Paul Dwyer

Making Bodies Talk in Forum Theatre.

Most Forum Theatre practice encourages as many ‘spect‐actors’ as possible to intervene directly on stage as part of the investigation of an oppressive social situation. Such practice is in line wit...Most Forum Theatre practice encourages as many ‘spect‐actors’ as possible to intervene directly on stage as part of the investigation of an oppressive social situation. Such practice is in line with Boals advice (in Games for actors and non‐actors) that ‘the keener the desire to take action, the more the spect‐actors hurry on to the stage’. While it is certainly understandable that jokers should seek to maintain interest by encouraging frequent interventions, there are risks attached to this strategy—particularly when the efforts to involve people on stage obscure the very important pedagogical function of all the talk that happens in a Forum Theatre session. Much of this talk is devoted to framing and evaluating what the intervening spect‐actors are attempting to embody. This article shows that the joker is able to exercise a high degree of control over what gets talked about in Forum Theatre and that such discursive regulation may be critical in shaping the ‘ideological contours’ of the event. The article concludes by suggesting that careful discourse analysis—insofar as it helps clarify the relation of a Forum Theatre event to the broader discourses which enable or constrain social change in daily life—provides a strong indicator of the events potential ‘socio‐political efficacy’ (as Baz Kershaw puts it in The politics of performance).

Users in uses of language: embodied identity in Youth Justice Conferencing

Abstract This paper offers a multimodal perspective on how identities are performed and negotiated in discourse, concentrating on the interaction of language and body language within a particular genre, Youth Justice Conferencing. These conferences operate as a diversionary form of sentencing in the juvenile justice system of New South Wales, Australia. Typically, they involve a young person who has committed an offense coming face to face with the victim of their crime, in the presence of family members, community workers, police, and a conference “convenor.” We conduct close, multimodal discourse analysis of the interactions that occur during the Rejoinder step in a particular conference, and investigate an “angry boy” identity enacted by two young persons at this point in the proceedings. This persona is very different to the forthcoming and remorseful persona idealized by conference designers. The role of body language in intermodally proposing and negotiating bonds within the conference is explored.

Theoria Negativa: Making Sense of Boal's Reading of Aristotle

Judging by the proliferation of recent works by and about Augusto Boal, as well as the number of course readers and critical anthologies in which his work is excerpted, his place in the canon of modern theatre theory seems assured.1 This critical consensus might almost seem too cosy given that Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques are usually regarded as a means to help effect progressive, perhaps radical social change. Thus, Douglas Paterson and Mark Weinberg (in an interview with Boal) puzzle over the fact that “people in established critical circles have not come after you. We would think there would be a ground-swell of resistance, because by taking on the Aristotelian structure, you are critiquing one of the fundamental grounds of the way western theatre is practiced” (“We Are All Theater” 18). Of course, the short answer to this puzzle is that it is no puzzle at all: Boal’s celebrated critique of Aristotle is itself firmly grounded in a theoretical position that is familiar to many “establ...

Reactions to Diversity: Using Theater to Teach Medical Students about Cultural Diversity:

Training medical students to understand the effects of culture and marginalization on health outcomes is important to the future health of increasingly diverse populations. We devised and evaluated a short training module on working with diversity to challenge students’ thinking about the role of both patient and practitioner culture in health outcomes. The workshop combined didactic teaching about culture as a social determinant of health using the cultural humility model, interactive exercises, and applied theater techniques. We evaluated changes in the students’ perceptions and attitudes over time using the Reaction to Diversity Inventory. There was initial significant improvement. Women and students with no past diversity training responded best. However, scores largely reverted to baseline over 12 months.