Theatre: the art of Looking at Ourselves
I want you to think about your average day.
Where are you typically moving around? If you’re working from home… you probably have very limited positions that you sit, stand and lie down in.
Even pre-pandemic, there’s typical positions your body is in:
You’re walking between rooms (or buildings),
sitting on the couch,
sitting in your office chair.
When sitting on the bus or train, you probably hold your body differently than you do when sitting in your office chair.
Let’s consider what’s going on in your mind there. For me, on the bus or train (or airplane!), I am trying to take up as little space as possible. There’s a different kind of tension in my body, and there’s the cultural/societal expectation that strangers don’t touch each other.
I want you to take a moment to sit like you’d sit in your office chair.
If you’re reading this, really, stand up.
Imagine you’re in your office, and then sit down like you would sit in your office chair.
Notice how you hold your body.
Do you sit up straight? Slouch?
Put your feet up on something?
Is there any tension in your body?
What about if you need to reach for something?
Do you have to strain or is there ease?
Why does this matter? Well, this is a tiny example of the way that theatre comes into McLaughlin Method workshops.
Theatre at its most fundamental breakdown is the presence of both having an actor and a spectator. In this exercise you just walked through, you were both the spectator and actor for your own experience.
Theatre is an embodied practice.
When an actor on stage needs to portray and convey to you, in the audience, that they’re on the subway instead of at the office, they make choices on how to hold their bodies to help illustrate the difference.
We can borrow from these skills that actors use for creating theatre performances, to see our own lives differently.
Now, I didn’t invent these techniques -- all credit for the base techniques that I describe and use come from the body of work of Augusto Boal and the Theatre of the Oppressed. The technique of sitting in these different situations comes from my twist on a game called Walks. I also use a ton of Image Theatre in McLaughlin Method work.
Image Theatre helps us create or recreate objective versions of situations we experience in the workplace.
I first learned these theatre techniques and how to facilitate them back in college at Fairfield University. I was fortunate to be only an hour from New York City, and took several workshops with the TOPLab NYC who specialized in facilitating Theatre of the Oppressed techniques. Even got to study with Augusto Boal himself before he passed away, and his son Julian Boal. I’ve been studying, practicing, and adapting these techniques for over 16 years.
If you’ve made it this far, you might be wondering why I mention the theatre of the oppressed -- and if that might be off-putting for some.
Well, I really grasped onto the learnings that Boal had later in his life when he brought these techniques to the western world. He learned that oppressions to us in the West looked like emotional oppressions of loneliness, not being understood, and more. Plus, all of the games Boal introduced in his book Games for Actors and Non-Actors, started to dismantle the micro-oppressions that we experience in our everyday lives.
Micro-oppressions are present whenever we feel a limitation of our physical, emotional, or mental ability.
One of my favorite quotes by Boal is (roughly from memory):
“Whatever one human being can do, so can any other human being. Maybe not as well or as prolifically, but it can be done, because we are all human beings.”
This opens up to the worldview of ourselves to realize -- wow, we’re in these bodies and minds that could do so many things, but our culture and society tells us that we can’t. Add onto that, our limited perspective on ourselves, which says “I can’t do that.”
The first things we do in McLaughlin Method workshops and programs is to start opening up our own perspective on ourselves to start identifying where we think we can’t. Because if we have those blocks on ourselves (and we all do!) then we definitely have those blocks on what we think others are capable of.
TAKE ACTION
Repeat this exercise of sitting as you would in your office chair. Jot down any ideas you have from this act of observing yourself.
Curious about how else we use theatre in our work?
“Once you break past your own limited worldview and lens, your awareness changes. Awareness is the first step towards behavior change.”
(c) 2019 - 2024 Katie McLaughlin, McLaughlin Method
