Background and Needs: Oxfam America is a nonprofit organization that works to end poverty and injustice. Oxfam specializes in helping communities realize individualized solutions to their problems. Oxfam works in El Salvador to help women and girls overcome gender discrimination, realize their potential and become decision-makers and leaders in their communities.
In El Salvador, one out of every three women is a victim of violence. Young women between the ages of 15 and 29 years are most often targeted, typically by male relatives and teachers. Despite growing awareness of violence against women in Latin America, public policies still lack a gender perspective—police and prosecutors continue to use discriminatory terms and practices in cases of murdered women and domestic abuse.
Collaborative Goal: To share forum theater tools with the theater group, Escena X, so that they are used in school interventions, The Path of Art: A Different Life Between You and I.
Project Description: Forum theater is a social action tool that generates favorable conditions for groups from different areas, organizations and public organizations, etc., to make it their own medium for facilitating a significant change in their places of work, in their interpersonal relationships and in other organizations. Through forum theater, actors and audience members gain knowledge of conflict resolution, effectiveness, effective communication, etc., increasing the possibilities of establishing direct, active, and purposeful expression between spectators and actors.
The workshop provides artistic tools based on Theater of the Oppressed in order to enrich artistic expression (theater, music) and make them more accessible to people that play diverse educational roles in formal and non-formal arenas. It will provide entertaining and artistic tools that are suitable for workshop participants to utilize in the replicating the Theater of the Oppressed in their daily work, while simultaneously broadening their horizons. The workshop will enhance their work by promoting the joint construction of new educational strategies in the context of formal and non-formal education. Likewise, the project intends to create a meeting space that strengthens links between the participants and between the organization that they belong to.
WORK METHODOLOGY.
This is a hands-on workshop that is a set of games, exercises and specific techniques that will work as theater activities - like a convergence of diverse artistic disciplines. Forum theater is an efficient instrument for understanding and searching for solutions to social problems; it attempts to generate thinking that catalyzes action beyond the workshop and the performance. Based on the work of Paulo Freire, Bertolt Brecht and principally Augusto Boal and his Theater of the Oppressed, forum theater seeks to tackle the dramatization of conflicts through a exercise that invites actors to act out alternative outcomes to a scene based on input from audience members. This methodology puts the actor and the spectator in the same level, creating the spectActor. It also generates a debate and joint problem-solving that tests our acting and action in daily life. It is dialogue in action.
