Creative Facilitation with Stephanie Pollack

I attended another session at the Summer Institute for Intercultural Communication titled, Theater of the Oppressed. It was facilitated by my colleague Stephanie Pollack, who is an experiential educator and facilitator who uses a lot of theater and art in her sessions. She is another person whose sessions I seek out at conferences.

Theater of the Oppressed

Theater of the Oppressed was developed by Augusto Boal and it utilizes theater techniques to facilitate insights based on Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the session we experienced two activities, but I am going to focus on one called The Great Game of Power.

For this activity, Stephanie seated us in a U-shape with a folding table, 6 plastic chairs and a water bottle in front of us. One volunteer at a time would arrange these pieces to make one chair the most powerful. The spectators would identify which one they thought was the most powerful and why. After discussion, the volunteer who created the arrangement revealed their intention. There was a considerable range of interpretations for each tableau. Lots of visions of power imbalance, and the ways various people might feel less power than another. The same elements were rearranged over and over, exposing many different aspects of power.

Facilitation skills

This exercise is a great example of something that seems so simple, yet benefits greatly from skilled facilitation. Especially if you are working with a group that knows each other, there is the potential for buried issues to surface, and an opportunity to work with them constructively. Since Stephanie has experience with this exercise with many kinds of groups, she was able to speak to the range of responses that are possible.

We also had a cleaning crew playing loud music in a nearby area, and later another class next door started chanting and banging blocks while playing a game from Cameroon. Stephanie knew to adjust the process, and not to try to isolate controversial issues and bring the group deeper when we were likely to be interrupted by another round of song.

Handouts

One of the things I really appreciate abut Stephanie is the quality of her handouts. Since she does highly experiential sessions, they have been handed out at the end. She included :

• an overview of Theater of the Oppressed,
• instructions for how to run the games,
• variations,
• tips and thoughts from her experience,
• article that she wrote that will be published in the Fall 2007 SIMAGES journal of NASAGA
• Bibliography and websites

I have enough information to learn more, understand what is involved and get an idea of the range of her experience and expertise. She also offered to send them electronically to anyone who preferred them digitally.