Doing is the Best Way of Saying

Peter Kearns, BA, MA, H. Dip.

Forum Theatre is an emancipatory method of gathering analytical research and evaluating where information becomes active for disabled people who participate in a research process.

Organisations tend towards certain ends, i.e. working towards their identified aims and objectives. When they fail to progress towards these ends, due to current circumstances within and without the organisation, this is usually where research intervenes. The intervention of research, in all its qualitative and quantitative aspects, exists as a function of the effect an organisation seeks to redress in relation to barriers disabling its progression towards an achievement of aims and objectives. Therefore, what is the role of research processes that educate, inform, organise, influence and incite to action? Or should research simply be a means of contemplation favouring administrators, managers and technocrats of disciplinary society? (Foucault, 1996).

If standard research practices can be affirmed to be contemplation, emancipatory research could be considered to be always presenting a vision of the world in transformation. As such, emancipatory research is not only a means of contemplation; it is inevitably political, insofar as it shows the means of carrying out transformation. In terms of disabled people wanting to participate in the market based Irish mainstream, the methodology of emancipatory research should be about identifying issues, actions & developing pathways of economic, social and cultural access. A primary objective of such emancipatory research, and its methodologies, is to devolve information relevant to disabled people participating in the process. A second objective should be an attempt to demystify the pretended ‘objectivity’ of the waged or contracted researcher. There is also space for change with the research-contracting organisation, whose role should be to develop in relation to the needs identified with disabled participants and not just as a publisher of research portraying existing circumstances.

The act of experiential emancipatory research facilitates thinking as a form of action. It facilitates the participating disabled citizen to discover, by themselves, that which they carry within them. Experiential emancipatory research can be a transitive process. Researcher/animator and participant are learning together, establishing a dialogue, just as all human relations should be a dialogue. If such dialogues are not carefully nurtured or energetically demanded, they can rapidly turn into monologues, in which one or two of the interlocutors, i.e. researcher and the contracting organisation, have the right to speak. This reflects a Paulo-Freirian concept of the oppressed, dialogue that turns into monologue and research information that is taken from disabled participants into the ethereal of documentation eating technocrats. The task implies that the emancipatory researcher does not just gather disabled participants in an accessible room in order to induce information. Such information findings will only become active in another arena. The process should be about coming to know, through dialogue with disabled people both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation (Freire, 1990).

As with conventional qualitative & quantitative research, conventional theatre is governed by an intransitive relationship (Boal, 1996). Everything travels from the stage to the auditorium. Information and stories are transported and transferred in one direction. As with conventional analytical research methodology, the staged performance portrays emotions, ideas and even morality, all moving in one direction and nothing goes the other way. The tiniest noise, the smallest exclamation, the least sign of animated life displayed by a spectator, is the equivalent of being drunk on your first day in a sheltered workshop. Strong reactions during a performance or research process can be seen as dangerous and emotions such as anger are directed towards therapy. Conventional theatre, and likewise conventional research methodologies, relies on an individual’s behaviour in society being a matter of following rules and conventions. By contrast, the use of experiential methods such as Forum Theatre, in drama or during a research process, encourages dialogue to flux back and forth. Transitivity is not merely tolerated it is actively sought. Only dialogue, which requires critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking (Freire, 1990).

The use of Forum Theatre in an emancipatory research process, asks its audience active questions and expects active answers. As a research methodology it facilitates information to become active (Gates, 1999) within a group of disabled people who will ponder issues and make choices. Such experiential methodology begins with questions of power and what is the relationship between a disabled person’s motive for imagining power and the images created through Forum Theatre. The use of this experiential methodology questions what disabled participants think about power and how they view it in terms of images and narrative. That is, they create the images and narrative to think about power in relation to:

• Showing what they could do if they had power.
• Speculate about what they would do if they had power.
• Arrive at some assessment of what power they would need in order to improve current circumstances.
• Postulate a range of narratives that cannot be achieved by power structures that exist at present.

However dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of activities it covers. In terms of standard research practice, this leads to the dominance of correlation and documentation whose validity depends on the approval of established regimes of thought (Foucault, 1980). Therefore, experiential Forum Theatre does not accept that all social experiences have been exhausted. It potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions, which are not yet articulated as a social institution (Williams, 1979). Through non-verbal images and narrative primarily created by the participants, with the researcher as facilitator, the action of thinking perceives reality as process and transformation, rather than contemplating the status quo. It is often said that disabled people are all researched out. They continually participate in standard research meetings where information is extracted from them and analysed somewhere else. The issues raised during such meetings can be borne from a reality of being a disabled person in an Irish new millennium and are at times perceived to be dense, impenetrable and overwhelming. The experiential nature of Forum Theatre, in a research workshop setting, proceeds to investigate such contextual realities by means of abstraction through coded dramatic situations created by the group as a whole. The use of these dramatic images and narrative does not reduce the concrete experiences of disabled people to the abstract, but rather maintains both elements as opposites, which interrelate dialectically in the act of reflection (Freire, 1990).

The decoding or deconstruction of images and narratives requires moving from the abstract to the concrete. This requires participants to move from the part to the whole and then returning to change the part. An example of this would be a Forum image of a doctor and care worker standing over and discussing the needs of a sitting and silent disabled character. Although this initial non-verbal image is created by a small group of actors who then face the audience, it is the audience who are asked by the research facilitator to give the image meaning and life. The actors are always acting out the characters they roughly imaged, but it is the active audience, the whole research workshop group, that supply a narrative. Forum Theatre participants in the audience are asked to identify character and power relationships in the image and how they are related to the wider social construct. This is followed by the audience identifying education, social, employment and life-skill needs for all characters in the image of a transforming narrative. This, in turn, requires that the disabled people, the research subjects, recognise themselves in the narrative of the abstract image and recognise the image as a situation in which they find themselves, together with other disabled people. It is not in the tragic characters of the image that pity and fear manifest themselves, but rather in the spectators (Boal, 1979). According to Aristotle’s Poetics, something underserved happens to a character that resembles ourselves.

This flux and reflux of active-information from the abstract to the concrete occurs during an analysis of a narrative image and leads to the supersedence of the abstraction by the critical perception of the concrete (Freire, 1990). The perception of reality for a disabled person, participating in a research process, is no longer confined to being dense, impenetrable and overwhelming. The experiential structure of image, character and transforming narrative evident in Forum Theatre is different from role-playing. Role-playing depends on an individual portraying somebody and usually entails the individual drawing on his or her own experiences to develop a role, an individual constructed role that is then performed to a workshop audience. This encourages the individual to draw from their own real issues and can lead to uncomfortable situations where the participant becomes the focus and is separate from the wider group. It is their own interpretation of issues, neurosis and isolation that becomes the problem, which is not necessarily a problem shared by the group. This somewhat mirrors the Medical, or more precisely, the Individual Model, i.e. the individual who “can’t” do something is focussed on as having a problem. With the focus on the role-playing individual, a group can become alienated from the role-playing experience. It becomes the antithesis of the social model; the problem is with the individual, not themes shared by the whole group and the wider society.

The real threat of standard research investigation methods is not that the supposed objects of the investigation, such as disabled people, discovering that they are to be co-researchers, might adulterate the analytical results. On the contrary, the danger lies in the risk of shifting the focus of the research from the meaningful themes to the people themselves, thereby treating the people as objects of the investigation (Friere, 1990).

The common garden researcher does not produce objects of investigation only for themselves or the research participants. By correlation and documentation their investigation becomes a commodity. This is where there could be a weakness residing in emancipatory research methodology. When emancipatory researchers produce documentation, they are responding to the necessities of the contract organisation or body. Their way of observing and correlating feelings, reactions, anger or frustration is necessarily transformed into a commodity for the contracting body. A new element is introduced: external demands, commodity demands that are at times external to disabled people who participated in the research process. The findings of emancipatory methodologies are transformed into a commodity, which now confronts the competition of the shelves and the rituals of the standard research market. The research does not necessarily respond anymore to the demands of the disabled participants, but to the demands and language of policy makers as contemplative audiences. The process is no longer spontaneous; it is induced and led by the mainstream. The mainstream judges according to the criteria of what is available, itsees the new with the same tired eyes as it saw the old (Boal, 1998). The confrontation between the emancipatory researcher and the contracting organisation, or even the research market, becomes a life and death business struggle for the self-employed researcher/animator. Because such a researcher facilitates the revelation of the new, that which was not fully communicated before, he or she is in essence a subversive on a contractual based subsistence.

In appealing to the mainstream, its market laws must be accepted. The mainstream has not experienced the emancipatory research process, it does not understand and it misunderstands. Disabled people become silent, when they do not posses the necessary information to decide. By providing experiential environments, information can become active at the level of disabled people participating in an emancipatory research process. Active-information can change and decide developments. As emancipatory research enables disabled people to show and to speak, so they become part of the struggle and the struggle becomes part of the research effect. All that happens only happens because there is a struggle (Freire, 1990). That is to say, each disability related contract for the emancipatory researcher carries within itself an antagonism, which makes the circumstances of a disabled participant move from what it is to what it is not.