Social Justice Camp DC

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.” –William Blake

“The moment we are living right now, this generation, represents the largest increase in expressive capability in human history.” –Clay Shirky

While doing outreach for Social Justice Camp DC, the name Augusto Boal has kept coming up in conversations with friends and coworkers. It even appeared on a big piece of butcher paper on the wall the other day.

I had never heard of the chemical engineer turned drama director/theorist before getting involved with Social Justice Camp DC, but his ideas now seem to be following me around.

This post is my attempt to follow them back.

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Born in Rio De Janeiro in 1931, Augusto Boal devoted much of his life to developing theater techniques that empowered individuals to engage in creative resistance in the face of political oppression.

As both a theorist and practitioner, Boal did not just see the potential power of art, he was able to create a methodology that operationalized it.

Influenced by his friend Paulo Freire (author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Boal developed the Theater of the Oppressed, a body of techniques that ‘uses theatre as means of knowledge and transformation of the interior reality in the social and relational field.’

Boal’s technique were based on transforming the experience of the audience from that of the spectator into that of the ’spect-actor’ so they too could play an active role in prefiguring their own reality.

This is why I think Boal would have liked unconferences.

At unconferences, there are no rigidly defined spectators or audiences.

Everyone is a ’spect-actor.’ Everyone has value to contribute to the conversation and can steer the overall inertia of the event.

At Social Justice Camp DC, participation will be highly encouraged.

We are doing our best to create an event that moves people beyond a passive experience based on spectatorship towards a creative  experience where everyone can add value to the conversation.

I hope you will join us!

~ @ninjaclectic
Social Justice Camp DC Organizer

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Related Media:

Wikipedia: Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, Unconference

NYTimes: Augusto Boal, Stage Director Who Gave a Voice to Audiences, Is Dead at 78

@pwthornton’s blog post: Clay Shirky: Every time a consumer joins the new media landscape, a producer does too

Youtube Video: Mark Osborne’s animated short ‘More’

Tags: origin, unconference

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 7th, 2010 at 7:34 pm and is filed under Genome. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.