The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB)

founded in 1990

Upcoming TOPLAB Events Winter 2008

Except for the January 5 workshop, all workshops take place at:

The Brecht Forum
451 West Street (travel directions below)
New York City

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Saturday, January 5, 2008 from 10:00 am to 6:00 pm

A Workshop in Image Theater, a Theater of the Oppressed technique

facilitated by Jen Berger and Marie-Claire Picher

at The Vermont Workers' Center
294 North Winooski Avenue
Burlington, Vermont

Image Theater is designed to develop individual skills of observation and self-reflection, and cooperative group interaction.
Leadership-building and consensus-building games and techniques explore relations of power and group solutions to
concrete problems through "living body imagery." Discussions begin through the language of images, offering a fresh
approach to power analysis and new opportunities for the exchange of ideas.

Tuition--sliding scale: $20-$50

You can pre-register online at http://www.workerscenter.org/register/

For more information, go to http://www.workerscenter.org or write to toplab@toplab.org

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Saturday, January 19, 2008 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm, and
Sunday, January 20 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm

A Two-day Workshop in Image Theater: Images of Gentrification

facilitators to be announced

This workshop will emphasize topics related to gentrification and should have special appeal to people who are working
and organizing around issues related to gentrification, as well as to anyone who lives in communities that are threatened
by changes that benefit the rich at the expense of poor and working people. In addition, activists working on other social
and political issues will be able to adapt the TOPLAB gentrification-issue model for use in their own projects. All
participants will come away with a greater understanding of some critical issues facing our cities—and, increasingly, our
suburbs. By using those topics as the basis for this workshop, people working on other issues will be able to enhance
their own effectiveness among their particular constituencies and within their organizations.

As part of this workshop, we are pleased that Rene Francisco Poitevin, a researcher on urban and gentrification issues
who teaches at New York University's Gallatin School and is a member of the Brecht Forum's Task Force on Gentrification,
will join us to discuss the various issues that will inform these sessions.

It is highly recommended that people read the book The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World's Greatest City
Becoming Just Another Town, edited by Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett (New York, 2007: Princeton Architectural
Press, $24.95. ISBN-13: 978-1-56898-678-4 and ISBN-10: 1-56898-678-4).

Tuition--sliding scale: $95-$150

To pre-register, please send an email to toplab@toplab.org to let us know that you will be attending.

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Saturday, February 2 at 7:00 pm

Diabetic Drama: A Workshop

facilitated by Robbie McCauley

Are you concerned with the personal issues, as well as larger social issues, around the growing numbers of people with
diabetes?

Prior to her March 1 presentation of excerpts from Sugar, performance artist and teacher Robbie McCauley will hold
workshops open to anyone directly or indirectly living with diabetes, or who is interested in diabetes--especially the race and
class health care disparities concerning that condition. She would like 12 to 15 participants willing to engage with "diabetic
dramas". Participants may be asked to come back for one or more subsequent workshops (although participation in the first
workshop does not require one to attend subsequent sessions). Each workshop will include story exchanges about all types
of diabetes, and dramatic exercises designed to share and obtain information, and to break silences.

Then, on March 1 join us for a performance by Ms. McCauley of excerpts from Sugar, her theater piece that looks at
everything there is to see about sugar, from slavery to colonialism to American mythologies to diabetes.

Robbie McCauley has been an active presence in the American avant-garde theater for three decades. One of the early cast
members of Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, Ms. McCauley went
on to write and perform regularly in cities across the country, striving to facilitate dialogs on race between local whites and
blacks.

In the 1990s, she received both an OBIE Award (Best Play) and a New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award for
Sally's Rape, which she wrote, directed and performed.

A core member of the American Festival Project, she has practiced and taught theater in several communities throughout the
US and abroad. She is anthologized in several books, including Extreme Exposure; Moon Marked and Touched by Sun; and
Performance and Cultural Politics, edited respectively by Jo Bonney, Sydne Mahone, and Elin Diamond.

In 1998, her Buffalo Project was highlighted as one of the "the 51 (or so) Greatest Avant-Garde Moments" by the Village Voice,
a roster that included work by artists such as Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso, and John Cage. Her recent piece, Sugar, a work
in progress, was presented at Ohio State University in collaboration with several institutional departments and organizations
as well as with members of Columbus' Near East community.

Robbie McCauley is on the Performing Arts Department faculty at Emerson College in Boston.

Admission by voluntary contribution

To pre-register, please send an email to toplab@toplab.org to let us know that you will be attending.

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Friday, February 15 from 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm,
Saturday, February 16 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm, and
Sunday, February 17 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm

De-masking Stereotypes: An Approach to Healing through Storytelling

facilitated by Potri Ranka Manis

A practical workshop on the Paulo Freire methodology as applied and experienced within the historical context of the social and
political struggles against oppression in the Philippines.

Potri Ranka Manis is a registered nurse and a member of and facilitator with the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory. She is
also the Artistic Director of Kinding Sindaw (http://www.kindingsindaw.org), a Filipino indigenous dance, drama and martial arts
ensemble. She created and choreographed several Kinding Sindaw dance dramas and has trained since childhood in all the
traditional dance, music, and martial art forms of the Maranao people of the Philippines. She is an award winning poet and
playwright, and has performed throughout the Philippines, Middle East, Hong Kong and the United States.

Tuition--sliding scale: $110-$165

To pre-register, please send an email to toplab@toplab.org to let us know that you will be attending.

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Saturday, March 1 at 8:00 pm

Sugar

performed by Robbie McCauley

Award-winning actress Robbie McCauley returns to the Brecht Forum to present excerpts from her performance piece Sugar,
which looks at everything there is to see about sugar, from slavery to colonialism to American mythologies to diabetes. This
presentation, an ongoing work-in-progress, will incorporate some of the story exchanges told by participants in the "Diabetic
Drama" workshops facilitated by Ms. McCauley in February at the Brecht Forum. Through the interweaving of stories, images,
facts and historical legends we will see that diabetes is not only a medical issue but also one of race and class, and we will
also see how sugar is sometimes something that is very bittersweet.

In the 1990s, she received both an OBIE Award (Best Play) and a New York Dance and Performance (BESSIE) Award for
Sally's Rape, which she wrote, directed and performed.

Robbie McCauley is on the Performing Arts Department faculty at Emerson College in Boston.

Contribution--sliding scale: $6-$15
Free for Brecht Forum subscribers

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Saturday, March 8 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm, and
Sunday, March 9 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm

A Two-day Workshop in Forum Theater, focusing on gender oppression

facilitators to be announced

As part of International Women's Day this workshop will focus on gender oppression in all of its forms and manifestations.

Exercises, games, and improvised scene work from the Theater of the Oppressed repertory developed by Brasilian director,
popular educator and Workers Party activist Augusto Boal. Boal's interactive approach to theatrical expression emphasizes
physical dialogs, non-verbal imagery, consensus-building and problem-solving processes, and techniques for developing
awareness of both external and internalized forms of oppression.

An innovative approach to public forums, Forum Theater is rooted in the Brasilian popular education and culture movements
of the 1950s and 1960s. It is designed for use in schools, community centers, trade unions, and political, solidarity and
grassroots organizations. It is especially useful as an organizing tool in protest movements. Workshop participants (the
actors) are asked to tell a story, taken from daily life, containing a political or social problem of difficult solution. A skit
presenting that problem is improvised and presented. The original solution proposed by the protagonist must contain at least
one social or political error. When the skit is over, the audience discusses the proposed solution, and then the scene is
performed once more. But now, audience members are urged to intervene by stopping the action, coming on stage to replace
actors, and enacting their own ideas. Thus, instead of remaining passive, the audience becomes active "spect-actors" who
now create alternative solutions and control the dramatic action. The aim of the forum is not to find an ideal solution, but to
invent new ways of confronting oppression.

In Brasil and other parts of Latin America, as well as in India and Africa, Forum Theater has been used with peasant and
worker "audiences" as training in labor and community organizing and participatory democracy.

This workshop is open to everyone.

Tuition--sliding scale: $95-$150

To pre-register, please send an email to toplab@toplab.org to let us know that you will be attending.

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Saturday, March 29 from 11:00 am to 2:00 pm (workshop), and
Saturday, March 29 at 8:00 pm (performance)

Along These Shores

a workshop and a performance

facilitated and performed by Gail Burton

Along These Shores is a solo performance piece in development which seeks to explore what it is to be an African American
female citizen of the US in the 21st century who experiences violence--or the threat of violence--in its many forms, simply by
being. Along These Shores explores the forms and manifestation of violence derived from the experiences of both the
performer and interviewees. These are expressed in spoken word poetry, storytelling, movement, body sculpting,
improvisation and "spect-actor jokering" in order to engage the larger community in dialog as a means to break the silence
that masks the impact of violence in our daily lives.

Using Body Interviews to tell their stories, women sculpt their experiences by using their bodies and voices to document
their experiences for the performer. Gail Burton, as performer, will serve as an empathetic witness to and facilitator of the
storytelling process. Once told, the stories are then re-sculpted by the interviewee on the body of the performer. The process
of Body Interviewing is derived from Image Theater techniques created by Augusto Boal. Using this technique, Burton will
weave the interviewees' stories together with memoir, spoken word, political biography, genealogy, African American history,
storytelling, song, movement, origami and audience interaction to communicate our universal experience.

Several problem-posing questions will be considered: What does it mean to be a citizen? What role does storytelling and
dialog play in educating citizens within a democracy in order to come to consciousness and rehearse for action? How does
universal understanding which arises from the specificity of experience allow us to transcend the lines of global particularity
and difference?

Finally, we will look at the meaning of violence, which might be viewed through the theoretical lens of Franz Fanon, as the
death tolls of young people of color in urban Boston rise, day-by-day, within a "business as usual" deafening silence. As
citizens, what are our roles in both instigating change as well as colluding in the silence? In considering Franz Fanon, what
is the role of the native intellectual in 2007? How might Fanon view urban violence in its current post-colonial manifestation?
How can creative and expressive dialog within community contexts be used as a form of action and situate oppressed
people in both historical and present freedom struggles?

Gail A. Burton grew up in East Harlem, New York City and graduated from Radcliffe College, Harvard University. She has
been a member of the Medea Project Theater for Incarcerated Women in San Francisco. As a workshop leader for her New
Freedwoman Project, based in Massachusetts, she has utilized spoken word and movement to support healing, sisterhood
and therapeutic transformation on the journey to community re-integration with women at the Suffolk County Sheriff
Department Women's Resource Center.

She received the Cambridge Peace Award in honor of Muses, her first play, and the community-building and organizing
activities surrounding its production, which celebrated and created positive visibility for LGBTQA communities of African
descent in Massachusetts.

Burton trained with and is currently a member of and facilitator with the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory in New York
City. She has studied Augusto Boal's Image, Forum, and Rainbow of Desire theater techniques under Marie-Claire Picher
and Julian Boal and Augusto Boal.

Workshop tuition--sliding scale: $20-$35
Performance contribution--sliding scale: $10-$20
Performance free for Brecht Forum subscribers

To pre-register for the workshop, please send an email to toplab@toplab.org to let us know that you will be attending.

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Saturday, April 12 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm, and
Sunday, April 13 from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm

Techniques for Facilitating Image Theater

An advanced training workshop on facilitating a basic two-hour Image
Theater module

facilitators to be announced

In this advanced workshop, TOPLAB trainers will provide the module and demonstrate methods and techniques of
facilitation. Participants will then spend the rest of the time practicing the techniques both individually and with a partner,
receiving feedback from the group, and reflecting on the practice.

This is an advanced workshop open to people with prior Image Theater experience who would like to use and apply those
techniques in their social, political or professional work. Participants must have a solid working knowledge of Augusto Boal's
theories and approaches; required reading includes Boal's Theater of the Oppressed and Games for Actors and Non-Actors.

Tuition--sliding scale: $110-$165

This workshop is limited to sixteen people and an application and pre-registration is required. For more information, or to
receive the application, please send an email to toplab@toplab.org

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Monday, May 12 through Saturday, May 17

Two workshops with Augusto Boal and Julian Boal

Workshop details will be announced in December and a description, along with information about the application process,
will be posted. Application and pre-registration is required. Tuition: $550 per workshop.

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Travel Directions

The Brecht Forum is at 451 West Street (West Side Highway) in Manhattan, between Bank and Bethune Streets, 1-1/2
blocks north of West 11 Street.

IND Eighth Avenue A, C, or E train to 14 Street or BMT Canarsie L train to 8 Avenue (take a few minutes to look at "Life
Underground", Tom Otterness' series of whimsical bronze sculptures scattered throughout both sections of the station);
walk down 8 Avenue to Bank Street, turn right, walk west to West Street, turn right.

IRT Seventh Avenue 1, 2, or 3 train to 14 Street; get off at south end of station, walk west on 12 Street to 8 Avenue, left to
Bank Street, turn right, walk west to West Street, turn right.

New Jersey PATH train to Christopher Street; walk north on Greenwich Street to Bank Street, left to West Street, turn right.

#8 bus to West Street; walk up West Street to 451.

#11, #14A or #20 bus to Abingdon Square; walk west on Bank Street to West Street, turn right.

#14D bus to 8 Avenue and 14 Street, walk down 8 Avenue to Bank Street, turn right, walk west to West Street, turn right.