Ensemble Principles in Collaboratives and Applied Theatre

Jeffrey Mosser: Welcome to another episode of the From the Ground Up podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I’m your host, Jeffrey Mosser, recording from the ancestral homeland of the Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee, now known as Milwaukee, Wisconsin. These episodes are shared digitally to the internet. Let’s take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technology, structure, and ways of thinking that we use every day. We are using equipment and high-speed internet not available in many indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the work we make lead a significant carbon footprint contributing to climate change that disproportionately affects Indigenous people worldwide. I invite you to join me in acknowledging the truth and violence perpetrated in the name of this country as well as our shared responsibility to make good of this time and for each of us to consider our roles and reconciliation, decolonization and allyship.

Dear artists, I want you to note that there are a lot of layers of the conversation that is about to happen today. As some of you may know, I presently produced this podcast in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but before I got here, I had some really cool experiences working with Augusto Boal. I also, in writing my thesis for grad school, had Mark Weinberg’s Challenging The Hierarchy: Collective Theatre in the United States book in my hands. For me to end up in Milwaukee, where Mark also calls home along with the Center for Applied Theatre, which is heavily involved in the current state of Theatre of the Oppressed work, is just some sort of full circle kismet that I was not expecting to happen in my life. I met Mark and his wife, Jenny Wanasek at a training, and of course we hit it off with the Boal connection. I had no idea he was in Milwaukee before this moment, which made me say, “Hey, you know I read your book,” which made us both light up immediately.

I’ve since met with him multiple times to talk through so many big ideas and most notably, the conversation you’re about to hear today is about how Theatre of the Oppressed, or TO as you will hear us refer to it, also connects to socially conscious theatremaking and ensemble work. If you’re like me, you’ve just said, “Of course.” And as we’ve been saying all along this season, the growth of many ensembles comes out of this need for socially conscious content. John Schneider in Theater X, for example, in my past episode. Mark enlightens us about the work he’s been doing here in Milwaukee, which serves the TO experience globally, and talks about the collaborative theatremakers he met in his own research, including Split Britches, which see the last episode with Deb Margolin in episode five this season. A few people, places and things to footnote, which I will provide links to in the transcripts page at howlround.com include Doug Paterson, Martha Boesing, At the Foot of the Mountain Theater, Barbara Leigh, Arts at Large, Center for Applied Theatre, Jana Sanskriti, and PTO – the Journal, Pedagogy, and Theatre of the Oppressed.

All right, folks, we’re ready to go. This interview was recorded on March 8th, 2023 in Mark’s home on Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk, and Menominee land, now known as Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Just to start us off, because we’ve been talking about Boal right away here, can you talk about how Boal entered yours?

Mark Weinberg: Yeah. It was this series of events. I can actually trace them back to a dog-eared newspaper mag in a co-op I used to work in. But without all of that background story, when I was working on the book and dissertation, I met Doug Paterson, and he was part of a collective. We did a bunch of work together, became fast friends, and through odd circumstances, we ended up being the two people organizing the 1992 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Conference, ATHE. And we were looking for who to bring it to do the keynote and some workshops, and Doug suggested Boal and I said, “That’s a terrible idea.”

I had spent, I don’t know, one million dollars in a 100 years give or take proving that I was a theatremaker and I could do all these things and had worked in collections and he was a guy who said, “Anybody can make theatre. Everybody’s theatre!” But Doug prevailed and there were plenty of reasons. I had read Theatre of the Oppressed, was really impressed by his analysis of Aristotelian catharsis and other things. So we brought Boal and, like you said, the moment I started to do it there was a connection that really was strong. Everything he said resonated with me. So he did the keynote, I fell in love with it, pulled some strings because I was one of the conference planners, and Doug and Boal and I ended up out at dinner and Doug was called away because of some problem with a bus.

Dinner was over and I said, “Boal, I will ask you questions until you tell me to stop, if you’re tired just…” And he said, “Let’s have a glass of wine.” And that we probably shared hundreds of glasses of wine over the next seventeen years, but we talked about everything and he talked about his love of traditional theatre and I was hooked. And every year after that I tracked him down somewhere and took a long workshop. I was invited… Doug was actually invited to come here to Milwaukee to do a “Introduction to TO” workshop because UW Milwaukee was trying to set up a Theatre and Society and he said, “Don’t bring me from Nebraska. Mark is in Madison.” So I got the call, I came and one of the people who took the workshop was Jenny. That’s how we met. Boal even influenced who I’m married to. Then Jenny and my big date was a five-day workshop of Boal in New York.

Jeffrey: Big date. That’s great.

Mark: He was the most… Next to my father, the most influential male figure in my life. The way in which he approached not only theatre work, but other human… The desire to call up in people what they had to offer, what they knew as a basis for making change in the world really, really appealed. I had read [Paulo] Freire, using Freire principles in classes whenever I could and to see Freire, some of the principles upon which I had worked in collectives, and theatre principles all tied up together was a revelation and it changed everything I did. Then when the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed organization was… I started going to their conferences and being part of that because Doug started that organization. And the ninth conference was in Milwaukee. And so Boal was here for a week and his place to hide and rest and chat was my apartment. So we became friends in a number of ways over…

In his autobiography, I realized I had heard all of those stories over a glass of wine or across a lunch table.

Jeffrey: Wow.

Mark: And my work changed. I’ve always been really curious and when I heard Boal say that the most essential thing for a Joker, a Theatre of the Oppressed facilitator, was curiosity. That’s one thing that sort of set me free. And so been able to approach the work for a couple of decades, really open and searching, trying to de-center power as I had in collectives, but in a different way. Trying to de-center power and to make sure that the voice of people was heard, all the people I was working with, and that the changes and the issues explored were based on what they said.

Jeffrey: Can you talk a little bit more about collectives? I know we… And your work in collectives, I know it fed into your book and dissertation, but what were you doing with collectives before Boal and then sort of how did that influence after?

Mark: I began my work in collectives, working in a collective grocery store in Minneapolis, and it was a time when I suddenly realized that my political work, my theatre work, and my collective work, were all feeding the same goal of meaningful social change through the arts and also through food. So I began to move more and more towards collective work. Helped form a collective in Madison called The Other Theater Company, that only did two productions, sustaining was very difficult. I can give you details on that if you want.

Jeffrey: Sure.

I realized this very simple model of all ideas going to a pot. Once they hit there, they are not owned by anybody, everybody has access all of the time. 

Mark: But I began looking at collective processes and I had been all but dissertation in Minnesota and couldn’t bear to be, you know, head of master’s in English lit, and so I just… And I finished an MFA. They told me, “That’s it. One term, no degree. You’re done.” And I realized that I wanted to document collective theatres because we weren’t documenting ourselves, we weren’t documenting the work at all.

People were so busy trying to live, trying to do the work. And so I said, “If I’m going to do that, I might as well get a degree out of it.” Talked my way back into university and began researching and writing other collectives while working in my own. And I realized the more I worked that being in a non-hierarchical environment, that consensus democracy is slow and messy, but can lead to a commitment to outcomes that otherwise might not be there and that the glue that seemed to hold things together for me in collectives was not only a commitment to power-sharing, but a commitment to communication style that allowed all ideas to sort of percolate together. I began to look at communication theory and there were all sorts of models of different power structures and I realized this very simple model of all ideas going to a pot. Once they hit there, they are not owned by anybody, everybody has access all of the time, allowed for a level of response, a level of discussion, and a level of creativity.

And I had an MFA in directing and was used to being the person that everybody had to listen to and telling the actors what to do. And I had always tried to gain insight from the people I was working with, but now, part of the collective allowing everybody’s expertise to flow together, I felt really comfortable. Sometimes really frustrated, as did every collective member of any collective I looked at. But I felt really comfortable. And when I talked my way back into the university, I started looking around for theatres studies and came up with three for the dissertation. And one of them was the theatre that Doug had helped form and that’s how I met Doug.

Actually, it all occurred in 1981 at the sort of Woodstock of political theatres. It was called The Gathering. It was in northern Minnesota and that’s that dog-eared newspaper. I found out about it that way and went and wrote about it. But I met Doug there and looked at other collectives that were there and began to work research with Dakota Theater Caravan on Teatro de la Esperanza and the United Mime Workers, all of whom I met at The Gathering. And because I knew Martha Boesing’s work in Minneapolis with At The Foot Of The Mountain, I began trying to work with them as well so I had a feminist theatre practice. And they functioned in such a different way. And so it wasn’t until after the dissertation and Greenwood Press picked it up as book that I added a feminist theatre.

Jeffrey: After your dissertation, then Boal comes in, is that right?

Mark: Yes. Yeah.

Jeffrey: Got it.

Mark: The collective I was in folded. I was still very interested in examining not only how theatre that had as a particular goal… But also the social and political implications of all theatre. And there was a big association… ATA [American Theatre Association] and it folded for… And what came out of it was a college university theatres and when they formed, there was nothing in that… No branch that was looking at social justice and Doug and I proposed that. And that’s how I ended up with that conference in ’92. I was teaching about theatre, I was examining theatre, but I didn’t have a methodology that worked for me to make theatre in that one and forming… I had formed student collectives and that was very satisfying and did some wonderful work, but I was looking for a more sustainable and broader based approach to community-based theatre.

You know one of the things about collectives is they attempted… all of them… they attempted to really represent the communities that the collective were part of, but the process of collectivity and… As people got older and they were children to take care of and et cetera, et cetera, it seemed to be collectives became more isolated from communities that they wanted to be part of, that they represent. I really wanted to be constantly part of groups that were making theatre or groups that weren’t making theatre but could use theatre as a tool for doing work.

Jeffrey: I just want to do a quick check here. What’s the difference in your mind between maybe a collective and an ensemble?

Mark: Okay. When I think of an ensemble, I think of a group that is trying to accomplish something and is very supportive of each other, but can exist perfectly well within hierarchy that someone forms the ensemble and then someone directs it. And while the ensemble is very supportive… If I was directing an ensemble show, I would not expect actor X to turn to actor Y and say, “Here’s a better way of doing things.”

Jeffrey: Sure. Sure.

Mark: So there are certain limitations. And often ensembles are bringing to life something that is a play or a piece of music or whatever it is. A collective to me is a non-hierarchical approach to creating an art form. And so most of the collectives I dealt with almost always did scripts that they created after contacting, ensemble pieces that I had directed were almost always scripts that already existed even when I redid the script that had been created by a collective I was in and then brought together a bunch of student actors to do it. They functioned as an ensemble but it was a very, very different process. They were learning to interpret and actualize a piece that was there.

Jeffrey: So you said you came from a MFA directing program. Can you pinpoint how you sort of learned how to give up that sort of sense of control? Or maybe you didn’t have the sense of control? That’s a big assumption there. But… So if I do direct a straight play, I’m like, “I have no control here. Nothing. I am not in charge of anything.”

Mark: Part of it was honestly the way I was working with this very, very tight-knit collective in a co-op. I mean I took working in that collective, realizing what kinds of questions were raised when everybody could question everyone and what kind of support there was when everybody got everything was a real revelation to me having been in hierarchical structures. I always believed in, let’s try this. So I never wanted to shut anything down without trying and let’s try this and somebody would do something and I would say, “What about if it happens this way? And what do you think?” And the next thing you know, the process of developing even a straight play was more part of it than just me as director. And the more often I did that, the better the work and the more I felt that there was real control. And this way, because we had created pieces together, I knew what we were doing and I felt that that was a much more fulfilling and much more, not only engaging, but also honestly engaging and emotionally engaged way to work.

And when that became, and I hate to use this word… But when that became institutionalized, when we said, “We are a collective. This is how we’re going to function. Everybody directs. Everybody acts. You don’t like the way someone’s playing their role or you want to make a suggestion, go ahead, you play it, show them what you mean. We’ll switch roles,” then it began to open doors in ways of creating that I found by its very methodology was challenging the very hierarchies and systems that I wanted to change. It’s also when I discovered… And it’s something that Boal and TO have re-emphasized when I started doing what was called political theatre, it was a way of teaching and when I work in collectives and working in TO, it’s much clearer to me that theatre is a way of exploring. So, yes, there’ll be an expression of some sort at the end, but the act of exploration, collective exploration is really important. And so the way in which the Center for Applied Theatre has created performances with groups has always used TO’s tools, but the way in which we gathered information was as collective as possible.

Jeffrey: And then you come back to Milwaukee here and begin the Center for Applied Theatre. Why was it important to start that here in Milwaukee?

Mark: It was a sort of accident. Before I met Jenny… And when I met her, she was in the middle of a project. She was doing community-based theatre that was deeply involved. She had worked on the Dreams Project in Milwaukee and had brought together multiracial, multiethnic cast to create a piece, a musical, an original musical about ostracism. So Jenny was already doing it. I fell in love with Jenny. That’s one of the things that brought me to Milwaukee. The other was that I was working half-time in the department here living in Madison, commuting. And so I came here and the need for change in Milwaukee was recognized, all that… The need for change in Madison, not so much.

Jeffrey: Got ya.

Mark: And so here I was coming into a city, a university that wanted to have a more socially aware track in the theatre department and Jenny and I had a mutual friend, Barbara Leigh. I met Barbara Leigh in 1981 at that same event.

Jeffrey: Wow.

Mark: And asked us if we could guide a creation process. And the next thing I know, Jenny and I were in a room with twenty-two other people. The only connection with each other was that everyone had lost someone or something to drugs. And we worked. I can’t remember getting their stories and gathering stories. We did… There was a performance schedule. We did the play and it was very well received and there were requests to do it more. And we realized that if we’re going to do that and if we’re going to ask actors or anybody to give up daytime and perform in schools we had to pay them. And so we formed the company so that we could keep the play going and then recruited actors from around the city and from the university. Many students.

So we had a cadre of actors and when we had a performance schedule, we would contact them, the ones that played specific roles, “Are you available on this day?” And even though we were no longer working as TO usually does with the very audience that created the piece, we had had representatives from that audience create the piece. And so on we went and the more we did the play, the more often people said, “I love the way that deals with issues. Can you do something about…?” So a lot of our work as the Center for Applied Theatre was directed towards, at first, anti-bullying. At the same time I had a class at the university called Applied Theatre and we would spend eight weeks doing TO techniques in class and then the entire class and I would leave the campus and spend the next eight weeks working with a community partner creating Forum Theatre.

So I was out in the community that way. That was an opportunity that is so rare because the students were paying tuition and getting credit. I was getting paid by the university. We could go into places that had no money, no funding and say let’s do this work together. And so we worked with runaway teens, men in a halfway house coming from prison and first offenders, LGBTQ youth. Wide variety of groups around town. And then at the same time we had this performance that was going from one school to another. Jenny and I began to be less and less satisfied with the anti-bullying because bullying is a symptom and we were in some schools where performances with students were impossible for a wide variety of reasons. It’s everything from attendance and students who were having difficulty reading and began to work with a videographer. And this is all under the auspices of Arts at Large, working with a videographer and realizing we could do things in video that we couldn’t do live.

And that opened up a whole lot of other doors and we created, with Susan Borg, an image maker, projects that were much more aspirational. So instead of dismantling cultures of violence, we were imagining cultures of respect and that changed everything. Even when we did exactly the same exercise, played the same games, developed pieces, that was a huge change. Again, it was asked and when students began not looking at how do we fix problems, but what kind of world—

Jeffrey: Wow.

Mark: What do we want to achieve? And we had a number of ways of exploring. Often we would do images, group images, of a problem and then animate those images in a variety of ways. What happened just before? How did you get here? What happened if everybody tried to get what they wanted? And so images of problems and solution were very much part of the TO canon in the first place. And we began adding images of a world in which the problem doesn’t exist. Now, trying to explain to kids what I was talking about… I just stumbled on it one day. I said, “What if I said, you guys are all doing such a great job, everybody gets to go to McDonald’s?” “Yay!” “Right? And I’m at McDonald’s and I order a bicycle.” And I said, “I want you to think of a world in which this problem would be as foreign as ordering a bicycle.” And we did, with Susan, this incredibly complex multi-station interactive video exhibit, galleries at Arts at Large in the old space.

And it was there for three months. And student groups went through it, interacted with videos, watched themselves watching bullying situations. It was really wonderful. And then we did workshops about their problem in the same space and ended with this question. It was a group of fifth grade and one group did a sculpture of trees in a park and somebody reading and somebody roller skating and somebody throwing a ball. And it was very clear they just wanted a place where they could relax and it was lovely, really lovely. Got to the last group and they were six fifth graders and they were standing one behind the other in a line with a hand on the shoulder of the person in front. And I said, “Oh, is that your image?” And they said, “No, it’s this.” And every one of them took a position that they couldn’t possibly maintain unless they had the hand on the shoulder. Honest to God, I fought back tears in looking at it. And this beautiful picture of individual freedom and expression and identity and community at the same time.

Jeffrey: Wow. Are the things you observed about collectives when you wrote your dissertation in 1991, still here with us in 2023?

Mark: I thought about this when I saw the question. This is the hardest one. Yes and no. Book was published in ’91, but I was looking at them in the eighties. Actually the dissertation was finished in ’86, ’87. They had formed during… Many of them had formed during the seventies and were exploring issues that still need the same kind of exploration. I think the tendency in the US with which I’m most familiar but in the world now is to deal with feelings of powerlessness and the difficult demands of keeping abreast of changes happening so fast. I think it has led people to turn more and more frequently towards authoritarian. And so I think the social systems under which we operate are more hierarchical and more authoritarian. I think the way in which capitalism has evolved to a division of wealth beyond even what existed just before the depression is another way in which there’s a hierarchy of everything. A hierarchy of opportunity, a hierarchy of food accessibility. The resistance to leveling some of that, not so that the ultra-wealthy lose their advantages, but so that human beings can have what they need.

So I think it’s a very difficult time in those terms. I was talking to my daughter yesterday and she said, “Yeah, it’s such a typical…” She said, “I don’t know if we’re headed towards revisiting the changes that people were pushing for in the sixties and seventies or if we’re headed for guns in the streets and battling authoritarian and arbitrary leadership.” And she was very matter of fact about it, which was frightening as all.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

Mark: But I think she’s right. So in systemic terms, I have had arguments with people who say, “Well, the system is broken and capitalism is broken,” and there’s cronyism that say, “I don’t believe it. I don’t think it’s broken at all. I think it breaks people, but the system is working the way it’s supposed to work.” So I think we’re fighting some battles that we were fighting but not as direct.

We were fighting smaller systems. Some of the issues that are at the fore now more than they were then, I think there’s a much more thoughtful approach to the balance of power between all genders and the way in which people self-identify more than just feminism. But I think it’s a bigger struggle. And I think that the recognition of the way in which the history of race and racism in this country has informed everything is clear. And I think that there are a number of groups that are battling small fires in that huge conflagration. And so there are some similarities. What I don’t see, or what I rarely see is groups that function as collectives did in the seventies and the eighties. The group comes together in order to create a non-hierarchical structure so that they can develop artworks that go out to communities. Theatres that operate as collectives, they were gathering information from the community. They were community-based.

And I think there’s a general acceptance among activists that theatre by the community is far more powerful than theatre for. Regardless of whether or not you want to argue that there’s a different aesthetic there, they’re not as valuable as artists. If we’re dealing with an issue that is causing people pain right now, that needs to be solved. And if I’m not creating something that’s going to history of theatre text and that’s quite alright, that doesn’t mean I don’t think it should be cut. I just came off a stint as editor of the PTO Journal. I was editor for three years. And that’s one of the goals. Deepen the discussion on it. Not only examinations of Theatre of the Oppressed but also technique and to report on things being done.

So I think it’s still important. I’m still working in that arena, but I think that temporal nature, acute nature issues that people… I haven’t felt that issues were as acute in demand since the end of the war in Vietnam and I don’t know, maybe it’s age, maybe it’s wisdom, maybe it’s lack of… I was very angry but also felt powerful and hopeful in the late sixties and seventies, change was coming and that it was going to happen because we were in the street. And now less so. I think change will come. And I think that what Boal called multipliers… Every time we reach somebody, if they reach somebody else and somebody else that the ripples in the pond keep going out and then they come back in with more power. I think that happens. And my goal to change the world is now, I think, modified to my goal is to get people, particularly younger people, because they’re going to be in power… To get younger people to ask questions.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

Mark: Because I think human beings, when they really ask questions, are going to eventually come up with answers that make sense for human beings.

Jeffrey: I want to go back just a hair and ask you, with your editorship and with your finger on the pulse of collectives, is collective work more present today? Is it more present worldwide?

Mark: I don’t think there are as many or as active collectives in terms of a group that defines itself as a collective and function with a very particular structure and separate from… Drawing in from, but separate from the community they were a part. I think there’s a different approach to community-based, not community theatre but community-based theatre.

Jeffrey: Sure.

Mark: And I think more and more it’s participatory. TO is not for everything. It is not the universal panacea, the only theatrical tool. But I think that people working in Theatre of the Oppressed and gathering from the community the stories that are going to be enacted on stage, often by the community itself… I think that’s where the theatre that’s tending towards… The theatre that’s pushing for social… is tending. While I was in India, I bumped into one of the groups that was there was from Germany and they are almost a commune and they are pretty thoroughly collectivized and take care of each other in very full ways.

And another group that had representatives there was from France and they draw from communities all the time, but they don’t have that same kind of collective structure. They come together, they do their work, they go home and live as individuals. There’s a different structure and I think it comes from an awareness that there’s a kind of arrogance in going into a community to help and to say, “Let’s look for the answers.” Well, worse is, “we know the…” But, “Let’s explore the answers. Here’s what we’re going to examine.” I think the greater arrogance is to assume you know the questions.

Jeffrey: Totally. Yeah.

Mark: And I think there’s more and more awareness of that. And so when people go into communities, it is not, “Here’s how we’re going to fix the issue.” It’s, “What is it we should be working…?” “What is it you know that we don’t? Here’s some ways of finding out what you know. Even if you don’t know you know it. Even if you haven’t defined the problem. Here’s some ways of finding out.” And that requires the kind of dialogue that collectives did not necessarily have with the community. Even when collective members have it among each other. And, again, that idea of all the ideas go in the center, it’s different than the kind of dialogic work that’s Freire in base and team-based.

Jeffrey: Earlier in our conversation you talked about having written a script or worked on a script that could be then performed by others. How do you enable them to re-perform it in a way that still honors where they need to meet it and the creative process that you did to make it?

Mark: That was a beautifully articulated question. And the answer I have to give you is I don’t know.

Jeffrey: Okay.

Mark: And the reason is, over the years when we had a performance company, we developed five pieces and we brought together a performer to do them and we offered them to other people but never had any other company. And so I don’t know. I’m perfectly willing to have anybody do them. I’m not proprietary about them at all. But I don’t know what that process would be like of passing that off.

Jeffrey: Sure.

Mark: Our pieces tend to be a bit more realistic than I would now like them to be. I think we can accomplish a great deal with theatricality that wasn’t part of my earlier work in TO and I don’t think they’d be complex for someone to do. And I think the antagonistic forces are clear enough so that people could understand what kinds of interventions might lead to changes. At the same time, being a Forum Theatre actor is different than being an actor in a play that’s not going to have intervention. You know as an actor, once you assume a character, once you’re playing a character, your goal in that performance is to fulfill the intention of character.

Jeffrey: Oh yeah.

Mark: That’s all there is to it. And in Forum, a professional actor on stage is going to be able to step on almost any intervention, but needs to understand that one of the goals of Forum Theatre is to leave people hopeful that there are ways of solving the problem or that there are ways of asking more questions about the problem at least. And you need to understand a character, not only in terms of their intention, but how the need behind that might be fulfilled in other ways. Now as you’re doing TO that is examining the control that systems have over people, it becomes even more complex. Julian [Boal] is very involved in exploring why potential allies who have a lot to gain by supporting someone who’s attempted to make a change, don’t support. What might be the pressures that keep people from unifying in moving towards a systemic shift.

Last June, I did a three-day workshop with Julian in Chicago. And part of the scene we were in that we developed, the group that I was in developed, was a Black man attempting to get people to go to a community meeting about the way in which police were treating youth in the street. And I was a bodega owner and everything that he wanted I wanted, but I was dependent on the police. They were my frequent customers. They kept my shop safe. And so there was no way for him to convince me to put so much of a dependent relationship with the police at risk in order to do something that I knew was right in support. And examining those kinds of issues, how the system is set up, it’s a much more nuanced and complex way of looking at power, but I think it’s something that TO can do in different ways than other examinations because it asks questions through the body, through performance.

And so I think… I’m not sure how I got there from the question you asked.

Jeffrey: That’s quite all right. Yeah.

Mark: It was difficult for us when we had a play where here’s a bully and here’s the… How are they going to deal with each other? That was an easier thing to hand off than handing off some of these other things. And yet more people, I think, would understand the difficulty. So as we develop new pieces and as we’re tending to move back towards Forum, that question may arise is do we develop a piece so that it can be done by others? Or do we develop a piece for that group that know the questions that group’s doing and then it’s done? But I’m not interested in the legacy of, “This is the Center for Applied Theatre play that is now done all over the world and everybody pays royalties and…”

Jeffrey: Right. Yeah.

Mark: So the answer to your question is I don’t know how that change would be made because I haven’t done it, but it’s possible.

Jeffrey: In your career and your span of work, is there a set of principles for collective or ensemble work that you have learned to use as your stakes in the road as you…?

Mark: Yeah. There are a few. One, I think I’ve already mentioned. I don’t know the answers and I probably don’t know… Quick example: we worked with runaway teens and the expectation was that we’d do Forum plays about all of the difficulties that they face as runaway and they didn’t want to do that. They wanted to do plays about why they ran away in the first place. About what the social structure, the familial structure was that led them to run away. That was a much more important question to discuss and to share with an audience. And so that’s what we did the plays on. That kind of understanding we don’t have. Secondly that, let me put it this way: everybody does what they do for a reason. And if we approach things judgmentally as opposed to with open curiosity, we never find out what that reason is. And we can never explore what other choices might be made. Nobody gets up and says, “I’m going to be horrible today. I’m going to hurt as many people as I can and kick dogs and…”

Jeffrey: Right. Right.

Mark: There are reasons why people behave the way they do and being curious about those reasons. So that and a third… And I think I’m sure I have to thank Jenny for making this so central to the work we do… Listening is an incredibly important part of the creative. Listening in silence, pairs listening. And one person in the pair when their time is to listen, just listens. No nods, no grunts, no signs, no… They listen. And Jenny said something so beautiful explaining it. She was explaining it to a group and she said, “Listen with kind eyes.” And understanding that principle that people will say what they want to and need to say, that if you are silent, receptive, that there will be silences, and then they’ll say what they really wanted to say and you’ll get more.

And I guess that principle goes with, well if you’re listening then when you talk there’s meaning because you have this… But the fourth thing is that the body is as much of a learning as an expressing tool and you can’t deny what you have lived. Yeah, I guess those are our principles. That’s real discussion, curiosity, they do for a reason… I mean you’ve taken better notes than I have, hopefully.

Jeffrey: Oh, no. No, the four things you mentioned here… And you just said it now, curiosity again. And just all of these things seem to stem from curiosity and the deep desire to understand each other and just be humans together, seems to be the thrust of what we’ve been talking about today all the way back to what we said with Boal. That’s so great. Thank you so much.

Mark: Without community, without understanding what community means and the support that comes from it, it’s difficult to move anywhere. An irrelevant side note that probably won’t make this, but I met Freire.

Jeffrey: Yeah?

Mark: Freire and Boal came to… I think it was the third PTO. It was the only time they were in the US together. Freire was already pretty frail. They got honorary PhDs in the University of Nebraska and gave talks. As someone said to me, I was sitting, “It’s like watching two old rabbis.” Cause everything they do is story-oriented.

Jeffrey: Yeah. Sure.

Mark: I was lucky enough to know Boal in many ways over the years and to consider him a friend and mentor and I don’t fall at the feet of celebrity and a big… Being with Freire was just that. I was open-mouthed. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was one of the two most significant books I read that realized how simple, not simplistic, but how simple and yet difficult it was to understand learning and to stop worrying the future. And it changed everything. Not only what I did in the classroom, it changed things I did as a parent. So to be in the room with Freire was pretty amazing.

I said, “Hello,” which is about all anybody said and that was it. There was no long discussion or meeting of the minds, but it really was to know years ago in my life someone put pen to paper and it is part of what made me who I am. And then there he was in the flesh. It was pretty amazing. When probably from the third year that I knew Boal, when we began to become friendly and it wasn’t just me sitting at the foot of the guru, he said to me, “You have to meet Sima and Sanjoy again. You have to see the work of Jana Sanskriti in Calcutta.” Well, they’re in Badu and the workshops are fascinating. I really love the way they did TO. Well the company is now thirty years old. Every other year they have an international festival they called the Muktadhara.

So I went this past year. I was in India for a month and finally got to stay with them and see how they work collectively. One of the things that we did… Because we were participating in festivals in very small, remote villages, was we developed some pieces. The attendees who were from fourteen different countries… And we developed pieces and took into the villages as part of their festival. So they performed and the single… We had three plays and a single piece of one play most often had the most interventions was when I was the antagonist. In one village, we performed in front of one thousand people and I was standing on stage having women scream at me in Bengali and lecture me about how horrible I was and what I should be doing. And I’m standing there trying to look like I’m reacting immediately, trying to judge what they’re saying and then I get the translation and then I would speak and then it would be translated and then they would speak.

Jeffrey: Wow.

Mark: It was an amazing experience. But it was wonderful to, one, be the antagonist. Also to see how this group that has been together for so many years functions as a collective, but in a manner and a scope different than any other collective I had ever seen. They have a center and a number of people live there, so it’s almost commune. And then they have a dorm in the same place. Upstairs theatre and the outdoor theatre. And there’s a core company and there are companies in thirty-one villages and they do constant research. They basically do constant research and they will develop plays. In every performance of every play that they do, they take detailed notes on every intervention and they think about ways to mold the plays.

And so they’re taking all of this and molding and then they’ll go to a village where they know there’s an issue with education of young, which is a variable. And they do the performance and they get interventions and lots of discussion and then they go back, a month later, six weeks later and do the identical performance and then they do it again. So the entire community is trying the proposals that came out of the intervention, thinking more deeply about the issue. And when they see the play again, they bring a whole new set of expectations to the play and awareness and then they do it again. And policy’s changing. The power of Jana Sanskriti as a community member is stunning to see. Absolutely stunning. And there’s activity and support. They were beautiful places and Jana Sanskriti has had a great deal to do with helping those communities have a way of exploring things that they wanted to look at and to function collectively so people get paid with it. So it’s a really interesting structure.

Jeffrey: Pardon me. Maybe you said this and I missed it, but it’s in reaction TO or it’s an extension of?

Mark: It’s definitely an extension of.

Jeffrey: It’s an extension of. Okay.

Mark: They, Sima and Sanjoy, studied with Boal for a long time.

Jeffrey: Got it. Okay.

Mark: They were very close. Boal has a son, Julien. I met Julien when he was doing workshops with Boal. He now has a theatre school in Rio where almost all of the students are activists. In other words, he’s teaching activists to use theatre. Stunning group. Last year, eight of them were in Chicago and he’s just finished his PhD. His book is coming out and he looks at oppression and the way in which Forum theatre functions differently than Augusto did. Very much complimentary but a different approach and a more systemic and less individual. And he’s remained very, very close with Jana Sanskriti and with Sima and Sanjoy. So there’s a sort of international sharing that’s going on sort of constantly. One of the questions that you had when you sent me some questions we might talk about—

Jeffrey: Yeah. Yeah.

Theatre is not the change, but theatre can explore the change and promote the change.

Mark: … is is there anything I want to know about Boal? One of the most important is that he was constantly, constantly looking for knowledge that came from everybody so that he could continue to develop tools and develop them with the company that really were the tools to find the steps. Theatre is not the change, but theatre can explore the change and promote the change. But that wasn’t the answer that I came up with. But I thought about that question. The thing that I’d love people to understand about Boal in all, it was joy in the work, it was always laughter. And that’s something that we try to make. Not the things are light and easy, but that there are human beings in the room enjoying being with each other, enjoying the kind of active hope that comes from exploring ways to make change. Or even asking questions or even looking at what we should ask questions about. All of those things are aspirational. They are process-oriented and they’re human. And so they’re joyful.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

Mark: And laughter and Boal went together.

Jeffrey: That’s great. Thank you for that. Yeah, I love hearing these more and more anecdotes about him and his life. I think that’s the first time I’ve heard joy brought into it. Well, Mark, thank you again for everything. This has been great. I’m so glad you’re local and we can have this conversation anytime, but I’m really glad that we put some of these anecdotes and stories into the brains of some listeners. So thank you so much… A lot.

Mark: It’s been a great deal of fun. I appreciate the work you’re doing in town and so we’ve made a couple of connections before and it’s really nice to just sit and talk.

Jeffrey: Isn’t it?

Mark: Without, “We’ve got this group of students. We’ve got to get this work done.”

Jeffrey: Right.

Mark: Or, “We only have twenty minutes at a coffee shop.”

Jeffrey: Exactly.

Mark: So this has been really lovely. Thank you.

Jeffrey: Thank you. There were quite a few heartbeats throughout this conversation that I’d love to connect. All right. So something that I want to note about this is that Mark was tying together all of the social aspects of his life from food inequality at the co-op where he worked to the Boal work that he has done since and to his own directing. He caught all of this in the seventies and eighties and still sees the hierarchies that exist today. The layers he can point to are fascinating and interconnected, especially regarding wealth inequality. I appreciate what he said about documenting the work, something that was central to the first three episodes of this season. So go ahead and listen back to those conversations regarding the National Endowment for the Humanities Institute at the Pig Iron Theater. Finally, the fact that Mark has been thinking about sustainability throughout all his work is also a clear indicator that we need to keep fighting and thinking about this topic. How do we sustain theatre? How do we sustain ourselves in the theatre?

It is a big question. And that’s what we’re here for, y’all. Thank you, thank you, thank you folks for being here and joining me on this episode as well. All right, folks, that’s all for now. I want to leave you with some words that Mark said, that, “Theatre is not the change. But theatre can explore the change.” Keep exploring those big ideas, artists, and we’ll see you next time on From the Ground Up.

Think you or someone ought to be on the show? Connect with us on Facebook and on Instagram @FTGU_pod or me @Ensemble_Ethnographer. And, of course, we always love fan mail at [email protected]. This podcast’s audio bed was created by Kiran Vidula. You can find him on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and at flutesatdawn.org. From the Ground Up is produced as a contribution to the HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows wherever you find podcasts. Be sure to search with the word HowlRound and subscribe to receive new episodes. If you loved this podcast, post a rating and write a review on those platforms. This helps other people find us. You can also find a transcript for this episode along with a lot of other progressive and disruptive content on howlround.com. Have an idea for an exciting podcast essay or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to this digital commons.