THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED

for Community Action and Embodying Change

Theatre of the Oppressed (T.O.) is an embodied physical practice to disrupt, transform, and design strategies to challenge internalized, interpersonal and systemic oppression. T.O. offers tools to explore shared struggles and histories and then invent new futures together which can be done in service of co-designing visions goals and strategies.

How You Can Work With Us

We tailor content and curriculum to meet your needs. We facilitate tailored workshops with organizations,  universities, and high schools. Our T.O. “Jokers” or facilitators each have 13-25 years experience as skilled practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed and other liberatory performance mediums.

START A CONVERSATION contacting Tatiana Chaterji at tatiana@collabchange.org if you are interested in learning more!

Grassroots Storytelling & Cultural Resistance

Through gathering in public for an action or reflecting with our closest community members, comrades and colleagues, with T.O., we lift up invisibilized stories. We devise and support campaigns and direct actions with Invisible Theatre, giant puppetry, guerrilla theater, flash mobs and related arts-based interventions.

All of our T.O. work is highly interactive and experiential. We embrace all physical abilities and health/access needs, with a warm invitation for everyone to move their body the ways that their body moves.

May Day Action with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, photo by Brooke Anderson.

Curious?

If you’re not sure in what ways you could work with us, here is a list of workshops we have offered in the past: 

  • We offer 3 hour mini-playshops for people and groups who want to explore a particular issue together or devise a particular strategy or action.

  • We invite you to dive into three traditions within the T.O. canon: Body De-mechanization (embodied practice), Image Theatre, and Forum Theatre. You will experience them as generative, educational and strategic tools - with historical grounding in its origins of class analysis struggle, and for use in the current political moment.

  • Training for Trainers, facilitators or “difficult-ators” of T.O. You’ve experienced T.O. as a participant, attended playshops, perhaps even led a warm-up game every once in a while. Now you’re ready to take things to the next level - come to hone your skills as a “Joker,” or Facilitator of T.O.!

    In a deck of cards, the jokers do not belong to any suit, and can serve as a wildcard by building alliances across different groups. In Theatre of the Oppressed, the Joker moves in between the actors and audience to probe, challenge and support collective insight. By complicating or problematizing the situation that’s being presented, the Joker holds the group and opens pathways to realize how and when change can happen.

    In this training, you will have the opportunity to:

    • Ask specific questions about how to apply T.O. exercises in your work;

    • Practice your facilitation with active guidance from the trainers;

    • Receive a written manual on T.O. facilitation; and

    • Connect with others who are inspired by embodied, creative transformation of political struggle.

  • Training for classroom teachers, after school teachers, program leaders, educators, support staff, counselors, youth organizers and community members who work with young people. Participants will learn techniques and best practices for effective facilitation in high-trauma environments with youth.

  • Regular play/practice session for people who identify as POC. We consider our lives as workers, educators, artists, folks outside of Eurocentrism and dominance - or right in the middle of it, depending on how you see it. Come to learn tools for creative resistance, express yourself, flex your facilitation muscles, revel in the wisdom that our bodies hold. Expect to find community and laughter in this non-judgmental, politicized, kind, inclusive, joyful setting.

  • Two-day learning laboratory for drama therapists and non-clinicians alike who are already familiar with improvisational and theatrical techniques for processing individual and family histories, emotions and traumas.

    Day 1: Introduction to T.O.; Systemic Analysis; Considering Power (structural, personal, relational); Oppression-Liberation Framework

    Body De-mechanization, Image Theatre, Forum Theatre

    Day 2: Integrating Boalian Tools with Therapeutic and Healing Modalities

    Deepening Image & Forum, Rainbow of Desire, Cop-in-the-Head

  • Developed with the White Noise Collective, training participants explore internalized messages of white privilege and gendered oppressions as well as unpack common dilemmas and contradictions in our work as racial justice allies and accomplices. Come ready to be simultaneously self-critical and self-loving,serious and playful.

Participants in a room standing in a circle, holding their left palms up to the face of the person at their left, in a TO game exploring power called Colombian Hypnosis.

A Partial List of Current & Past Partners

Movement organizations

Bay Rising

Core Align

Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

APEN (Asian Pacific Environmental Network)

Schools

Middlebury Institute for International Studies

Dominican University

San Francisco University

Cal State East Bay 

Castlemont High School

California Institute for Integral Studies 

HIGHLIGHTS FROM SOME OF OUR PREVIOUS COLLABORATIONS

  • Image Theater for May Day with APEN (Asian Pacific Environmental Network) to connect immigration and environmental justice. (2017)

  • Guerrilla Theater with Bay Rising to kick coal out of Oakland, a boxing match “Big Banks versus Mother Earth”. (2017)

  • Invisible Theatre to engage bystanders in dialogue with Stop Urban Shield. (2016)

  • ACTual Troupe: Eleven Bay Area based Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners convened to support campaigns, organizations and movements with creative direct action, direct assessments and direct dialogue about the most critical issues of our time. Our primary forum play "We Are Gathered Here Today; A Forum Play for Black Lives" was about police picnics, racial profiling, gentrification, media and incarceration as a driver of our economy. (2016-17)

  • Rysing Womyn in partnership with MISSSEY: arts-based leadership program for young women and gender nonconforming youth who have been directly impacted by criminalization, commercial-sexual exploitation, the foster care system, and other interlocking oppressive forces. It incorporates the following modalities to create a safe space for healing, sisterhood, critical consciousness, and political action: circle/restorative justice, poetry, performance, public speaking, theater/acting/dramatic expression, popular education/ oppression-liberation pedagogy, Theatre of the Oppressed, activism, and community organizing. (2017-18)

  • Unsticking Stuckness: Unsticking Stuckness I & II  was a 9 part workshop series held at the Oakstop and Oakland Peace Center that culminated in a training for trainers. (2015-16)

  • Beyond Partition: Part of the United States of Asian America Festival of the API Cultural Center, this workshop was a space for healing, critical consciousness, and creative expression for members of the South Asian diaspora. We addressed collective trauma from 1947 Partition, the largest human displacement in recorded history, and other fault lines and fractured memories of colonization, casteism, language politics, Islamophobia, and intergenerational cross-currents of religious conflict. We dove into the art of apology, physical storytelling, role and role reversal, and the sculpting of emotions. (2018)

  • Bridging Restorative Justice and Liberation Arts:  In partnership with the Oakland Unified School District, we host monthly sessions for teachers, RJ facilitators, school youth workers and other educators to deepen their skills in theater-based activities and facilitation. We explore dramatic play, embodiment, creative expression, and consider power in society. Both RJ and T.O. are modalities for healing, social and personal transformation, and leadership: we work at their intersection and bring overlapping core principles to life. (2018)

May Day Action with the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, photo by Brooke Anderson.