The Citizen Recommends: Just Act, Go Vote 2.0
The Citizen Recommends: Just Act, Go Vote 2.0
The experiential theater visitor uses drama to activate would-be voters. They'll accept their human action anywhere in the city this chief season
Apr. 11, 2019
Two co-workers meet at the part water libation. 1 launches into a spiel nearly how excited he is to vote in the upcoming election, how eager he is for new candidates to make a modify in Philadelphia.
His friend is more ambivalent. He posits an age-quondam skeptics' question: If these elected officials really care, why do they but come around when they're campaigning? Besides, he adds, he'due south scared to put his job at run a risk by requesting fourth dimension off to vote.
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Their names? Rock TheVoter and Nope, the principal players in Merely Act, Go Vote 2.0 , a new show from Merely Deed Theater Group, which has been performed at schools and other locations throughout last year'due south mid-term election flavour and as recently as this calendar week. Just Human action's creative director, Lisa Jo Epstein, hopes it inspires audience members to engage in thoughtful conversations long later they've left the performance.
"We're not saying 'Vote for this person or vote for that person,' because the [ultimate] goal is to become people thinking: Why am I not voting? Why is my neighbor not voting? What are the root causes? " says Epstein. "And upon doing then and reflecting actively on that, it brings u.s. back to 'This is a reason to vote—because we are in this [current] situation because of who's in function.'"
As with all of Merely Human action's pieces, the audience is charged with becoming "spect- actors " instead of merely spectators. With this change in label comes what Epstein calls "the responsibility to act on the injustice that they encounter."
Later each functioning, there is a dialogue betwixt the performers and the spect-actors; audience members are encouraged to interrupt the performers, jump in themselves, and take on the role of Rock TheVoter, giving them an opportunity to practice a strategy with Nope that they could employ when speaking to someone with whom they disagree—at the water cooler, the dinner table, or beyond. There is too a 'Table Jam', a chat for attendees to reflect on the experience together. At this week's evidence a representative from City Commissioner Lisa Deeley'due south part even stopped by with a voting auto, to talk well-nigh the logistics of voting and find young people to volunteer to work to polls in the upcoming May primaries.
"Merely Human action doesn't provide whatsoever answers—we're the ones asking questions," says Epstein. "The goal of this work is to say, 'You all in the room, you're the experts. Simply nobody has given you that space to recognize and embrace and mobilize it.'"
"We're not saying 'Vote for this person or vote for that person,' because the [ultimate] goal is to get people thinking: Why am I not voting? Why is my neighbor not voting? What are the root causes? " says Epstein.
This type of audience immersion is a hallmark of a type of operation called Theatre of the Oppressed. Epstein met the Brazilian theater practitioner who created the movement, Augusto Boal, in 1990, later on graduating from UT Austin with an MA and PhD in applied theater. She worked with Boal for three years at the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris, France; later and then honing her craft as a Professor at Tulane Academy, the Lower Merion native returned to Philadelphia where she founded Gas & Electric Arts with her husband, David Brown.
"This form of theater creates and invites people to recognize their gifts, and mobilizes them in the pursuit of justice," says Epstein. "The work that we practice is not merely near individual, personal transformation. Information technology's likewise about transforming patterns of action and thinking."
Since launching in 2015, But Act has staged over 15 performances tailored to different audiences. Concluding fall, they held a workshop nearly what it means to canvass equally a white person in a neighborhood where the population is predominantly made up of people of color. Another workshop with JVES Human Services, a nonprofit that offers task-readiness and career training, focused on the bear on of parents' and elders' attitudes on young people'southward view of voting.
"In some regard, But Human action, Go Vote two.0 is a living, breathing organism," says Epstein. "Because depending [on] who the members of the ensemble and community are, the specifics of the injustices will change."
This summer, Just Act volition exist launching a Just Human action Institute for Theater of the Oppressed at their Germantown studio infinite, to teach theater informed by the technique.
"This internal transformation is vital to transforming our relationships with other people," says Epstein. "When there's […] a transformation from the inside of a group well-nigh how they treat each other, how they chronicle to larger institutions in which they work and alive and motion— then you lot're talking virtually transforming construction inequality."
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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/the-citizen-recommends-just-act-go-vote-2-0/
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