From spectator to protagonist
Theatre of the Oppressed is a range of techniques, games and exercises, using embodied narrative to support the empowerment and liberation of individuals and their communities. The approach was developed by Augusto Boal in South America, and has since been used all over the world in the building of community, to dynamize social engagement, and to support individuals to realise their creative potential for personal and social transformation.
“Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.” – Augusto Boal, Games For Actors & Non-Actors
Theatre of the Oppressed is a potent tool in the facilitation of group work, community empowerment, and the holding of liberatory conversations. This training lays the foundation praxis for you to explore the forms and tools of the key tools of Image and Forum Theatre, aswell as a host of games, techniques and exercises underpinned with the theory and philosophy of Boal’s work.
In essence, Theatre of the Oppressed utilises theatre in order to generate solutions to real problems, create dialogue where before there was only monologue, and ultimately “humanise humanity” by enabling people to develop the skills and faculties to liberate themselves and others. It creates space for a rehearsal for life. It is a way of analysing the power dynamics of our society and our personal relationships, purporting that personal problems are social problems.
This week long training will explore two fundamental aspects of Boal’s work:
Participants can expect to gain:
“When does a session of The Theatre of the Oppressed end? Never – since the objective is not to close a cycle, to generate a catharsis, or to end a development. On the contrary, its objective is to encourage autonomous activity, to set a process in motion, to stimulate transformative creativity, to change spectators into protagonists. And it is precisely for these reasons that the Theatre of the Oppressed should be the initiator of changes the culmination of which is not the aesthetic phenomenon but real life… its objective is to become integrated into reality, into life.” – Boal
This training will be hosted at our sibling centre near the village of Abella de la Conca, in the mountains some kilometres away form the Ulex Centre itself.
In the solidarity economy:
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George is a practitioner of the Theatre of the Oppressed, writer, performance poet and natural farmer who has travelled extensively across Europe and Asia working with groups ranging from the homeless in London, subsistence farmers in India, victims of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to recovering heroin addicts and street kids in Kuala Lumpur. As founder of the training collective Reboot The Roots they have a decade of experience as a facilitator and educator in fields ranging from TESOL and drama therapy to drug rehabilitation and conflict resolution. They qualified in their Certificate in Joker Training and Certificate in Rainbow of Desire whilst working with Cardboard Citizens in 2010.
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Reboot the Roots is a charity that promotes social inclusion through the arts. It uses theatre, music and workshops to support people who are denied their rights to full, happy and active participation in society. This includes those recovering from addiction, people living with HIV/AIDS and individuals who have been in conflict with the law. They facilitate workshops with the socially excluded, train trainers from other organisations and NGOs in techniques of art for inclusion, and help other practitioners to achieve their goals through logistical support, consultation and funding. They believe that creative tools for social transformation can enable people to participate fully and equally in society.
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Isa (she/her) is an educator, facilitator, and author. She grew up in France before setting off on an adventure to London, where she worked as a freelance journalist, French teacher, and administrator for a community arts organisation, all while writing her PhD on the concept of community. She became Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London (UK), where she taught for 10 years before leaving academia to breathe the air of freedom and collective action. She co-founded and co-facilitates, with Jay Jordan, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, which has been bringing together artists and activists since 2004 to co-design and implement creative forms of direct action that are as joyful as they are politically effective. Active in social movements for over 20 years, she has facilitated assemblies of several hundred people, co-organised international mobilisations and climate camps, and trained thousands of people in reinventing forms of civil disobedience. Her passion is exploring collective dynamics and all the ways in which these can be made more fruitful, joyful, and caring, particularly through popular education and rituals. She has been involved with the zad in Notre Dame des Landes since 2016.
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An Maeyens (she/her) is a facilitator and trainer with over two decades of experience in grassroots movements. She specialises in creative, inclusive agenda design and brings deep expertise on group culture, power dynamics, and transformative learning. Starting of in the anti-globalisation movement she has trained thousands in civil disobedience, supported international coalitions, and developed multilingual training programmes and toolkits. Her work spans movements, cultures, and countries, guided by a commitment to care, accessibility, and leaderful organising.
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Ari’s activism began in 2002, at age 16, as a Bosnian refugee in Canada, where they founded and coordinated a group for LGBTIQ high school students and allies. They were a co-founder and leader at kolekTIRV in Croatia and Trans Network Balkan, involved in community organizing, advocacy, program management, team coordination, capacity building, education, media work, campaigns, events, fundraising, etc. In 2024, they joined the Supervisory Board of the Croatian Trade Union Collective of United Precarious Workers and Activists (SKUPA).
Beyond the Balkan region, Ari served as a Board member at Transgender Europe (TGEU), where they held roles as Secretary, Treasurer, and later Co-chair. They have also been a trainer with the Center for Artistic Activism and served on the Advisory Committee and since 2022 as a Community Care Facilitator at FRIDA — The Young Feminist Fund. Since 2024 they are the Operations Manager at Global Philanthropy Project.
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Sergio (all pronouns) was born in Romania and migrated to Germany in the early 2010s. In the past, he was a social worker with homeless people and a social consultant for Eastern European migrants for various organisations. Trained as a filmmaker, he spent two years making a documentary about the ‘civic reawakening’ in Romania and the waves of protest it brought with it. In connection to this, Sergio is currently co-steering the development of an online open-source participative knowledge production platform on activism in Romania. Over the past nine years, Sergiu has offered his skills to various journalists, grassroots collectives and campaigns, mostly working within the labour rights, climate justice, international solidarity and anti-authoritarian movements in Germany and Romania. Nonetheless, his biggest focus since 2020 has been his work as an organiser with the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers Union, where he focuses mostly on organising Romanian migrant workers on construction sites, in factories and in the agricultural field.
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Linzy Na Nakorn is a movement director, politicised somatics practitioner, community organiser and facilitator. For the past decade she has been facilitating movement, body work and creating theatre, dance and participatory performance that advocates for and organises with communities in pursuit of housing, disability and racial justice. Her movement practice focuses on trauma-informed approaches to building resilience, capacity and joy via way of the body for personal, interpersonal and community sustainability. Linzy was a Co-Director of The Big Ride for Palestine in partnership with The Gaza Sunbirds, Native Woman Ride and Middle East Children’s Alliance; using cycling as a tool for mobilising active solidarity and in support of campaigning for the rights and self-determination of the Palestinian people. Linzy is part of a UK network of activists and artists advocating for Radical Care – supporting organisations, researchers and institutions to work towards system change in societal approaches to labour, leadership and access.
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Jeroen (he/him pronouns) has been involved in grassroots social movements for more than two decades now, starting back when he was fifteen. Throughout the years the fights for “climate justice” and “migrant justice” have been consistently on top of the list of struggles that make his heart beat faster. A key transformative moment for Jeroen was reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire’s revolutionary pedagogy gave him a language to support the creation of emancipatory learning environments, rooted in a desire for collective liberation. Jeroen has also been exploring in depth Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects among other methodologies to build his trainer’s toolkit. Inspired by the liberatory possibilities of these traditions, he started an organization with a friend, LABO vzw, based in Belgium, where he has worked as a trainer and campaigner between 2013 and 2023.
Ulex: Latin (argelaga Catalan, gorse English) noun:
1. A thorny-evergreen flowering shrub, with a high capacity for regeneration and resilience. Its seedpods open in contact with fire and it reshoots from charred stumps. A successionary plant that grows well under challenging conditions. It improves soil fertility through nitrogen fixing, preparing the way for renewed biodiversity.
2. A traditional choice for igniting fires. Burns hot and bright.
3. A networked project adding nutrition and fertility to European social movements through training and capacity building. It kindles the realisation of social justice, ecological intelligence, and cognitive vitality.
