Changing the World: One Performance at a Time
- realityskimming
- 4 days ago
- 11 min read
by Andrew J. Burton
About the Story Thing (2025) - 12
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"About the Story Things" is a thematic series of articles, sponsored by Reality Skimming Press. Pieces will appear every other Monday Jun 2 through to the end of 2025. Query us about contributing to this or future themes at https://facebook.com/relskim or email info@realityskimming.com
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Where do stories come from? Beneath even the most diverse tales, science fiction, horror, murder mysteries, romance, fantasy, there are elements of real life. The story arcs of each character interacting with one another, are the heart and soul of what we write.
For many years my life was shaped by my work in theatre. Years ago, a director gifted me with a dog-eared copy of “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”, by Augusto Boal. This book, and others by Boal, changed the course of my work, not just in theatre, but as an activist, a social worker and therapist and as a writer. I had the opportunity to learn from, and work with Boal himself on a number of occasions. I also worked with other practitioners of Boal’s practices. In 1996, I began work on using theatre as a means of social change in Prince George, which led to the founding of the Street Spirits Theatre Company in 1999.
Street Spirits developed as a repertory company, involving young people in learning the skills and craft of acting and play creation to support positive change in the world. Through the company, we were able to create performances about problems of concern to communities and use a forum theatre process to, as Boal put it, transform audiences from “spectators” to “spectactors”. Forum theatre involved audience members stopping the performance, coming on stage, taking a role in the play and improvising ways to address one or more of the issues in the story. The process sometimes generated real-world solutions to significant concerns. Sometimes audience interventions failed. Whatever happened, the audience spent the time of the performance thinking about real world problems and what they could do to resolve them. Over time, our performances resulted in actual changes in communities across the country. Over many years we created and performed hundreds of plays and led workshops all over North America to introduce the process to others. We have worked with countless young people learning and performing with a goal driven by the words of one of our participants; “Changing the World, One Performance at a Time”.
The performance and play creation workshops we provided all over North America, involved performers and audiences in a collaborative, creative experience that dealt with real world concerns in a meaningful way. At the heart of the work was a process of observation. Noticing the world around us, taking note of the places and events that shape people’s lives, the challenges they face in their daily lives, the relationships, both good and bad that affect them, how they cope with adversity, the mistakes they make, the successes that seemed to serve their journey. Working collaboratively with others to develop stories, conflicts, dialogues and resolutions was a key practice that influenced my writing and creativity. How those experiences of people, places, relationships and challenges developed and played out became the basis of a collaborative play creation process that resulted in several hundred performances, many of which resulted in real world change in the communities we visited. Sometimes it was the little things. At other times it grew to a change on a grand scale. Beneath it all was a story based on human experience taken from life and crafted into performance by performers and their audiences.
What follows is a recollection of one such workshop.
The Process
It is late in the evening, a Wednesday night in Mission, BC. I am walking alone down First Avenue getting some air and decompressing from a series of long, tiring days. Along the sidewalk beyond Tim Horton’s, there are a number of young people lounging in storefronts. The odour of marijuana drifts on the cool night breeze. The smokers eye me suspiciously. I am not from here. I am a stranger, an unknown quantity. I can feel the attention as I move silently down the street past the closed-up storefronts and the restaurants with the “Washrooms for customer use only” signs. There is a clash of cultures here. An element of that clash resides in the task, for some, of finding places to pee, to move bowels, to wash the grime of the streets from face and hands. One such searcher makes eye contact; “Spare change?” he asks. I pass along the price of a regular coffee and a donut. A part of me speculates that it might also be a part of the way to a rock to smoke in the alley. An internal dialogue begins. “What business is it of mine what he spends it on? What purpose does that speculation serve?” In the heart of discourse, I seem to have drifted toward a particular side of a common debate. In this dance of the street, I see the commonalities with the play being created over the past several days.
I had arrived in Mission on a Friday evening. The work began on Saturday morning. Fifteen people in varying stages of preparation for theatre gathered expectantly in a church hall. The age range was from 13 to 70. Four participants had worked with me before and were looking at this as a time to put things into practice. Six days were set aside to learn performance and play creation skills and to develop awareness of some of the problems the community struggled with. Saturday was a day of laughter. Participants chased each other across the floor, walked blind, pushed against one another, posed and mimicked each other. By afternoon they were creating story in frozen images, moving from tableau to tableau with a shifting narrative first one then another telling elements of the story they had developed in our deceptively simple workshop process. By late afternoon many were tired, muscles ached and perplexed looks betrayed an inkling of what might be possible with this novel performative process.
Sunday started late. The church had events in the morning so we had to wait, cooling our heels on the lawn outside while children sang the praises of their favoured deity in what some already called “our space”. Sunday became the day of voice and movement. Our frozen images came to life. Dialogue and action flowed across the floor in waves of emotional conflict. Strong feelings moved one or two to tears. More theatre games defused the feelings, focused the group, developed skill and drew participants into being in the moment.
Monday morning found the group meeting in a funky cafe. The actors checked in, then scattered into the streets. They were tasked to approach people on the street and engage them in conversation. Their purpose was to explore concerns about life in the community that could inform the play they would create. Two hours later excited observations circled through the group. What needs to change in Mission? What are you concerned about? What do you worry about living here? The group compared notes on their experiences. An old man in the downtown had railed at them, insisting that there was “too much Jesus”. An elder woman wanted to impose curfews on everyone. Some people were concerned that the homeless population was increasing. Others were concerned about health care and wait lists. There were concerns about drug trafficking. There were concerns about gangs and organized crime. The group began the play creation process. Scenes were developed to explore the nature of the problems in the Mission community. Some scenes captured the interest and imagination of the group participants. Some story elements reflected experiences of group members. Some were recreations of things seen and heard within the community. Some captured the imagination of the group. Others were set aside for another day.
On Tuesday one young girl distanced herself from the process for part of the morning. Concerned, I sat down with her on the pavement beside the building for some time listening to hints of pain. Her family was falling apart. She had been forced to leave. Sometimes it is the little things people focus on in challenging times. They take on depth and meaning. They are important. They matter. She had been taking dancing classes. She had loved it but no longer had the money. She believed she had nowhere to go. For her, it was not the alienation from family, the prospect of homelessness that disturbed her the most. It was not being able to dance. She said that she feared she could not express those things that mattered to her in drama. She said she was not good enough. Dance was her means of expression. She feared losing it. We returned to the hall, collected a group of participants. We played a game with choreography. Combining elements of “Interplay” (a dance-based performance technique) and “Image theatre” (our process of creating physical images that encapsulate social, relational and sometimes political concerns). As a group, we created an interpretive dance that spoke to some of the issues of trying to help, of bringing people together to share their pain and share their strength. On show night it would become the opening of the performance. Our young dancer would take centre stage.
In the afternoon a latecomer joined the group. Edgy and haunted, she apologized for missing the first days. She lived in a derelict car by the railroad yards. She had lost track of time, days blurring into days. She bragged about being ten days clean. There was a look of desperation to her. She wanted to be there. She expected to be turned away. We sat in circle with the group. Some participants knew her, knew some of her story. The group decided to welcome her into the process. She added her voice to the performances we were developing.
By Wednesday we had established the focus and the flow, defined characters and relationships, explored the challenges of health care, life on the streets, pressure to deal in drugs, the strong arm of the gang that controlled the dealers. A barista at the coffee shop made suggestions for the play, things she had seen on the sidewalk beyond the windows. A businessman from the Optimists club added some dialogue overheard on a downtown street. We worked through theatre games and exercises to develop performance skills. We ran through the play with actors standing at opposite ends of the room to get used to speaking loudly.
On Thursday we moved to the Clarke Theatre. The actors worked the play, getting used to the stage space. We had a technician who could create lighting effects on the fly. We set up a sound system with area mikes so we could ensure that everyone would be heard. We ran the play then played theatre games to settle frazzled nerves.
On show night the theatre was buzzing. People from all over the community gathered to witness and to take part. Our performance opened with the dance. Seven people told a wordless tale of dealing with their private hurts, moving as puppets, strings pulled by painful pasts. Our principal dancer came to the floor, stopped their movements one at as time, bringing new ways of interpretation, New movements within the dance pushed other dancers to change their stories. Another movement creating images illustrating a different experience. Still more involved swinging from one place to the next. The dancers showed an experience of finding new ways to move through the challenges of life with symbolic movements. The dancers shared their joy, and led the room into fresh moments of insight. Some in the audience rose and danced with them. Some shed tears. There was applause. Performers and audience shared thoughts and feelings about their experience.
The forum theatre performance was introduced and began. The performance dramatized a story created during the workshop. The meat of the play focused on issues identified during the creative process, problems identified and fleshed out through discussions with people form the community and workshop participants.
For actors and audience, the core issues were of drugs, crime, alienation and homelessness. Beneath the created scenes were undercurrents of isolation, helplessness, fear and anger. Within the substance of the play, people did not seem to connect, to support each other easily. It appeared to be, that when problems were seen, they were someone else’s concern. The choreographed piece at the start had spoken to this. It had set the tone. We all need to share our awareness and our solutions to get to something that works.
The Forum process involved the audience in solving the dilemmas in the play, pushing back strongly against the “not my problem” mindset. Audience members stopped the play, came up on stage, joined the characters in their struggles and worked things out through dramatic improv. Sometimes the audience’s interventions were actions that would have put them in harm’s way. We debriefed about this. “You can’t let fear stop you.” One audience member said. “You have to do the right thing.” Augusto Boal’s words resonate for me in these moments; “Solidarity means running the same risk.” The process began to show themes that led to comments from the audience in the talk-back after each intervention:
“Family has a responsibility to lead and to support.”
“The community has a responsibility to educate and to provide services that make it possible for people to see better options.”
“Services need to be more flexible, more available.”
“People need to feel safe and to have adequate housing, access to positive choices.”
“Justice needs to be restorative, not punitive.”
“It’s not okay to stand and watch.”
“Where injustice exists, everyone must actively oppose it. To fail to do so implies your consent.”
The show ended after many interventions. There is a closing discussion between audience and actors about the issues, about how participants in the event can create change. Some participants share personal stories. Real possibilities start to move through the auditorium. The audience adjourns to the lobby. Discussion continues. Connections are being made. Plans are being hatched. Our young woman living in the derelict car is offered a place to stay and help to make some changes. Our dancer has offers as well. Her mother had come to see the play. They have a moment together. The workshop participants circle to debrief and say goodbye. Some have plans to continue. Some are taking the process to other communities. All are both happy and sad at the same time. Change is going to come.
So what does all this have to do with writing? The heart and soul of writing lives in the space between. There is the story we hope to tell. There is the story experienced by the reader. As many writers are aware, what we write is not always what the reader experiences. In the space between, there is a story that emerges from a synergy between writer and reader. Understanding this allows a writer to craft work that not only speaks from the artistic vision of the creator but does so in a way that is clear and compelling to a reader. We can, by considering the perspective of the reader, create works that speaks to readers of their concerns. We can incorporate elements of story that are germane to the lived experience of our audience, factors that draw upon their perspective of the world and of themselves, their hopes and dreams, fears and nightmares. By doing so we can build a connection with our readership, one in which the reader experiences a bond with the story and the storyteller. As a part of this process, it is a good practice to include questions embedded in the story for the reader to ponder; “What do you want to happen? How could you resolve this in a good way? What else might happen if you do that?” Done right, the creative process can engage readers in awareness, not just of issues of concern, but of ways and means to take action to resolve them. The audience member or the reader, not only experiences the story but can experience being an element of the creative process.
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Andrew Burton is a Canada-based poet, playwright, and creative arts social worker, resident in Prince George, British Columbia, since the mid-1990s. He founded and served for many years as Artistic Director of Street Spirits Theatre, a socially-engaged theatre company that received a citation from Canada's Solicitor General, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal and the Otto Award. An award-winning writer across genres: poetry, short stories, articles, and plays, Burton has appeared in literary outlets such as Ellery Queen, Minstrel, Dreamland, CaNon, Dateline Arts, Parent Connection, Thimbleberry, and Biker magazines.
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References
Boal, A. (1992). Games for Actors and Non-Actors. Routledge. New York.
Image Credits
Booyabazooka. (2017, Jan 3). Conventional comedy and tragedy theatrical masks. Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Comedy_and_tragedy_masks_without_background.svg
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