Day 3 at the Theatre of the Oppressed Festival - delayed report

I'll keep this short and sweet. Our workshop on the third day consisted of debriefing initially about the play 3000 Mujeres, from the day before. We then warmed up to our workshop by checking in with a sound and a movement (that ring a bell to anyone doing Playback Theatre or Applied Theatre?)

The next game was fast paced: the leader would start off saying yes to the person next to them and that person would have to reply Yes. If the person wanted to move the sequence in the opposite order, they would have to say No. This would then be repeated ad infinitum in the circle of performers.

Then came mirroring, which is quite a standard physical theatre exercise in my experience. You basically mirror the action your partner makes. If they place their hand on your shoulder you place yours on theirs. The workshop facilitators added a twist: they called out the actions and we had to do them, no matter how ridiculous. At one point, they had us touching bum to bum, hand to shoulder, shoulder to shoulder, nose to nose. It got REALLY intimate.

The inevitable next step was to get into rehearsals and analysis of the piece of theatre we were developing. Olivar and Luiz, our facilitators from the Rio de Janeiro Centre for Theatre of the Oppressed, gave us feedback on the character portrayal, the dramaturgy, even our set design. After the feedback session, we dispersed off to lunch with 500 other participants, in the largest mess hall I've seen in a looong time.

In the afternoon, I dropped in to see Alas de Mariposa (Butterfly Wings) by Nicaraguan Theatre of the Oppressed outfit Ventana. They performed the story of Lucero, a blind girl who is eager to go to her new school, but due to misconceptions and discrimination against blind people in her school, is turned away at the door. The interventions all seemed to center around the same moment: when Lucero meets the school headmistress. It is at this crucial turning point that Lucero can enforce her rights in the new Nicaragua.

Although the actors wore the subtext on their sleeve, the acting was fresh, authentic and believable. Despite the large amount of exposition, and the abundance of dialogue, it was very touching and Lucero's character was well established. It was a very satisfying performance.

That evening's performance was Detras del Cuadro (Behind the Frame). It is the story of a single mother living with her mother who keeps her lesbian partner a secret until the day that her five year old  daughter requests her mother invite her partner to her birthday party. After much to-ing and fro-ing, she does so. She tries to warn her mother that she is inviting her partner to the party, only to find that her mother assumes it is a man. When confronted by the same sex relationship, her mother throws her partner out of the house and threatens to take away her granddaughter from her daughter because of her "immorality". This brought on a plethora of responses, including one clueless guy who was trying to explain to the daugther that the single mother's friend was actually her partner.