering questions such as: What would I do in the situation being acted out? How can we change the scenes through our ideas and actions? Forum theater as (aesthetic) training for future action in explosive conflict situations.

With forum theater, any problem posed by the participants—voiced and visualized by them—can be changed by the participants themselves through the actions of others and the identifying actions of the audience.

In Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, generative themes are the themes of the learners and participants in the collaborative process that provide clues to the background of their life situations and interests.

Over the years, while leading hundreds of workshops on forum theater based on Augusto Boal's methods with a wide variety of groups, from school classes to pastors and highschool-techers, I developed my own collection:

Working on taboo – my rule of thumb arose from practical experience with groups: Every group needs a warm-up and familiarization phase, during which I alternate between the first types of work on expression, body awareness, and working with partners in pairs, threes, and fives, alternating with the whole group (which, in good rooms, could sometimes number up to 40), and create a relaxed atmosphere.

But at some point, we need topics of oppression that should be changed, and there were phases when no one wanted to bring up a topic. Too little trust or too little experience?

If the group consisted of professionally trained social workers, youth leaders, teachers and teaching nurses, psychotherapists, etc., who wanted to work as theater instructors themselves, I revealed to them the secret catalog of taboos as a guide, which not all other short-term participants needed to know:

Theater only becomes interesting when it brings society's taboos to the stage in a dilemma:

The rule of thumb is Work on the taboo, here more on the social background: And please: TABOO!

In palmistry, the thumb represents the self, and in my rule of thumb, it represents sexuality. No places to learn, no nice language, but targeted marketing and massive personal destruction through incentives, morals, and guilt are the clearest signs.

The index finger is used for you; in my rule of thumb, it stands for money, which determines our relationships. From sayings such as “money ruins friendships” and “you don't talk about money, you have money” to questions about wealth and class differences and the mental prohibition of the word “capitalism,” it is shrouded in secrecy and could very well reveal our relationships.

The middle finger is associated with the topic of religion or the meaning of life. Either the ready-made package of a denomination or the do-it-yourself version of atheism and free thinking; baptism, initiation, wedding rites, and funerals included or not… an open conversation beyond the vocabulary of pastors is hardly possible.

The ring finger is associated with long-term relationships, and in my work with the topics of illness, death, and farewell, i.e., the disturbances involved. Above all, grief, the permissibility of deep feelings, and their social expression are so hindered that funerals and farewells very often get stuck in awkward formalities.

The little finger takes care of the remaining topics of deviant behavior: being different. Lesbian or gay, disabled or colored, of a different faith or unsuitable for society, all outsiders as well as celebrities included. The fear of the unknown remains speechless and aggressive, treated superficially in jokes and insinuations.

There is a lack of language to address them accurately, while at the same time there is a chattiness of distraction. Paulo Freire uses the terms ‘myths’ and ‘culture of silence’:

We always have good reasons not to talk about it. If we want to anyway, it doesn't work: we stray from the topic, become restless, need to smoke… If we suddenly become tired, yawn, get headaches—and suddenly don't know what we wanted to say anymore—then our inner police have done their job well.

It's good to know a lot about them, but it's as pointless as armed combat against armored vehicles, like the military against terrorism, to want to fight them with force. Because they are fed by our own fear, we can only outsmart them gently and according to their own principles, with nonviolent methods and intelligence.

Translated from https://zukunftswerkstatt-moderieren.blogspot.com/2021/01/forumtheater-aus-den-themen-der.html and die_arbeit_am_tabu

More at https://fritzletsch.wordpress.com/2016/10/03/forumtheater-in-bildersprache