Abstract
This paper aims to investigate the validity of Forum Theatre as a way to explore the transformativity of the hitherto ʻobjectsʼ of research in the Sociology of Clinical education, analyzing two projects conducted with Yogo-Kyoyu (School Nurse Teacher).
Forum Theatre is one form of the Applied Theatre begun and developed by a Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal in South America in the 1960s. Forum Theatre, as opposed to the traditional theatre, entices the spectators to participate in the theatre by discussing or even intervening in the scenes played on themes that can be shared by all the participants in the forum. Improvised theatre, which consists of the core of the Forum theatre, also brings change and transformativity by compelling participants to use their own bodies to play parts as actors in the fictional reality.
Forum theatre, however, has its varieties and its structure has not really been articulated in the sociological sense. This paper endeavors to discover the basic formulation of Forum Theatre, theoretically analyze how it brings about the change and transformativity in the participants and ascertain the potency of the methodology as a clinical educational study.
The paper identified four stages in which the Forum Theatre proceeds.
At stage I, the participants, together with the researcher, decide on one theme and create a story for the improvised theatre, which we called ʻproblem-posing-theatre.ʼ At stage II, the participants at stage I and the researcher both become actors and perform the theatre in front of the spectators. At this stage there is no difference from ordinary theatre. Forum Theatre, however, proceeds to stage III, where spectators become floor participants. They express their own opinions and ideas, raise questions and even intervene in the theatre and stage their own improvisations. This stage III constitutes the most important part for making the Forum Theatre come into effect. After the stage III in our project, we advance to stage IV, when the participants at stage I gather together to re-discuss, recreate and complete the scripts which materialized in the three different versions.
Yogo-Kyoyu, in our project as participants in the Forum Theatre as it proceeded in each stage, confronted their own everyday problems and conflicts, eventually to reflect and rethink their own ethnomethodologies in their own workplaces. What brought them to change, as analyzed in this paper, was related to the structure and the nature of Forum Theatre. The drama played out in the Forum theatre is structurally unfinished, and this very fact of unfinishedness attracts the spectators to intervene actively. Improvised theatre also entails bodily engagement in the reality that is shared and experienced at the intersection of a fictitious situation, as written in the play, and the individual participantʼs everyday reality. This nature of the Forum Theatre brings the participants to realize various aspects of their own beings as well as others, and to acquire new perspectives toward their different everyday lives.
