Theater of the Oppressed Series: Preface to "The Theater of the Oppressed"

Original source: https://www.douban.com/group/topic/29397130/

Translator: Lai Shuya

Chapter Name: Translation Order

Page: page 31

In 1993, I joined the People's Theatre Company, and there was a book club every two weeks. The book I read was the English version of Theatre of the Oppressed. At that time, the theater companions were generally not good in English but had a high desire for knowledge (or, if we were young, let’s pay homage to the master), the photocopied chapters were crowded with colorful phonetic symbols and Chinese explanations. Chapters are esoteric and difficult to understand, and sometimes new people join, so every time I read from the first chapter, and after reading for a long time, I still stay at the first chapter...

It was an embarrassing sight when I first met Bois. At that time, what I knew most about Bois was his "Games for Actors and Non-Actors", but it was still far away and vague from understanding the deep thinking behind these games. It was not until 1996 that he went to Hong Kong to attend a workshop hosted by Powa himself, and saw how he managed these games with ease, unraveling the physical restraints of the participants step by step, and skillfully pushing the group energy to a peak, becoming a "forum theater". When I saw the power of the audience directly using the theater and expressing their voices through the theater, their eyes brightened: this is a very systematic theater system that subverts the traditional theater roles and patterns, from theory to practice! So, when I went back to read the most classic work in the country, "The Oppressed Theater", the idea of translation came up. At that time, the idea was very simple. The translation was for like-minded theater partners who were not good at English. I never expected that it would be translated. will be published.

Yes, to like-minded theatre partners.

For the development of Taiwan's modern theater throughout the 1990s, a new concept of theater for the purpose of social transformation—the "people's theater" grew, declined, and revived in Taiwan in a crucial decade. In the past ten years, the early pioneers held a clear leftist banner and used the successful examples of Southeast Asian countries as the basis for their introduction. Through articles and writings and a performance like walking out of Handan, they tried to establish a people belonging to Taiwan. Theater; however, the unfriendly objective situation of the overall social taste and the consuming mainstream theater scenery, coupled with the limitations of the practitioners themselves, again symbolizes the tragic fate destined for this theater form, and also accelerates the public. The atrophy of the theater and the ending in name only; until the end of the 1990s, those who left or lingered returned to the theater, stripped off the heavy and unrealistic ideals of the early days, entered the community and campus, returned the theater to the people, and gave It got a new title called Community Theater.

Whether it is the public theater or the community theater, as a radical and creative social movement, the important role played by Pois provides a dialectic between theater and political/social development at the theoretical level, and at the practical level. The above clearly shows a highly practical and approachable skill system. However, there are not many local people familiar with his theatrical ideas, and there are also very few theater workers who transform and apply his methodology. The reality compared with this phenomenon reflects that the progressive social theater is still in a weak position. The fringe position, on the other hand, questioned how few workers have devoted themselves to the practice of this theatre.

This is the loneliness and powerlessness I feel deeply when I personally enter the community to work in theater (and switch to Bois's method and skills a lot). Where are our partners? Perhaps we have seen too many sublimated poetic texts affirming that the theater stimulates and gathers the power of the people, and we have also read too many great discourses and short stories to prove that Bois is indeed a visionary master, but he is addicted to it. , I am afraid it is a sign and crisis that is getting farther and farther away from Bowa. On the front page of his new book "Legislative Theater", he branded a line of words: Doing is the best way of saying.

"Do it!", "You can do it!", "I'll teach you how to do it!" lingered between the lines of Beauvais' book like a ghost, more like an alarm bell, often awakened by overromanticization or forgetfulness Readers in action. However, we are faced with a more fundamental question: where is the person doing it?

Optimistically speaking, it may be possible to use various future possibilities to outline the community faces and lines of these people. For example, when I started to translate this book, I was also working on community theater, and many partners who might use theater as a challenge to conservative social reality emerged one after another. They are local Taiwanese community organizers, literature and history workers, teachers, Social activists, researchers, community members, students and countless community members; and two years ago, the British Theatre-in-Education using the Pois technique was introduced to China, and theatre workers began to It was experimented, and this is a possibility that the "political nature" of Powa's theater is often narrowed down to "rebellion" and other negative meanings in Taiwan. (On the other hand, theater people who were seen as "impossible to rebel" have now rebelled, and in the most traditional schools.)

If this vision can be expected, then the practitioners who practice this theater will no longer be a solitary Don Quixote, and the emergence of multiple use situations and different practice contexts can also highlight Bois's claim: "All theaters are political", only in practice can the subversiveness and limitations of the Bova Theater be reflected. This is the expectation of this translation book while looking for like-minded people.

(thanks omitted)

Lai Shuya

2000 in London