Snapshot
Surprise theatrics designed to confront power holders in contested political spaces or playfully intervene in public settings in order to disrupt norms and spread new political ideas.
Guerrilla theatre takes performance to the public sphere, confronting power holders in contested political spaces or playfully intervening in public settings in order to disrupt norms and spread new political ideas.
Guerrilla theatre could be considered a meta-tactic at the heart of the Beautiful Trouble project, encompassing a whole nest of related techniques and approaches for imaginatively and performatively intervening in political issues.
To dig into specific instances and approaches, check out:
Invisible theatre: The public staging of a realistic scene — say, a same-sex couple discriminated against in a restaurant — that poses an ethical dilemma and engages bystanders, who remain unaware they are part of a performance.
Electoral guerrilla theatre: By running for public office as a prank, you can sabotage a particularly ugly policy or candidate, popularize a radical idea, or challenge the limits of the electoral system itself.
Legislative theatre: Legislative theatre, a tool for proposing and enacting legislative and policy changes at any level of government, takes Augusto Boal’s interactive forum theatre exercises from the stage into the real world.
All of these public-facing approaches stem from Augusto Boal’s practice of Theatre of the Oppressed, which uses theatrical games and exercises in workshop settings to help groups of people explore collective struggles, analyze their history and present circumstances, and experiment with inventing new futures.
To learn about some specific Theatre of the Oppressed exercises, check out:
Image theatre: A theatre exercise in which participants form statues that represent an oppressive situation, followed by group reflection to better understand the situation and try out possible solutions.
Forum theatre: Forum theatre is a tool for exploring and rehearsing possible actions that people can take to transform their world. It’s often used both in preparation to taking action and in anti-oppression workshops.