轉載 被壓迫者劇場引導者的内驅力
by Phui Yi Kong
I was born, raised, and currently live in
Malaysia.
When I was facilitating Theatre of the
Oppressed (TO) workshops in college in southern Maine, USA, TO offerings were
easier to set up and support. Groups would instinctively grasp the critical
nature of the process, diving deeper into it to milk the form’s potential.
These participants were a combination of academics and seasoned activists. They
already carried a belief in individual social change. When given a chance to
work collectively on an issue, these primed groups would self-mobilize. Almost
all the time, they would teach me about the issue at hand. My role, as a
facilitator/Joker, was to keep the dialogue and problem solving hats rotating
through the group members. I became a container for everyone to talk to each
other using their true voice. Things changed when I returned home.
Fast-forward to the time my TO Mentorship
began, I had just resettled in my childhood home of Malaysia and began a career
as a secondary school teacher. The conversations I was having and hearing
around me changed from questions about how to set up guerilla activist action
outside the statehouse to how lessons are getting through to learners. Both
questions are important and factors in pushing social change, but the latter
had dulled my senses. If “slumping” was a participle, it would aptly
describe the circumstances through which I operated in the past year to
facilitate Theatre of the Oppressed:
Failure is a lovely teacher. Through this
mentorship, I have failed aplenty. In the first three months, 14 year-old girls
stared, puzzled, at the prospect of the Columbian Hypnosis game.
For the next six months, workshop participants at a senior cum abandoned folk
centre wandered in and out of sessions, while management reluctantly provided a
private room for the work. Ten months after the Mentorship began, my school
administrators mandated staff to donate money and tied their attendance, at a
forum play I facilitated, to their performance review. (The TO troupe consisted
of Afghan refugees living in Malaysia.) The vehicles of anti-oppression seem to
run in the same streams as forces antithetical to liberation. I would try a
different tactic to practice TO and each intervention seemed only partially
satisfactory. What next?
TO practitioners, who have gone back to a
different community than the one they first practiced in, require a
reminder that the values underlining TO may not
be reinforced by the community they are now in. It is
insufficient to say that different communities have different values. Instead,
each community brings an enveloping cloud of operational values that
potentially drain the facilitator’s inclination to propose liberating and
embodied forms of expression. A facilitator can support a group’s process, but
not at the expense of core TO values. This paragraph is worth a close reading,
as the ideas echo Paulo Freire’s “fear of freedom”.
This draining predicament is not something
outwardly expressed in a group of people but a product of being treated as
objects for others rather than subjects of history (again Freire is at play). The
people are not the ones who resist embodiment; the hiccup lies within the
facilitator’s relationship with the powers of authoritarian management. The
caretakers, the bosses and the expectations towards the role of a teacher (as
bankers of knowledge not as liberators) stir the pot, not the
individual. And here, I am explicitly including myself as an object of
oppression. I am a member of this urban, Southeast Asian, authoritarian
society. To use tools of Theatre of the Oppressed in Malaysia, mobilizing Malaysians
as historical actors, I would have to better comprehend the circumstances
behind the reluctance to freedom — perhaps my own.
It is insufficient to merely acknowledge
the region’s colonial past, national affirmative action policies barring education
and economic attainment for minorities, draconian laws against freedom of
speech, and the consenting poor treatment of the elderly and the
abandoned. There must be a deeper critical tackling of each of these systemic
injustices with first hand interface with groups of
stakeholders. Education must interlace with TO and be led by those under
institutional regime, not the regiment leaders.
One mistake I have made since starting this
TO mentorship is working in groups where the people are different than I am in
age and background. There is overlap in terms of vernacular upbringing and
being from the same area, but the groups who may more readily meet the clarion
call of collective resistance using theatre and art as a medium are the
overseas-educated civic-minded yuppies – perhaps the English-speaking,
Chinese-educated urbanites who WANT to make their voices heard. I have
witnessed and am privy to the immense privilege in these slices
of society, but I also have personally experienced difficulty in setting words
to opinions. And rather than euphemize actual sentiment, I self-censor. A
fundamental literacy about the political voice is lost, has been lost.
In this self-reflection of the purpose and
use of TO back in my stomping grounds, there has been an intense
uncovering of my deeper intentions as a newly returned member of this urban
community. The ongoing-ness of this effort is made easier by the TO Distance
Mentorship’s support. This year didn’t feel as solitary because I was
reminded in our monthly calls of the humanizing potential of the work.
To do this work, a person has to take a
deep look at their own limitations of political voice, identify the barriers to
its expression, and be prepared to stutter and babble their way into a stable
inner discourse on the self as actor (rather than object) – so that others may
do their own liberating. And this process is best done with others.
“when suddenly she realized . . . words
were . . . what? . . who?. . no! . . she! . . [Pause and movement 2.] . . .
realized . . . words were coming . . . imagine! . . . words were coming . . . a
voice she did not recognize at first so long since it had sounded . . . then
finally had to admit . . . could be none other . . . than her own”
– Mouth in Samuel Beckett’s “Not I”
– Mouth in Samuel Beckett’s “Not I”
沒有留言:
張貼留言