Change In Theatre

Theatre can be a powerful tool to create social change. To the audience witnessing theatre, it is a piece of art that can evoke a feeling or provide a message that can cause action. For the actors, the effect can be even more profound as they are forced to empathize with their characters in order to portray them accurately. In the case of improv, perhaps the most central focus of this course, theatre becomes a way to merge the audience with the actors: it forces both into a position of introspection that yields an outward action. The ability of improv to create this interaction is why it can be used so effectively to initiate social change—people are forced to examine themselves. One of the most subtle and actionable problems that strikes
The problem lies in people’s lack of understanding and unawareness of the struggle that foreigners face in this country. This is why improv, especially the kind exemplified in “Theatre of the Oppressed” would help engage the issue. The first step in engaging this issue through theatre would be to gather a group of students, some foreign exchange, some American, and discuss the issue; perhaps hear some applicable experiences from the foreign exchange students, and have the American students discuss the issues: “it will be the local people themselves who will be expressing themselves through this Forum Theatre” (Boal 22). Next, we could practice some role-swapping: create a scenario where the Americans are the foreigners, and have the foreign exchange students treat the Americans in the way that they feel they are often treated. After having the actors fully engage the issue, we could come up with some sort of scene to be played out in public. While the scene would ideally be created by the group, it would need to involve something that drew attention and would cause reactions from
It focused on “creating new dynamic art forms that positively reflect black life,” for the purpose of creating a “political and artistic influence” (Austin 263). The movement created an outlet for the oppressed to express their opinions; it gave a voice to those who had none, and allowed for a way to portray black life in a better way than it had been. The Black Arts movement attempted to combat the “antiblack racism in the 1960s and ‘70s [that] continued to reference…antique visual, aural, and affective stereotypes” (Sell