Performance
Exercises in attention, body, space, and ensemble make performance available beyond professional theatre.
Theatre in its oldest sense is not a profession but a basic human activity: every person acts and every person watches. Treating people as "spect-actors" rather than as a passive audience means no one has to be trained before they are allowed to take part.
The author holds that a session never truly ends, because whatever happens in it is meant to carry over into real life. The work sits on the border between fiction and reality, and its purpose is for participants to cross that border.
The method sets out to undermine the split between actor and spectator so that nobody is left merely watching. When everyone participates, people discover their own power to change the situation being played out, not just to comment on it.
Staging a situation of oppression first makes it visible to the people living it, and then lets them try out alternative ways to overcome it. Playing out options in fiction gives people a new handle on real situations they had felt stuck in.
Unlike standard actor training, the exercises address performers' need to get close to spectators without losing themselves. Closing the distance with an audience takes its own practice, separate from technique on stage.
Because players make their statements by doing rather than by talking, each round of play builds awareness, courage, and the capacity to act. Trying an action with the body is practice for taking it in life.
Theatre does not have to choose between entertaining and instructing; the games can be enjoyable while working as a kind of social therapy. They focus the mind and relax the spirit at the same time, which is part of why people engage.
The same games are used by activists treating theatre as a political tool and by therapists, psychiatric nurses, educators, and teachers. Such play can change relationships in a classroom as well as enrich theatre itself.