Theatre of the Oppressed Retrospective - Transeuropa 2023
Channel: European Alternatives
Date: 14/03/2024

A video interview on transformative performance with theatre director Péter Tasnádi-Sáhy.

At last year’s Transeuropa Festival, ‘Holding Spaces’, which took place in Cluj, European Alternatives held a series of participatory theatre workshops entitled ‘Disconnected’ encouraging audiences to explore and take agency in performatively resolving the conflicts and contradictions of a housing crisis.

The ‘Holding Spaces’ theme is about our relation to our environment. But we have to ask the question: what is the base of this relation? In prehistorical times Homo sapiens was the part of nature; it was our environment; we depended on it. But today our relationship has changed drastically; we have several kinds of environments, but most of them are alienated, and we hardly have any connection to them. We are disconnected from the places we want to hold.
Forum theatre was developed by the Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal as part of the Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal aimed to help oppressed people to get a better understanding of their situation and give them a tool to change it. In this video interview theatre director Péter Tasnádi-Sáhy, gives a practical introduction to the method, including snapshots of the workshop itself.