Theatre van Deyssel | May 24th, 2024

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In the smallest theatre in Amsterdam, rehearsing for the revolution, a group of artists and researchers explore how performance can open multiple paths for imagining new worlds. 

Workshop participants were introduced to some of the techniques by Augusto Boal and The Milan Women’s Bookstore Cooperative, highlighting the stories that can dictate our actions in order to challenge and re-imagine them. 

In this event, scripts are referred to as internalised structures, behavioural patterns, values, and hierarchies that affect our learning possibilities and how we produce and reproduce them. 

Participants were encouraged to bring a story from their artistic or research practice that encapsulates the scripts they wish to challenge or re-imagine as the basis for scenes to explore, transform and rehearse anew. Through storytelling and games, participants playfully dissected these, examining their origins, and re-imagining their roles within them. 

Using these exercises as an entry point for thinking about performance’s ability to transform scripts, the group questioned what it means to “rehearse reality”. What does performance and witnessing teach us about social change? What can we [un]learn through the performance of stories and embodying text that isn’t our own? 

The Theatre of the Oppressed, pioneered by Brazillian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal, offers us tools to confront and deconstruct these scripts. By engaging in methods such as storytelling, re-enactment and repetition within participatory theatre, the workshop explores power dynamics, question societal norms, and envision alternatives. 

The Milan Women’s Bookstore Cooperative's practice of Affidamento facilitates the extension of what they call the radical politics of difference into ways of working together and into existing institutions and power structures, opening new political spaces for each other.