Forum theater is one of the techniques from the wide repertoire of the Theater of the Oppressed (TO). The TO was created in Brazil, primarily thanks to Augusto Boal, who realized with his theater group that the classical theater format is problematic in the context of their work: it implies that the audience is passive, that they come to a space that has nothing to do with their life experiences, there they watch a play that talks about things they don’t understand, possibly reward it with applause and leave. None of that appealed to Boal. For him, the theater is not only found in consecrated temples: the theater is the whole world, and the actors are all of us. Instead of presenting plays written by Europeans and directed by privileged intellectuals who had access to European universities, Boal and his collaborators wanted to talk about their everyday life, and open theater to all classes and races of Brazil. Most importantly, instead of the audience being a passive receiver who watches the performance in the dark and sympathizes with the protagonists, but is deprived of the authority to change anything, it becomes an active participant, creating and changing the performance on the spot.

These ideas are very close to the general ideas about participation, horizontality, community, power relationships and the role of the art that we have in Živi Atelje DK. This is one of the reasons why we wanted to include theater workshops in the activities of the Women to Women collective. First thing we decided to do is to stay focused on the process rather than the product. This is why we opted for the continuous meetings, once every two weeks, starting with games, play, laughter, looking for ways to use our bodies more, and to open up our creativity, so as to find different ways to communicate about our lives, oppressions and moments of joy.
The performance in the forum theater has a standardized dramaturgy: it begins with the introduction of the antagonist, who is marked by being in a position of power, and benefiting from the oppression, and the protagonist (individual or a group), the focus of the scene. The protagonist has her own will: there is something she wants to do that goes against the will of the antagonist. Neither the protagonist(s) nor the antagonist(s) exist in a vacuum: they are part of a wider social context that determines their specific relationships. For example, the same character within one scene or play can be the protagonist if he is a worker in a factory where he does not have basic labor rights (because the broader social context is that of capitalist exploitation), and in another the antagonist (if he commits domestic violence, for example, because then the broader social context that of patriarchy). That is why it is important that we try to present a specific social context in each play.
We have started working on the lived experiences of the participants – the one that kept coming back is the structural violence of the bureaucracy. And then, when we started investigating the reasons behind this Kafkian situation, many people without Croatian passport experience when trying to get working or residence permits, the image of the wider context started to appear. The precarious situation of existential insecurity keeps people passive, afraid to complain about small salaries and working conditions, which in turn creates more profit for the local business owners. The play we created follows a worker in a restaurant kitchen (protagonist) who is, together with her co-workers, subjected to tenuous work in difficult conditions. She tries to complain to her boss (antagonist), but is shut down – without papers she can’t do much. Her next step is trying to get a work permit, but this becomes a gargantuan task of never-ending walks from one institution to the next, collecting the required paperwork. Other workers are tritagonists – they can help either the protagonist or the antagonist by their actions or inactions. A forum theater play always ends with the defeat of the protagonist: this is because the play is actually a question that we ask the audience, a formulation of a problem that we want to explore together with the audience. That question should be real, reached by the workshop participants themselves, and not imposed by the facilitator; the protagonist should recognize it and try to change it – the protagonist is not a victim!

The dramaturgy of the forum theater is subject to change and experimentation, but it usually retains a certain basic structure. However, Boal himself insisted that he did not want to hold a monopoly on the method, and that it should be open and adaptable to the needs of those who use it.
Once the play is prepared and the actors are well acquainted with their characters, the performance begins. Although it is customary to say that in the theater each play is a world of its own, in the Forum theater this maxim applies literally: the only moment in which what has been rehearsed is repeated, is in the first scene, when the play is performed from beginning to end as it was the group prepared. After that, the rest of the performance is in the hands of the audience: through the mediation of the kuringa (joker, facilitator), members of the audience become the ones who define the problem, enter the roles of protagonists and tritagonists and try to position themselves differently, and even solve the problem; those who comment on other people’s interventions and learn from them, organize themselves and participate in the performance. Kuringa serves to set the rules of the game and establish the framework within which the situation plays out, but the real star is the audience. The performance ends after trying out several different ideas about how to approach the situation, but still not saying everything. Unlike the institution of classical theater, characterized by the concept of catharsis as the conclusion of the whole story, Forum theater is a truly open form: the audience should also go out into the world questioning and thinking about the problem, because this will enable them to think of new solutions and sometimes apply them in life.
We have decided to take a step further – following the ideas of legislative theatre -, and to use the play as a way to open conversation about what we see on the structural level as possible steps in the right direction. We have collected the ideas, translated them, discussed them and sent them to the decision makers.