"Teacher- What is liberty?"

"Mister, are you a facilitator?"

On the first day Quenna and I were expecting to sit in and watch the teacher conduct the class. Not so. There was an action scheduled later that week downtown and we were asked to work with a group of students to create a skit that they could perform outside the city building during the demonstration. So we worked with a group of students that we had just met. I anticipated that students might be resistant and challenging, but when we asked to hear some stories of their experiences in their community, many stories were offered. When we asked for them to embody the stories and start getting to the work of creating the scene they got up and started acting as the police officers, neighbors, drug dealers that were in the scene as we talked about what we saw in common in the stories. I was excited to watch them perform later in the week.
An Journal excerpt from this class:

What Queena and I found was that facilitating as we did, involved asking pointed and
directed questions to the students, helping them mold their ideas, asking how
they felt, if they related, what they saw, and how it relates to what they see
everyday. We had a chance to do a closing reflection with this group before the
time was over, the students seemed to have positive feedback and said it was
fun.

An journal excerpt from the day of the action:

The next day was the action, many
of the students that were there the day before at school were not there for the
action. We didn’t have almost any students from the second group, and a few
from the first. One of the teens who played an intervener did not want to
perform as another student who played with her was not there. Guadalupe had to
go out and find a third student. The two students who began the skit were there
and, while both were shy, agreed to do it. We did about two or three run
throughs, and the big problem was their voices didn’t carry, they couldn’t be
heard. I asked Quenna if she knew of any voice excercises we could do with
them, and we came to the solution to ask them if they could use the bull mics.
Two of them agreed, one did not, she said it make her nervous and she would
rely on her own voice. She was playing the intervener and so her role was
critical and I hoped that she would carry her voice. We all waited with the
crowd of YJC students and teachers, chanting then we were informed that it was
time for them to go. I held the toddler of the one of the actors, minutes
before we tried to give a pep talk and say that if they felt nervous to go
ahead and use that energy, to go ahead and move with that, and to tell them
that it was okay if they are nervous. 

The scene was short, and the voices
didn’t quite carry, the least audible was the voice of the intervener. When the
scene was done there was a big applause from YJC. Quenna’s question earlier of,
“Who is the audience?,” still rang in my head. I was proud of the students,
they got up and did the skit, that is what is important. Their audience was
each other, the school. In two days time three students went from a classroom
to a street performance, I was very proud of their work. I was still proud of
the students from Monday who performed in class, Guadalupe mentioned how one
student had never participated at all this year, but I noticed her watching
most of the time, we encouraged her to come in, she stepped in and when we
challenged what she could say, someone from the class, the most vocal and
gregarious shut her down by making a comment, she then challenged him to come
in, which he did, and they both played the role of intervention.        

---

Very early on in the year, the main teacher of the class and Quenna and I and Julio who had been assisting the class previously became the lead facilitators of the class, planning every session. We began with many many games and warm up activities building to image work. One of the first big image activities we did was from the Cornerstone Community Theater manual:



We asked students to line up in two row facing each other. We told them we were going to give them a word and that we were going to ask them to think about what that word meant to them. Then we were going to ask that they begin to make an image with their bodies of what the word represents to them. What we liked about the activity is that it builds from very concrete things to more abstract. Once the students were in images we asked the opposite facing row to observe the image, then to mimic it so the original 'statue' could see his or her image reflected back to them.

Journal excerpts from facilitating the activity:




This activity particularly as described in the last excerpt above them helped to propel us into antagonist work where we asked students to speak back to the voices that prevent them from doing what they want to do. Speaking to these "Cops in the Head" is key in Theater of the Oppressed work as a technique to experiment and practice in responding to oppression, but this activity is integral to responding to the self hate and inner dialogue that pushes down on all of us. When we asked our students what how other communities or media views them, or what the expectations of them are, they shared with us:

Fear                             lower standards                                                  Failure       

meant for us to fail                               makes you feel like you can't do nothing        

                              systems train them wrong

                                                                            we should rise above it

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