Mutant Media Forum Theatre

Timescale Summer 2007 -Training date June 9th Finsbury Park ,London -

Overview:

The Mutant Media Freak Show is a banner name to cover a wide series of vaguely related activities happening in 2007. The themes for Mutant Media Freak Show events are Underground media, Anti-nuclear art activism, and pro-change “Mutate and Survive” ideas and Freak culture in general.

There is an emerging upsurge of performance based art-activism. Let's get even better at doing this so we can communicate to as wide an audience as possible. We want to put together training and a few pilot shows using forum theatre techniques. This will involve events like, Big Green Gathering and Climate Camp. After these summer activities some people involved would like to take the show into radical social spaces.

Theme 1 – Sustainable Energy and Nuclear as a answer?

We face energy problems shared by our entire society. We all have an interest in talking about it seriously and sorting it out. However we seem to be unable to break the silence and move beyond reading depressing articles in the newspapers. A good example is climate change. We need to avoid the situation where people change their views from “There's no conclusive proof it's happening.” to “It looks like we are too late to do anything about it.”

Theme 2 - Mainstream Media and Climate Change

Is mainstream media the best way of communicating the problems and possible solutions we face. How will mainstream media deal with the energy crisis? Are there alternatives?

Forum Theatre Techniques

Pete and Becky from group Theatre Active will be co-ordinating the training. Theatre Active have been delivering Forum theatre in schools for over 10 years.

One good way of breaking inertia faced when dealing with big problems is to start having conversations in bigger groups. Forum Theatre is one way of doing this. The model we propose to use this summer is based on the work of Augusto Boal.

The model is thus. Four actors act out a short theatre piece in front of an audience. After the action stops a facilitator steps in and the audience is broken up into 4 groups, each group is assigned a character. The actors then spend some time with their group and share background information and their objectives. They then ask their group now known as their “Brain” how they should proceed, the actors cannot make up a single thing they will only do and say what their group now tell them to, always referring back to their objectives as the main aim is for the audience to help get their character what it is they want. Then the action starts again. The actors go back with their new scripts and the piece of theatre continues . The action can be stopped at any time by the actors or any audience member by calling 'Time Out' once the action stops all the actors return to their brains and top up their script or change their script in response to the other characters speeches. This continues for a while until the Facilitator instructs the actors to move one brain to the right during the 60-90 minute performance each character will visit each group giving the audience the opportunity to stand in the shoes of 4 very different characters with very different objectives.

Forum Theatre is an invaluable tool for activists to explore emotive issues with large groups without being seen to be preaching or imposing ideologies.

Please get in contact if you are interested in this project and the training by sending an email to mickfuzz @ rocketmail .com or giving me a call 07913 882 193