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ART AND CONFLICT
Theatre Of The Oppressed: A Community Dialogue Case Study
The arts are a unique and powerful tool for exploring and resolving issues arising from
conflict, for promoting healing, building relationships between divided people and fostering
positive individual and social change. Arts can build peace in a number of ways by providing
a medium through which people can articulate experience they might not otherwise be able
to adequately verbalise. Arts can provide a creative medium through which thought, feeling,
experience, perception and need may be channelled. It is a uniquely powerful way of
sharing one human to another and potently effective at humanising the stories of others,
even the “enemy”, for us. It enables the sharing of grief, loss, frustration, a sense of
injustice, a hunger for change in a creative and unifying way.
According to Michael Shank (Strategic Arts Based Peace Building: Shank and Schirch 2008);
“Since the peace building field requires tools that are as diverse and complicated as the
human spirit, the arts emerge as a local ally. The task for peace building practitioners,
is to find ways of incorporating the arts into the work of peace building and to create a
space where people in conflict can express themselves, heal and reconcile themselves
through the arts.”
Peace building is about enabling people to understand and manage conflict and division in a
manner that leads to justice, equality and inclusion for all without recourse to violence or
coercion. It is about social change, transforming people’s perception of the world around
them, their own identity, and their relationships with others. It is about understanding that
our individual welfare rests with our common welfare. The arts can help to transform
people’s worldviews, their understanding of self and other and the reality of the shared
issues and needs that underlie most conflicts. When we are locked within conflict, whether
interpersonal or society wide, problems seem insurmountable and all encompassing.
Discomfort with conflict often stems from the painful awareness or refusal to acknowledge
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that there are multiple truths and that right/wrong and good/bad may be fuzzy categories
dependent on the eye of the beholder.
Art can frame contentious issues and relationships in a way that offers new perspectives
and possibilities of transformation; acting like a prism that allows us to view the world
through a new lens. Rather than solving problems by negotiating the best solution, the arts
can offer a new framework within which to for interpret old problems. The artistic
experience maintains the powerful potential to transform people’s understanding of self in
relation to other. When combined with peace building training it can equip people with the
tools and understanding to live powerful, fulfilling and peaceful lives that add to all those
they meet.
One of the most popular art forms in peace building is drama deployed through community
based theatre. Drama provides the potential to deepen understanding of community
relations issues through replaying and demonstrating events and attitudes from different
perspectives and highlighting possibilities of resolution and mechanisms for positive change.
Drama methods have been used for many decades in a wide range of socio-political, cultural
and religious contexts in more than 100 countries worldwide. In Europe, community-based
theatre has become part of the regular cultural-political landscape in countries such as
Austria, England, France, Germany, Norway, Spain and Portugal, while in Northern Ireland,
both Forum Theatre and Playback Theatre have been employed.
Background to the Project
Community Dialogue has long been aware that many people fear, or are suspicious of,
dialogue. Our experience of delivering our ‘Steps into Dialogue’ programme led to a Pilot
Project of alternative dialogue methodologies which eventually developed into a Creative
Dialogues Toolbox. This was a radical revamp of our traditional challenging dialogue process
as a toolbox of innovative, exciting and accessible alternative and compatible
methodologies. We have found that this new ‘toolbox’ approach renders our dialogues
more immediately appealing and accessible to potential users who are suspicious of
dialogue, or who lack confidence in themselves.
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Examples of the Creative Dialogues Toolbox approach included:

Creative Writing, Song Writing and Poetry Dialogues

Graffiti, Murals and Symbolism and Cartoon Dialogues incorporating artwork by
internationally renowned artists donated to Community Dialogue by Parents Circle
Family Forum

Drama, Human Sculpture and Role Playing Dialogues in association with Blue Eagle
Productions and Hector Aristizabal

Troubled Readings Dialogues incorporating passages from stories read by authors
Theatre of the Oppressed and Dialogue
In June 2012, Community Dialogue successfully received funding from Belfast City Council
Good Relations Fund to deliver a series of pilot workshops incorporating a drama technique
known as Theatre of the Oppressed combined with our dialogue technique. This was an
innovative process, which enabling participants to explore and articulate their experience,
perception and needs.
Community Dialogue worked in partnership with a locally based theatre group called
Theatre Lab. Theatre Lab is a partnership between Partisan Productions and a community
development organisation (Ballynafeigh Community Development Association). It utilizes
applied theatre techniques to explore issues identified as important to communities across
Northern Ireland.
One format that Theatre Lab use regularly is Forum theatre, a Theatre of the Oppressed
methodology which actively engages the audience in resolving the issues or problems they
raise and explore through the drama. The methodology creates a critical distance for
participants enabling them to evolve a different perspective on contentious issues and allow
space for the formulation alternative responses.
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Explanation of the methodologies
Dialogue is a process involving active listening as well as talking. It implies accepting and
respecting the views of others and trying to understand where they are coming from.
Diversity and division are openly addressed in this process.
The dialogue process enables participants to share their experience, to be heard, to be
accepted and to be valued despite the diversity of backgrounds present. The process also
leads participants to consider how to live together in a diverse and divided society and how
to accommodate and celebrate difference.
Dialogue deepens understanding of our own, and each other’s positions, often leading to
shared understanding and an enhancement of our ability to make informed decisions.
It does this by shifting the focus from the stated positions that we so often argue over to the
needs (often shared), which underlie them. We believe that if groups understand each other
more deeply they would be better able to make informed decisions about starting,
continuing or ending conflict. If they stepped into the world of another group and saw how
these others came to hold their positions, feel their emotions and chose their values then,
although the groups often remained opposed to each other, they were less likely to engage
in violence. Some of the issues discussed could be highly emotive, but through the dialogue
process people learnt more about the issues, dealt with them in a less emotive way, and
slowly began to hear why other groups held the positions they did.
Theatre of the Oppressed describes a theatrical form that the Brazilian theatre practitioner
Augusto Boal first developed in the 1960s, initially in Brazil. Boal was influenced by the
work of the educator and theorist Paolo Freire.
Once scenes are developed which illustrate moments of oppression or conflict, these are
presented to an audience who become "spectators" who are invited to take the place of a
character to explore, show, analyse and transform the reality in which they are living – this
is Forum Theatre.
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“All our senses, our perception of reality, and our capacity of feeling and
reasoning, tend to become mechanical by every day repetition. We tend to become
less creative, accepting reality as it is, instead of transforming it. Games of the
Oppressed is a system of games that help us to “feel what we touch”," to listen to
what we hear”," to see what we look at", “to stimulate all senses", and “to
understand what we say and hear".
Augusto Boal, Rio de Janeiro 2004
This methodology has been used in countries all over the world very successfully but is a
relatively new approach in Northern Ireland.
Project Participants
Six groups agreed to take part in the project. These were a mixture of local women’s groups,
both Catholic and Protestant, a men’s group from a Protestant community, and a group of
refugees and asylum seekers.
Two of the groups were recruited in conjunction with the Project Worker involved in the
Learning Through Engagement Project managed by LINC/CCWA. The other groups, including
the refugees and asylum seekers had previously been involved in a series of dialogues with
Community Dialogue
The time factor proved problematic at times as ideally each session required a full day to
fully explore the issues but because of childcare needs and other factors, each group was
worked with separately over a period of six two hour sessions.
The starting point used games and exercises to help participants to use their bodies and all
their senses in ways that are not everyday but became integral to sharing personal
experiences and creating theatre from those experiences. Despite the time limitations, the
participants became enthusiastically involved and the games provided a sense of fun that
enabled them to give themselves permission to relax their inhibitions and become more
expressive. This provided a safe space for them to enter a process of articulating the various
concerns or issues that faced themselves or their communities.
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That articulation was initially nonverbal but eventually developed into a balance between
physical activities and discussion.
All the sessions took place within each group’s local community. In the case of the refugees
and asylum seekers, they met at the Northern Ireland Community for Refugees and Asylum
Seekers building. This enabled them to feel more comfortable by being based in familiar
territory.
Through the Forum Theatre, the groups identified a wide range of examples of oppression.
For example, the refugees and asylum seekers identified a scenario where bureaucracy
provides a barrier to accessing services such as opening a bank account. Various scenarios
were acted out by the other members of the group to try and deal with that bureaucracy. In
the dialogue, many felt that this particular scenario could be used as a tool to raise
awareness with other refugees and asylum seekers that they too have rights and should be
able to assert those rights when necessary.
Another example was where one of the women’s groups identified bullying in the
workplace. This involved a supervisor upsetting a cleaning woman by insisting that she carry
out work that was not her responsibility. Again various scenarios were acted out and
resulted in a number of ways of dealing with the problem. The drama then provided the
basis for a fruitful and stimulating dialogue on the issue of powerlessness in the workplace
and the role of women within wider society.
Hector Aristizabal
Hector Aristizabal is a theatre practitioner from Colombia who has used his theatre skills to
transform communities all over the world. He was invited by the Playhouse Community Arts
Centre in Derry/Londonderry to carry out a residency. Community Dialogue has very strong
links with the Playhouse and as a result of those links Hector was invited to Belfast to give a
one day workshop on Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to some of the participants who
were involved in the pilot project.
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Hector founded ImaginAction to help people tap the transformative power of theatre in
programmes throughout the U.S., Latin America, Europe and around the world as far afield
as Afghanistan, India and Palestine for community building and reconciliation, strategizing
and individual healing and liberation.
He was recently honoured with the prestigious Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political
Theatre.
The participants felt inspired by his input and were keen to work with him again. Hector
returned to Belfast 6 months later, this time to stay for a month and provide more in-depth
work.
For over a month he worked with two main groups, the men’s group from Tiger’s Bay, a
Protestant/Unionist/Loyalist estate in North Belfast and a women’s group from Lenadoon, a
Nationalist/Republican estate in West Belfast.
Community Dialogue had facilitated a series of preparatory dialogue sessions separately
with both groups in advance of their engagement with Hector Aristizabal. The two groups
then met with each other on a number of occasions over that month. The women had
written a song when working with Community Dialogue, “One Small Step”, which reflected
their lives. This provided a bridge between the voices of the women, articulated through the
song, the issues raised by the men and the ideas jointly developed through the drama
process. The song was eventually used as the basis for the drama which was performed as
Forum Theatre to the local community in Tigers Bay.
The Forum Theatre process enhanced dialogue following the performance in the Tigers Bay
community as the scenarios explored experiences and issues shared by performers and
audience alike including drugs, lone parenting, violence and deprivation. The Forum Theatre
performance enabled initially reticent performers and audience to explore and express
feelings, experiences, perceptions and needs, in a creative manner that generated a sense
of common humanity and shared understanding among people who have traditionally been
divided by years of conflict.
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Conclusion
“Once we start doing the work of truly knowing each other’s stories and each
other’s human struggles we notice how similar our stories are, we humanize the
other and in that way humanizes ourselves through theatre.”
Hector Aristizabal
The combination of drama and dialogue utilised by this project helped to create a safe space
where individuals could explore difficult and contentious issues, build trust between them
and examine the possibilities for reconciliation. By empowering individuals to express their
own experiences of conflict in a critical, non-threatening way, dialogue about alternatives
became possible and channels for change become more apparent.
The experience of Theatre of the Oppressed for Community Dialogue was both rewarding
and enriching. It illustrated how community theatre can become a vital tool in enhancing
the process of dialogue.
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