Forum theatre practice as lived activism

Abstract

This article seeks to show that activism for racialised, black and migrant women stems from their embodied lived experiences and the need for creating practices and spaces for these to manifest, be validated and expand on. Forum Theatre practice that includes the racialised body, collective reflection and reparative action can address the neo-colonial and patriarchal encounters, and places of oppression within mainstream activism. This article was discussed, written, and based on the workshops and reflexive conversations regarding the racialised women's experiences of the hostile environment policies. It reflects on the necessity to address and combat these policies through empowering the mind, body and spirit of the women activists in North East of England, part of an AHRC funded knowledge transfer project of using arts based interventions for civic engagement.

Introduction

What does activism mean to you?

Activism for me is very abstract. Activism is not separate from me it's not outside of me, it's part of me. Anya Cook- Socialist Educational Association National Executive Activism is also part of my faith. My faith pushes me to stand up for justice and to stop any oppression and injustice wherever I see it in whatever way I can. It is a requirement of my faith to take an active part in bringing positive change around me wherever I may be. Huma Omer – Community Volunteer

I would ideally like to openly take a stand against any injustices and bring awareness to the larger community. As a Hijabi woman, I like to prove that I have a voice for anything that I am passionate about. Safiena Arshad – Secretary Suffrage Sisters’ Alliance

It is about being active in challenging on political, social, financial, situational issues or concerns. It's about finding ways for your voice (or supporting others to have their voices) heard in order to bring change. Huma Omer – Community Volunteer

It means having the responsibility to challenge all forms of discrimination, inequality, racism, abuse, Islamophobia and aim to demand the change to improve the lives and services for all of humanity. Taj Khan - Grass Root Community Activist

Activism, as mentioned above in conversation with Suraiya, is abstract unless it is connected to her experience as a black migrant Muslim mother. Activist practices are embedded in structures that are culturally dominant, such as male, white and colonial (Ahmed, 2007; 2012; Ahmed; Hill Collins, 1990; Cornwall and Coelho, 2007; hooks, 1994; Lorde, 2007). It does not directly connect with the everyday activism of black and/or migrant women where we find ourselves invited into spaces as second-class citizens rather as knowing entities. Our knowledge is derived from our everyday lived practices of survival, resistance and advancement of our families, communities and ourselves (Erel and Reynolds, 2014; Kaptani et al., 2021; Reynolds, 2005). Much depends on who enters these spaces, on whose terms and with what ‘epistemic authority’ (Chandoke 2003 cited in Cornwall and Coelho, 2007). This epistemic authority is carried by a specific language of privilege. To respond to that exclusion, new methods of knowledge are needed. Forum Theatre applied in an inquiry space by the moving bodies of migrant, black and Muslim, mothers and young women foregrounds the specificity of their lived experiences. Our everyday lived experiences in public and social spaces, enacted in Forum theatre scenes, make visible the operation of power in the encounters with patriarchal and national structures, institutions and practices, that are also racialised. Furthermore, by getting into the positionalities of both oppressed and oppressor in the theatre space, migrant women could explore for themselves multiple repertoires and understandings, as well as seeing and experiencing the harms against them with some critical distance. Forum Theatre offers a space for practicing activism for black, migrant and Muslim women, to enact their experiences, analyse them and gain new insights about their own everyday life encounters. Forum theatre does not merely involve role play, rather it is a process of involving and activating the mind and body's desire for action and reflection through several workshops. Within them a group produces scenes, reflexive enactments and interventions with the aim of transferring this knowledge and experience into their communities to help activate resistance and change. In this project the group worked towards countering micro, structural and institutional racism.

The sociopolitical environment

Research, mass media and the lived experience of black and ethnic community organisations In the North East of England evidence a hostile environment culture, with racially minoritized groups being victim of hate crime, mosques targeted by the English Defence league (EDL) and other right wing groups (Holland, 2022).

These right-wing groups are fuelled by the hostile environment policies and practice such as blaming refugees and asylum seekers for various social problems, actioning harsh and unfair immigration policies (Kaptani et al., 2021). The hostile environment policies feed into the messages in social media including questions around ‘foreigners taking over British jobs’, ‘over load at GP surgeries’, ‘stress on the NHS’ and ‘full schools’ in urban areas. People seeking, safety, economic security and a future for their children by fleeing hostile and war torn countries, are blamed for high unemployment and rise of living costs – despite the local and national Government failure to address these deeply embedded social inequalities in the North East of England.

Institutional racism and discrimination is rife in places of work and as we saw at the time in the UK, the vote for Brexit was often a vote for stronger immigration policies. Ethnic minorities are marginalised and used as scapegoats for all the failings of national government decision makers. We see this evidenced in ‘dog whistle journalism’ that feeds the development of racism, discrimination, Islamophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia as a consequence of lack of knowledge, awareness and fear. This serves to distract the general public from the reality of government policies and ideologies. The hostile environment is the result of these interrelated factors. A message we hear a lot in the North East of England is that ‘migrants are a burden on the system’ and they are referred to as ‘free loaders and benefit spongers.’ It may seem easy to shift the blame onto the minorities, for creating a hostile environment, rather than to tackle it, says Grass Root Community Activist, Taj Khan. In 2021–2022 there were 1120 recorded hate crimes in the UK area of Newcastle, 70% of which were racially motivated.

The work of community activists in the North East serves to challenge the wider oppressive mechanisms of the state and social policy and our Forum Theatre project was instrumental in supporting and advancing this work.

Forum theatre as transformative practice

In this sociopolitical environment a Forum Theatre project part of an arts-based intervention funded by AHRC 2020–2022 and led by Umut Erel offered a space for migrant activists in the North East of England for collective learning and community action. This practice is based on Audre Lorde's (2007) concept that ‘The masters tools will not dismantle the masters house’. Forum Theatre process and practice offers new ways of generating and creating personal and social knowledge that is transformative and transformative action. This is a result of the following properties: the body in action, collective reflection for awareness and change, and focus on structural issues through an enacted personal experience. All these are processed through the group collectively rather than working individually, with one personal narrative.

`As was mentioned above activism becomes an unspecified abstract notion unless it connects to the whole being including the mind and body. The body in Forum Theatre is asked by the aesthetic form to inhabit the space with an agential capacity and to transform it through its actions, thus also transforming its encounters in the space. The body, when viewed as a subject, creates actions, and when viewed as an object is observed to produce an understanding of these actions and consequently transform them through its deliberations. `The corporeality of the aesthetic expression opens up other possibilities in the racialised body in terms of the way it is experienced.

As one group member in the film we made of our training and workshops shared.

Forum Theatre is the theatre about the oppressed and the oppressor that is something I grappled most of the time growing up as a migrant woman in the Northeast of England especially with the racial tensions and especially when I was a teenager. I realised that it was really having an effect in changing the way I saw myself because by embodying what the oppressor looks like and what it is like to be the oppressed, even by doing these visual things you start understand these things in your body, and I think it felt like working with the body to kind of retell the narrative, retell the story and move these things into the present as you are dealing with it now. (Film extract, 0:28–1:20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = ydsuGdJcyR0&t = 10 s).

We used Image Theatre that foregrounds proximities of bodies in space depicting social encounters. In this technique, the person whose experience is being processed ‘sculpts’ bodies in various postures and gestural expressions. In this context, bodies are placed at different proximities in the space to create an image of a real situation (Boal, 1995). Image Theatre as a method uses the body to generate insights concerning power relations and to encourage reflections through the group's different readings and interpretations. Images are important as they depict the visual, physical, spatial and interpersonal aspects of everyday encounters in space, which are not yet formulated consciously and thus cannot be expressed verbally. Moreover, verbal communication does not feel ‘safe’ for people who do not have linguistic confidence, feel that they do not own the spaces they inhabit, or do not want to take the risk of confronting cultural and group normativities as of yet (Vacchelli, 2021). Images enable spectactors to re/present, ‘show’ and communicate their lived experiences, as well as to be recognised by those who look at and share the images with. The Images creates the energy needed for the articulation of words, feelings and ideas. It is used as a technique for group members to reflect on and interpret the different meanings of the image. The images in Theatre of the Oppressed constitute a language through the body that speaks the co-creators’ unverbalised thoughts. In the context of exploring interactions within the hostile environment Image work is used as a focal point to gain insight on the operations of oppresive situations . This connects with Boal's (1995: 36) concept of “osmosis” in the aesthetic practice of Forum Theatre, where every day lived experiences in public, institutional and private spaces, in which society's political values are embedded, can reveal the mechanisms of opression. While these are experienced and become visible in the workshop space simultaneously this collective practice enhances the body's, mind's and spirit's capacities and resources for resisting, transforming and repairing from oppression.

One of the group members shared in the film about the ‘123 exercise’ that is about working in pairs and counting from one to three between themselves and repeating the numbers sequence among them few times till they replace each number with a gesture and sound leading to a gestures and sounds-based interaction. She shared:

123 is just one two three, but the more you do it the more you realise that you can change your tone of voice you can change how you feel just using these limited numbers. That for me was quite powerful. Powerful because I just I have a limited vocabulary. It empowers you to respond in certain scenarios. (extract from project's film, 1:15–1:38)

However, the ascription of ‘limited vocabulary’ here expresses how she feels, as her command of English vocabulary is excellent. It may be connected to her black and migrant ascriptions of ‘non-ability’ in knowing as will be explored below. Nonetheless, this was an empowering experience that one can act and change within a short exercise by using the moving body and sounds, and come to the realisation of ‘I can’.

Moreover, in Forum Theatre practice racialised women are experiencing themselves as knowers rather than bodies of pain or heroic figures. This is achieved through a process and practice of working together to reveal what kind of practices, interactions and encounters create exclusion (Tuck and Yang 2014). The group needed to be able to find a space to speak up, as many times black and migrant women do not feel they are able to do this, because of fear. As Suraiya highlighted the importance for given a chance to change the oppressive situations and gain an understanding ‘of why people do what they do’ (see project film, 2:12–2:38). In the space of Forum Theatre, we came to understand that space is inhabited through movements, and between bodies. The movements that are made also tell us a lot about these spaces and their discourses. Furthermore, such spaces, as they are imbalanced in terms of power dynamics, create tensions in the bodies of those who are racialised. They negate black and migrant bodies’ existence by straining and shrinking their bodies and by refusing to include their stories, hence their lived experiences (Kaptani, 2023).

Ways of moving and seeing

In our Forum Theatre practice black and migrant women ‘are able to practise theatrical forms in which, by stages, he [she] frees himself [herself] from his [her] condition of spectator and takes on that of actor, in which he [she] ceases to be an object and becomes a subject, is changed from witness into protagonist’ (1985, p. 125). This echoes Freire's (1972) concept, embraced by hooks (1994), of recreating the world as subjects, and as such we have to start from our position as subjects; otherwise, we will always be objects. Theatre practice proposes ways of looking at oneself. As Boal (1995, p. 13) states, ‘Theatre… is this capacity, this human property, which allows man (woman) to observe him/herself in action, in activity’. This way of looking is part of a collaborative process of creation, whilst one is also looking at herself through her own and others’ actions, hence creating a dialogical process of meaning-making (Kaptani and Yuval-Davis, 2008). In this dialogical aesthetic process, transformation becomes possible (Kaptani, 2023). Boal's notion of transformation refers to the aesthetic space where ‘all actions gain new properties. Forum theatre interventions are addressing not only behavioural but structural issues and every intervention offers an analytical process and advances knowledge and action (Praxis). As all witness the property and validation of ‘I can’.

In Forum Theatre practice the moving body crosses the borders from spectator to spectactor leading to agency rather than objectification. As Arendt (1958, p. 178) mentions, to act is to start something from the beginning, something that was not there before. This can be restorative regarding the racialised and gendered experiences of static objectification, as bodies can move and transform (Kaptani, 2023). Hence, this topo-somatic practice opens up an agential space, where the body can move, resist and repair (ibid). The body is not only subordinated, marked by and subjected to oppressions, but is also viewed as something with ‘energy, wit, intelligence, skill, the capacity for humour and humanity’ (Orkin, 1991, p. 226). Boal (1995) refers to the mechanisation of the body subjected to a repetition of movements, postures and gestures, which limit its possibilities, and in response, uses games to ‘demechanise’ it. He defines this process as a ‘muscular alienation’ that creates a ‘social body’ where particular repetitive professional, social and hegemonic practices supress the body's intelligence. As Boal (1995, p. 127) states: ‘There is a great number of exercises designed with the objective of making each person aware of his/her own body, of his/her bodily possibilities, and of deformations suffered’. Furthermore, Boal observed through years of practice in theatre making and social change that the body's intentionality is also shaped by place (Boal, 1992, p. 73). Specifically, Boal's (1995) games and Image Theatre focus on the body's gestures and movements, as a means of generating knowledge and action . As Boal (1992, in Auslander, 2002, p. 128) states: ‘It is through the body and its habits that those mechanisms can be exposed’.

This links with Butler's (1988) work on gender identity construction and Ngo's (2016) work on habituated movements in whiteness. The latter highlights how the body both normalises and sediments gendered and racialised performances, which are neither conscious nor pre-reflexive. These reflections link to hooks’ (1994) and Fanon's (1952) call for reclaiming an embodiment to deconstruct behaviours and interactions of oppression, as well as to return to the colonised body as a site for recreating the self. The immersive body can dishabituate oppressive patterns and re-emerge within this resistive aesthetic practice of knowledge production.

As a cocreator activist shared: ’In my childhood I learnt to cover my feelings to respect others and I put others first. I wish I had discovered this before, if I have feelings I do not need to hide my feeling so long as I can express and feel ourselves as we are, this practice gave me big happiness' (reflections, March 2021).

This practice offers a reparative space for forming a decolonial feminist methodology. In Forum Theatre, it is recognised that this oppression is not inevitable and that the body is fuelled by the desire of ‘not anymore’ and to step into the ‘not yet’ to actualise it. As Tuck and Yang (2014, p. 417) state: ‘Rooted in possibilities gone but not foreclosed, “the not yet, and at times, the not anymore” desire refuses the master narrative that colonization was inevitable and has a monopoly on the future’. The community leaders who took part in the training were colonised, overanalysed, objectified, rejected, interiorised and abused bodies, as they had been oppressed and seen as a problem (Du Bois, 1994; Tuck, 2009). This underscores the reflection by Suraiya, that activism isn’t abstract but part of herself, part of her body and whole being.

Agentic bodies – decolonial bodies in praxis

At the same time, the body possesses desires, the ability to move, intelligence, and liveliness. In a feminist and decolonial practice, it is important to go beyond the ‘problem’ and invite the opportunity for bodies to move, reflect, create, show their wit, play, imagine and change (Kaptani, 2021). In the workshops the migrant women who participated experienced the enhancement of their knowledge-making and creative capacities by connecting to a holistic and humanising mode of making knowledge together. While usually their bodies were attached to damage or heroism (Hill Colins, 1990; Ng, 2018; Reynolds, 1997; Tuck, 2009), the centring of the moving body in the aesthetic space as a creator of knowledge and change offered a novel approach to making meaning and recreating the self. This practice humanises oppressed groups by transcending the patriarchal and colonising binaries of body and mind, theory and practice, rational and corporeal, thus acting as a reparative process.

The transformation is inevitable as this resistive practice foregrounds the black, female, Muslim and migrant body that has been omitted as a carrier of knowledge within the White male and Eurocentric frame of extraction and validation replaying in activism spaces and practices (Ahmed, 2012; hooks, 1994; Kaptani, 2023; Salami, 2020; Zempi and Chakraborti, 2015). It belongs to the negative other of the hierarchy and binary of male white as the subject of a universal knowledge and black, racialised female as the local and cultural object. Through the specific process of Forum Theatre, the racialised body applies intelligence, stored experience and willingness for change through image work and interventions as it becomes the foci of reflection and action. This was shared in the short film from the civic engagement workshop where one of the group members mentioned how using the body to retell the narratives of racial tension in North East of England facilitated them to gain an understanding of their subjugations and oppressions and actively intervene, as described above.

For example, in this project, following sessions of theatre games and Image work, the participants created short scenes based on their lived experiences of exclusion. The scenes were performed and then opened up to interventions from other people in the group. The bodies of the new participants who replaced that of the ‘oppressed’ were physically moved to take centre stage via the emotions triggered/evoked by the unjust situation portrayed in a scene.

The participants’ bodies transform to spectactors’ bodies here as they are crossing positional ‘borders’ from being audience members (witnessing an action) to becoming actors (taking action) and determining (changing) the course of action in the depicted scenario, thus offering possibilities to other women to reflect and take new action.

Obviously, these movement for crossing borders was not possible to materialise on an online space. There were challenges of working online which generated a new founded online practice. Moving from the audience space to that of the spectactor was not available online and we had to acknowledge this limitation. We worked more with gestures than movements and encouraged to ‘break the screen’ through leaving the chair, moving into the room and experiment of different ways to relate to the screen. Being in break out rooms created an intimacy even though mediated by the screen and not physically being there (Rifkin and Kaptani, 2022).

Within this online Forum Theatre practice one of Suraiya's scene took place on the bus as she describes below.

The bus scene

A single mother is wearing the hijab and tries to get on the bus and asks for a ticket the bus driver insists that he cannot hear her.

I felt alone, like I had no one on my side. I stood there (while explaining to the bus driver) wishing someone would speak on my behalf. My thoughts also turned to my responsibilities and a fleeting one about just giving up on one thing because nothing seemed worth the hassle.

The group intervened with different tactics from being playful ‘Do you want a girlfriend that's why you ask me to see my face? Or empathetic ‘Did you have a bad day? to asking for respect. ‘Please I’m late for my studies and just finished my work, show some compassion and respect’

Below is Suraiya's written description on some of the interventions and how she felt.

The Antagonist (the bus driver) was apologetic but felt to be insincere, they claimed they had issues of illness and death in family and said they were overworked and underpaid. They were willing to issue an apology only because they thought their job was on the line but also took on board that they will have to change their stance on viewing different people equally but they made excuses for their discriminatory behaviour.

The Protagonist (female with head and face covered for religious reasons) was hurt, humiliated and harassed. She seemed to have lost faith in people as no one stepped forward to correct the driver's behaviour. She is a single mother, studying at University and working nights cleaning as she cannot work during days as a student so she didn’t need this hassle and she was delayed on the day. She felt she couldn’t change everyone's viewpoint but she thought if a person was fined every time, they were racist to another, people will start realising it was harmful behaviour and maybe it can be eradicated.

While as seen above Suraiya's Muslim gendered body was pushed out, contained, and regulated in the Forum Theatre exercises and games - the subject starts feeling within the body, gaining a sense of its spatiality, the imposed restrictions and habitual gestures. Brian Fay (1987, in Pillow, 1997, p. 360) points out that ‘oppression leaves its traces not just in people's minds, but in their muscles and skeletons as well’. Reflecting on the exercises, habituated modes of existence are many times determined by patriarchal and cultural imperatives and codes of communication (Alcoff, 2006; Butler, 1988; Ngo, 2017; Raynor, 2017; Yancy, 2014). In the workshops, these habituations surfaced and became visible when the bodies performed new actions. This links with Adjin-Tettey et al.'s (2008, p. 26) belief that: ‘by pressing our female bodies physically into the service of anti-subordination, we have made some gesture against the silencing and concealment of women's trauma’. In addition, Boal's (2002/1992) exercises of re-sensitising the body while connecting with the colonised body in a different way. The body in this topo-somatic practice goes through a reparative process as it fosters consciousness of how ‘the damage is done when the minority subject is pressured into performing particular accepted roles of marked difference in order to be recognized’ (Mayor, 2012, p. 3). As Suraiya generates insights on Forum Theatre practice ‘Wearing a hijab, may feel restrictive at times but not when it comes to Theatre, I have renewed self-assurance. If I am affronted by anything too, I am able to look at the bigger picture and take many other factors into consideration’.

The examples of racism and discrimination documented above are worked with in Forum Theatre, they are processed and in the space of Forum Theatre the protagonist is supported by other group members who intervene or offer interventions that might make a difference, that might help change the story, or the antagonists actions. For Frances Rifkin (Utopia) Forum Theatre practitioner states:

This work is powerful because what we can do in the theatre space, can support what we do in the real. In the theatre space we are always supported - in Forum Theatre, there is always someone who will support, who will jump in to the scene, we are never left on our own to face things.

Another key theme in our follow up discussions is the power of the community-based interventions and by this we mean the way that the group think collectively; the solutions are collective not individual. In this way the Forum Theatre sessions enabled group members to feel that they are not alone with the issues and the hurt, humiliation and pain caused. The Forum Theatre sessions facilitated the development of confidence, strength and mutual support and recognition, in conditions of dire racism and discrimination.

The group spoke about how working together in the scene had made them feel braver in real life situations, as well as the important work achieved in processing experiences of racism in the hostile environment, and developing skills and knowledge that can be shared with community members, taking this forward into life and work. Suraiya makes the following point:

The confidence that we picked up from our sessions have been uplifting to say the least. We now know it is all right to speak up when you are wronged or you witness discrimination. We now know that we have the power to change the outcome of any uncomfortable situation. The best part is understanding that the Antagonist too may have issues was an eye opener. You understand that no one is born cruel, cruelty is learned by circumstances.

The group agreed that it is important to use these methods which foreground the intersectional body as site of knowledge and reparative action and to take the FT training into their communities. Creating resistive knowledge spaces for analysis and action among racialised and migrant women to validate and enhance their skills for agency, to speak up on their own terms through their lived in- bodied experiences. A space where ‘I can’ is articulated through rehearsing different ways of being and expressing actions and for making visible and experience the change, the not yet.

These topo-somatic interventions revealed the need for a re-emergence of racialised and migrant women as knowledge makers and recreators of themselves in spaces of inquiry. This can be achieved by approaching inquiry as the creation of a resistive knowledge experience among all those involved. This is an experience of lived knowledge that creates reparative spaces and intersubjective encounters strengthening new self-definitions. This is encapsulated in Boal's (2003, p. 352) suggestion that to restore humanity is to restore the capacity of the oppressed for action, as the “spectator” (the one who looks at the oppressed) brands them as less than human.