McDonalds Theatre – Handout: Boal with a bit of Brecht – David Boje, Director
Aesthetics PDW - 2003 August 2nd Academy of Management Meetings in Seattle
Augusto Boal’s 3 types of Theatre for Social Change for Spect-actors
• Image Theater sets up a stage, in which we can see the body motions and interactions, in what is known as a body sculpture. Image Theater is a silent theater, a great stage to begin OT/OB training. Image theatre is Rainbow of your desire – Your cop in your head that limits your power in a situation – Your internalization of oppression.
• Invisibility Theater is not realism; it is reality (Boal, 1992: 15). Invisibility can add some verbal dialog, but the scenes should carry themselves with mostly the body language. Invisibility Theater brings the absent reality (most oppressed character) on stage; it becomes visible, no longer hidden or taken for granted reality (juxtaposes ontological alienation). Hegemonic power – power game whose rules are invisible to you – Do not see your own complicity in keeping yourself or others disempowered and voiceless.
• Forum Theatre - Trying out solutions to oppression in simulated games of power – Practice events where you try out a solution to your disempowerment. Power games have rules of oppression we will make explicit. Game rules can be modified, but they still exist, to ensure that the players are involved in the same enterprise of power, and to facilitate the generation of serious and fruitful solution attempts (Boal, 1992: 18).
Bertolt Brecht Effects sought in Epic Theatre
Staging Effect
• Brecht uses multi-level set in Saint Joan of the Stockyard, with most of the Stock Exchange scenes on the upper level, plant workers and strikers on the lower level to depict the class division of the society.
Defamiliarization
• Take a “common recurrent universally-practiced operation and try to draw attention to it by illumination its peculiarity”
• “What is ‘natural’ must have the force of what is startling”
In exposing the systemic forces as unnatural, the spectator becomes aware of the root causes and effects that drive and restrain the current situation.
Brechtian Alienation Effect (w/McDonalds examples we can experiment with)
• Acting in ways that do not invite empathy, such as pointing out that the actor is portraying a character, and not trying to be the character.
• Actors portraying customers, managers, fry clerks, and cooks do not fuse with their role.
• Actors break off a portrayal and approach the audience down stage left, to speak to the spectators, and invite critical reflection.
• Widen epic field of view to stage simultaneous scenes
• A similar Brecht A-effect in Boal’s (1991) Invisible theatre: show scene from off stage (e.g. a sweatshop) with a front stage scene (e.g. McDonald’s counter); Show multiple sides of McDonalds’ situation, in ever-wider fields of vision on stage.
• Announcing the scene titles and content, before acting them out.
• Take away illusion of 4th wall; make spectators aware of the performed illusions
• Vivify the underlying root causes and effects, the entire socioeconomic system.
• Replay scenes, some in slow motion, with accentuated gestures, to draw spectator attention to certain behaviors and situations (p. 125-126, in Willett).
• Wearing animal masks as in medieval theatre (p. 192 #42 in Willett); Vegetarian activists wear bikinis made of lettuce leaves.
• Not narrating McDonalds in heroic narratives of progress.
• Projecting statistics, images, and cartoons about McDonalds’ child labor contracts in toy factories, union busting, nutritional value, and images of chicken and beef slaughter house conditions – onto a screen, while the customers queue up to order their Happy Meals.
• Put a little too much makeup on Ronald McDonalds to bring out more grotesque character
• Spectators are invited to criticize the character portrayed by the actor.
Aesthetics of Aristotle and Plato – Introduction
· Aristotle’s Poetics – a reply to Plato’s aesthetic theory, the critical view of mimesis (Katharsis) forces is they’re ontological alienation & emotional escape instead of enticing with an intellectual appeal to spectators.
· Hamartia – Character’s moral/tragic flaw gives rise to spectator’s pity & fear
· Purgation Thesis – Aristotle argued Katharsis & Hamartia in tightly cohesive tragic theatre (as opposed to
epic) allowed spectators to purge their own character flaws, but comedy calls for the direct opposite emotion: righteous indignation (nemesan).
· Cognitive Thesis – Recent scholarship asserts Aristotelian Aesthetics has a cognitive interpretation of
Katharsis Kurt von Fritz, Pedro Lain Entalgo & Leon Golden). Mimesis is part of the pleasure of learning and inference, experienced since childhood.
TWO ANTI-ARISTOTELIAN Aesthetics, RECLAIMING Plato’s AESTHTETIC CHALLENGE: Cathartic-Mimesis forces of Spectacle give profound ontological alienation from material reality; their aesthetic is to disrupt Katharsis empathy/entertainment (& pleasure) ride.
Some Terms Defined:
Metatheatre is a multiplicity of theatres (formal, informal, off and on stage) simultaneous in a TAMARA of sites; with starring and supporting cast… Metatheatre is defined here as the multiple and contending theatres that constitute organizations. The Metatheatre can be defined as a network of simultaneous, TAMARA-esque stage performances. In your organization you can never see all the theatre performed; it is occurring simultaneously on different stages; some you see and perform, but other acts you hear about from colleagues, vendors, and customers.
Metascript is defined as a multiplicity of scripts that define the field of actions, where strategies are plotted, rhythms find their time patters, characters get trained in their lines, and many feel con-scripted and imprisoned in their character roles and dialog; there are themes of working conditions for on and off stage performers, and some of the mindsets are incommensurate with other mindsets; a mess of directors, script editors, and characters learning and refusing their scripted lines compete for time on the center stage.
SEPTET (7 dramatistic elements), by directing a cast of:
(1) characters, in strategic (2) plots, which create oppressive (3) themes. Leadership is produced, distributed, and consumed in (4) dialogs (in talk, in stories, and in discourses). Leadership affects and is affected by the temporal (5) rhythms (seasons, cycles, recurring patterns). Leadership is the championing some (6) frames (ideologies) over others. And, leadership is most of all the (7) spectacle theatrics (four types), a dynamic hybrid of (a) concentrated corporate culture theatre, (b) diffuse theatre on the global stage, the (c) integration concentrated and integrated, and the more and more frequent (d) megaspectacle of corporate scandal turned by media frenzy and spectator appetite into mass entertainment.
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