When Poodles Cry

My production of the musical Annie in an elementary school involved 67 students, 18 parents, backdrops flown in from New York, and one poodle.

My off-the-cuff reading of a Christmas play in a homeless shelter involved one scarf, several women, and a teddy bear with one eye.

At the women’s shelter where I teach weekly theatre classes, we’re not rehearsing Waiting for Godot.  We’re not learning the moves to “Thriller.”  Our hour together is an end to itself, the theatre games and readings a means for both personal and social transformation.  No audience or poodles necessary.

Poodles are good.  Art for art’s sake is good.  But art as a tool is equally valid, a concept somewhat unfamiliar in our reality-television-saturated culture, which manufactures a need for validation of art and life with cameras and a viewing audience.  When initially approaching the shelter about holding classes, I wanted to be clear that theatre was not a stand-in for High School Musical. Here’s what I said:

Bodies and voices become instruments for change as participants explore societal concerns in a deeply personal way. We’ll use a variety of theatre techniques to make a safe, enjoyable space for improvisation and image-making. Participants will try on roles and appreciate multiple viewpoints on issues as they “rehearse for reality,” to borrow a phrase from Theatre of the Oppressed’s late founder Augusto Boal.

The homeless woman seeking shelter today might choose to stay on the street tomorrow, and my moment with her may be the only one I’ve got.  The logistics of performance, while not impossible, aren’t entirely feasible, so I pack my art-as-a-toolbox with a mix of time-tested acting exercises, Theatre of the Oppressed games, and sociodrama, experimenting as I go.

According to pioneer Patricia Sternberg, sociodrama has as its goals insight and behavioralpractice, along with catharsis: the act of releasing or purging one’s emotions.

Classic sociodrama exercises such as The Empty Chair, in which a participant speaks to an imaginary person, often become emotional experiences; the heavy tears, however, should be left to the trained professionals, like the clinical therapist who comes to the shelter once a week to lead a class. Her brochure promises approximately 29 forms of empowerment that will promptly liberate participants: Homeless women will soon shake free their burdens; manage anger; better their parenting skills; drop a dress size. Possibly a free 18-piece knife set is involved, as well.

“We were crying before it even got started,” one of the women told me later. They welcomed the opportunity to expel some of the demons of childhood, addiction, and life on the streets—catharsis under the watch of a trained eye.

On the other hand, here’s Augusto Boal, founder of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), on catharsis:

Forum Theatre [a branch of TO] does not produce catharsis: it produces a stimulant for our desire to change the world. …Let them create it first in the theatre, in fiction, to be better prepared to create it outside afterwards, for real.

If one of Boal’s theatre games brought you to tears, he treated the show of emotion as perfectly natural and fine and good. What he wouldn’t do–in my experience studying with him–was stop everything to comfort you.

For Boal, a Brazilian, tears are a natural expression accompanying our search for change in this world.  Channel those tears to find out what needs to be done; don’t halt the whole process to wallow.  This from a former political prisoner, a man who was strung up by his ankles and shocked with an electric charge because of his efforts to improve life for the poor in his native land.

At the homeless shelter, my crowd is tough.  Any game I choose immediately passes through the women’s mental checkpoints for hints of manipulation or, worse, a waste of time when they could be taking a free shower.  If I falter slightly in my presentation I may lose half the crowd, which is often already quite boisterous.  I draw on about every skill I have in me, and I need to have many ideas ready at hand.

But when I work exclusively in sociodrama, in the art of purging, I leave feeling like I’d chosen vitamin-enriched cereal over the option of steak. There’s a time and a place for everything, including cereal, but the other day I returned to Theatre of the Oppressed for what I hoped would be a hearty meal.

I started with the game Columbian Hypnosis. One person holds her palm level with the face of her partner.  She moves her palm fluidly and with grace, wherever she wants, and her partner keeps her face level with and the same distance from the palm.

That’s it.

Doesn’t sound like much, does it?  But this is not your average party game; all sorts of dynamics show themselves.

Does the leader simply command, or is she sensitive to the needs of her partner?  A male partner I once had in a class had nearly wrestled me to the ground.  A few months back when I led this exercise at the shelter, a woman had become angry at being led, uncomfortable with someone telling her what to do.  This led to a discussion of why that’s a problem for her, and how people can abuse power.

The other evening I paired up with a different woman at the shelter, and ours was a beautiful dance.

Kim, I noticed, wasn’t leaning downward with me, so I had to adjust my moves to slowly teach her what I wanted.  Almost as if she were leading me, though that was my role.  Kim said later she didn’t even notice me after a while.

The game became a platform for discussion of how society functions and what role each citizen can play.  Yes, emotion comes to the surface, but we channel it toward learning something about each other and the larger communities in which we operate.

We ended the evening with Emily’s Morph: Three people begin by doing a sound and movement of their own choosing, and by the end of a designated path they are to act in unison without any discussion.

A man had once told me the story of leading this exercise in Russia.  The participants come to the end and they’re all still doing their own thing, no morphing at all.  When he asked what happened, every last one said that as citizens, they were tired of being told what they can and cannot do; they were not about to let their ideas be taken from them.

At the shelter, the first round was quite like the Russians’, but for a different reason: Kim, Angie and Pat had dutifully begun with their sounds and gestures, but Geraldine was singing an entire Al Green song.

Geraldine is a head taller than me, about 30 pounds lighter, and has one tooth.  She might be 40, or she could be 60.  Clearly inebriated this evening, Geraldine would periodically interrupt to hug me, tell me what I do is beautiful, and show pictures of herself at a gas station.  You can’t help but love Geraldine.

The group asked to try morphing again.

Without talking, and while keeping up with their sounds and moves, the women made some quick decisions.

Angie, who was near Pat, decided to incorporate her moves.  Pat caught on and adjusted to her.

Kim was near Geraldine, who was still singing the entire Al Green song.  Kim quickly realized that if any morphing was to be done, she had to do it.  If Geraldine was ever going to be included and welcomed into the group, Kim would need to sacrifice her own ideas.

So there’s Angie and Pat, doing a little song and dance in unison.  And there’s Kim and Geraldine, singing “Let’s Stay Together.”

Our life lessons wrapped up with laughter, which felt perfectly natural and fine and good. And not a poodle in sight.

Amy Scheer is a writer, weightlifter and theatre teacher. She lives in Grand Rapids, MI, with her husband, two sons, and giant hissing cockroaches named Chubby and Lipstick.  She blogs at http://betterwaitforit.blogspot.com