"Joking" with the Classics: Using Boal's Joker System in the Performance Classroom
Ruth Laurion Bowman
Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques are known and practiced in a variety of contexts around the world, both academic and nonacademic. At present, Boal probably is best known for his Image Theatre, Forum Theatre, and Rainbow of Desire techniques. Less familiar to many who have participated in TO workshops or read Boal's more recent texts is his "Joker System," which he developed with the Arena Theatre of São Paolo in the 1960s. Although "jokers" figure prominently in many of Boal's games and techniques, the Joker System is a separate class of techniques, with different aims and aesthetics from Boal's more recent TO work. As Mady Schutzman notes, while much of the theoretical foundation for Boal's TO was laid in his early experiments with the Joker System, the system itself has been largely superseded by TO, and the joker's function is very different in Forum Theatre or Image Theatre than it is in the Joker System. 1
As it is described by Boal, the Joker System is a flexible formula for adapting and staging extant texts, as well as for developing new ones ("Joker System"; Theatre of the Oppressed 159-97). Boal and the Arena Theatre company used the Joker System to "nationalize" certain European "classics" (Theatre of the Oppressed 163-65)--i.e., to rewrite and stage them in a manner that would be more meaningful, relevant, and entertaining to a Brazilian audience. I have used Boal's Joker System in undergraduate performance courses for nearly a decade to explore a variety of "classic" texts by such authors as Euripides, Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chekhov. In each case, our exploration of the text culminates in a Joker-style production of the play--adapted, directed, and performed by the students in the class as part of their course work. In what follows, I describe one such experience in order both to illustrate a general process of using the Joker System in the classroom and to call attention to some of the pedagogical benefits of such work. In so doing, I hope not only to provoke interest in a relatively neglected aspect of Boal's work, but also to encourage others to incorporate the Joker System into their own classes.
The principal goal of the Joker System is to upset or destabilize the singular reality of the world as it is represented in the dramatic text (and as it is [End Page 139] conventionally reproduced in performance) in order to explore alternate ways of representing and interpreting that world. The objective, Boal notes, is to present simultaneously in the performance both the play and its analysis (Theatre of the Oppressed 174-75). Avowedly Brechtian in its aesthetics, the Joker System relies on a handful of basic techniques: (1) an "alienated" acting style, designed to "reduce" dramatic characters to a relatively simple "social mask" and to distance the actors from characters; (2) continuous role reversal or switching, such that characters are played by several actors, and actors play several characters; (3) stylistic and genre eclecticism from scene to scene (or even within a single scene), with little or no regard for a unified production style or tone; and (4) the use of music as an independent "discourse" to complement, supplement, subvert, or contradict the meanings expressed in the text and performance.
Boal proposes additional guidelines for the two main characters in a Joker System performance, the Protagonist and the Joker. In contrast to the first two techniques mentioned above, Boal recommends that the Protagonist (who may or may not be the central character in the play) be played by a single actor in the classic realist style. The Protagonist is to be the "slice of real life" we all apparently want to see in a performance and is the character with whom the audience is to identify or empathize. The polyvalent Joker figure, on the other hand, may be a single actor-character or a group of actor-characters. The Joker may be a character found in the text, or she may be an invention. She may retain her role as Joker throughout the performance, or she may insert herself into any scene and as any character. The Joker is omniscient in that she knows, better than anyone else, the history, the plot, the characters, and the ending of the story, adopting what is essentially an authorial point of view. By means of periodic interviews and commentary, she can speak to anyone in the theatre at virtually any time she desires. She can explain things to the audience if things seem unclear, or she can ask the performers, audience, or even the technicians for their ideas about what occurs. The Joker also keeps the performance moving by serving as a mediator between the different parts of the performance--an emcee, in effect. While the Protagonist operates in the domain of psychological realism, trapped in the world of the dramatic plot, the Joker operates in the realm of "magic realism," able to move easily between the there-and-then world of the Protagonist and the here-and-now world of the actors and audience.
Finally, the Joker System as it developed at the Arena Theatre had its own architectonic structure of performance with seven main parts: dedication, explanation, episode, scene, commentary, interview, and exhortation. This structure operates as a kind of poetics, both to guide the adaptation of the dramatic text and to establish a relatively simple set of theatrical conventions that an audience can learn to help them decode the production. The adaptation begins by dividing the play into major episodes, each of which is further divided into a few more or less interdependent scenes. The commentary (usually performed extemporaneously by the Joker) serves to amplify or explain some [End Page 140] bit of performed action, as well as to bridge scenes, while the interviews conducted by the Joker appear irregularly, depending partly on circumstances arising in a given performance. The performance begins with a dedication to some person or group or event in order to make a direct link between the performance and the world, and is followed by the explanation, which is delivered by the Joker as an introductory lecture designed to provide a more elaborate context or preface for the performance the audience is about to see. Finally, the performance ends with an exhortation to the audience to respond in some way (e.g., action, discussion, debate) to the themes or ideas developed in the play and its production.
I chose to work with the Joker System initially in an upper-level undergraduate course I teach on presentational aesthetics. In the course, we examine various nonrepresentational theatrical forms and styles that generally eschew or interrupt illusionism and call attention to their own rhetoric and artifice in performance: Greek theatre; Brechtian aesthetics; "low" or "popular" comic forms such as vaudeville, burlesque, and minstrelsy; "high" tragic forms such as French (Racinian) neoclassicism; narrative or chamber theatre; and twentieth-century avant-garde performance.
I was attracted to the Joker System for use in this course for several reasons. First, I thought it would highlight many of the differences between what my students knew best (representational, psychologically realistic acting styles) and what they knew less well (reflexive, presentational performance forms), as well as between dramatic and epic modes of theatre. Second, the relative simplicity of the Joker System, its handful of "rules" or guiding principles, would allow the students to begin working with it immediately, without a prolonged series of prefatory lectures on the hows, whys, and wherefores of doing a reflexive or presentational performance. Third, its adaptability to group size, space and technical facilities (or lack thereof), and different texts would permit us to work with virtually any play we liked.
Typically, I spend one class period introducing the students to Boal's Joker System, and I conclude the meeting by assigning them the task of mounting a Joker-style performance of any play they choose. During our next two or three class meetings, we select a text, "write" our adaptation, divide production responsibilities, and settle any other organizational or procedural matters. Then I give them another week or so in which to prepare their performance. I also insist that, while the performance might be considered a workshop production, it should be open to anyone who might want to attend. 2
In one class, the students decided to perform Euripides's The Bacchae, a text we had studied earlier in the course. We devoted the bulk of our next two class meetings to the adaptation process, dividing the play into episodes and scenes. During these discussions, my initial goal is to help the students understand that an adaptation, though it usually strives at some level to be [End Page 141] "faithful" to the original text, is always at other levels a rewriting of that text. Consequently, while they should not ignore the play's structure, language, and characters, they need not feel obliged to replicate them. In a similar vein, I noted that we were also adapting Boal's Joker System to our own purposes, and so they should not feel enslaved to it, either; that some alterations in the System would undoubtedly occur. To begin the adaptation, I encouraged them to abstract from the particular characters and incidents in the play in a manner similar to our old friend, Freytag's triangle, and to consider treating each of the major segments or turning points in the play as an "episode."
The process of dividing The Bacchae into episodes and scenes that retained the story line, balanced the different perspectives offered in the play, and piqued each student's interests effected a passionate, at times heated, exchange as they attempted to wade through their differing interpretations and opinions about the play and aesthetic ideals for the production. Asking the students to "rewrite" the play seemed, in comparison to our earlier discussions of it, to increase their interest and involvement in it. By working back-and-forth between concrete particulars in the play and more abstract summaries and categorizations, the class settled on four episodes, which they titled:
The Points of View are Introduced
The Points of View Do Battle
The Battle is Resolved
The Results are Questioned.
Crude though these labels may seem, the class was satisfied that this episodic structure represented a fair restatement of what happens in the play. I was struck by how accurately it could be said to reflect what happens in nearly every Greek tragedy.
The adaptation divided the text further into eleven scenes. Episode One consisted of the three opening scenes from the play: scene 1, Introduction of Dionysus and the Chorus of Asian Bacchae (cf., Euripides 5-12); scene 2, Introduction of Teiresias and Cadmus (12-14); and scene 3, Introduction of Pentheus (14-16). Episode Two was comprised of four scenes: scene 4, Teiresias and Cadmus Argue with Pentheus (16-22); scene 5, Dionysus Argues with Pentheus (25-30); scene 6, The Chorus of Asian Bacchae Describes the Destruction of Pentheus's Palace (31-36); and scene 7, Dionysus Argues with Pentheus Again, Then Dares Him to Dress as a Woman (37-56). 3 Episode Three contained scenes eight through ten: scene 8, The Theban Bacchae Tell What Happened to Pentheus; scene 9, Agave Boasts of Her Kill; and scene 10, At Cadmus's Prompting, Agave Recognizes What She Has Done. The final episode, "The Results are Questioned," consisted of the eleventh scene, a debate among Agave, Cadmus, and Dionysus, mediated by the Joker, which also served as the exhortation. The debaters drew from (but were not limited to) the final pages of the play to build their opening cases and to answer questions from the Joker and the audience (76-85). [End Page 142]
In making other adapting and staging choices, the students adhered to most of Boal's guidelines. To ensure the kind of eclectic, even "chaotic" performance Boal recommends, and to divide the labor equally, each of the scenes was delegated to one or two students (with the exception of scene 11), who would be responsible for all aspects of its presentation--selecting a performance style or genre, recruiting classmates to play supporting roles in the scene, blocking and rehearsing the scene, and so on--while one person volunteered to play the Joker for the production. 4 As a result of this rather arbitrary division of acting and directing roles, all the characters in The Bacchae would be played by more than one student actor, and all the actors (except the Joker) would be playing more than one character. 5
Interestingly, the students opted not to use Boal's suggestion concerning the Protagonist. One reason for this was because they could not agree whose point of view should be treated empathetically. Each of the play's major points of view was, in their view, equally valid--and equally faulty. They were interested to see whether a Protagonist would emerge in the performance, despite the multiple role exchanges and interpretations, and whether their uncertainty about which perspective the play endorses might not be one of the play's points. Moreover, because this form of performance was new to them, they all wanted to try it. No one wanted to be the "slice of real life" trapped behind an illusionary fourth wall.
Two other final bits of organizational business that the students settled before going off to work on their scenes were to devise a common ground plan for the performance space and to settle on a common set of attributes or "markers" for the different characters. Given the Joker System's emphasis on performer-audience contact, the class decided to use a deep thrust arrangement, almost an arena layout, with the audience and "offstage" actors seated together around a bare central playing area. A set of generic rehearsal cubes would be made available to use in the scenes as the students saw fit, and a simple rehearsal lighting plot would be used. Because there would be no consistency in the actor-character relationship from scene to scene, the students decided to "label" each character for the audience by fashioning a distinctive costume piece that could be exchanged easily by the actors, all of whom would wear a generic costume of black pants and shirt. Dionysus would be identified, for example, by a studded white leather jacket, while Pentheus was marked by a suit coat covered in aluminum foil. Other production elements (props, music, special lighting effects) would be left to the discretion of each scene's participants.
After two weeks of independent discussion, research, planning, and rehearsal, the class came together to perform their version of The Bacchae for me, each other, and a small audience of faculty, relatives, friends, and fellow students. Rehearsal cubes, props, and costume pieces were preset in various places around the space along with a dozen or more boom box style tape players to provide the music. The performance began with a simple dedication, written [End Page 143] and performed by the Joker, to a local politician who was known for his moral duplicity, thus linking the play to the players' own immediate social reality. The Joker chose not to perform an elaborate lecture for her explanation, however, other than to preview the basic structure of episodes and scenes. One reason for this, of course, was that she wasn't entirely sure herself what she was about to see; another reason was that she did not want to influence or skew the debate that had been planned for the final exhortation scene by offering her own perspective.
Because each of the scenes was adapted and staged independently, the performance itself took on something of the character of a quilting bee. Each performer (or group of performers) brought his or her own bits and pieces of the play to the performance, and the group as a whole assumed the task of stitching them together in the performance as they were performing. Each scene had its own independent shape, color, texture, style, and tone. Boal's emphasis on stylistic eclecticism was embraced by the students, for each scene was presented in a different style or genre. We saw scenes played as parodic musical comedy, fairy tale, expressionistic film noir, religious documentary, surreal music video, grotesque sitcom, mime, and dance. The text of the performance included a majority of the lines from The Bacchae itself, but the students also brought a number of intertexts to bear on their scenes, including fragments from other literary works, nonfictional texts, and popular culture materials.
The process of linking the independent scenes into a new "whole" occurred in a variety of ways. Sometimes a scene would have its own clearly marked boundaries, after which the Joker would offer a brief comment on or paraphrase of what had been depicted and then introduce the next scene. At other times, and especially as the two-hour performance progressed, the players gained confidence in their ability to sense when a scene was nearing its end so that they could segue smoothly to the next scene as the present scene ended. For instance, the student playing Agave in scene 10 entered scene 9 before it was finished. She positioned herself behind the boastful scene 9 Agave, imitating her movements and gestures. When the boastful Agave concluded her movement and exited, Cadmus entered to begin scene 10 with the remaining Agave actress.
In some cases, the players opted to intrude upon or "argue" with a scene as it neared its conclusion. The scene 3 Pentheus stormed into and interrupted scene 2, which had already been interrupted by the Joker who was engaged in an "interview" with the scene 2 Teiresias and Cadmus. Although Pentheus had planned and rehearsed scene 3 as a solo performance, the Teiresias, Cadmus, and Joker figures chose to remain onstage throughout scene 3, forcing the Pentheus player to adapt to the situation he had created.
The performance also held together in part because of a relatively consistent use of contemporary rock music and sensual, often sexual, visual imagery from scene to scene. The scenes were also connected by the reappearance of the same performers, the use of the character "markers," and [End Page 144] the repeated use of props, rhythms, and bits of dialogue across the scenes. Some of this reuse was preplanned in rehearsal, since the performers carried information concerning what one group had planned for a scene into their rehearsal of another. However, some of the repetition and reuse of material was improvised during the performance, as performers would quietly whisper suggestions to each other about incorporating something from an earlier scene into their upcoming scene.
In one notable case, a mirror, which was used in scene 1 and left inadvertently onstage, was reused so often that it developed into a key motif of the performance. A Cadmus performer used it to accent his character's self-reflective speech, and two Pentheuses, a Dionysus, and an Agave used it to suggest their character's narcissism or pride. In Agave's recognition scene (our scene 10), the performers used the mirror, instead of the object they had planned to use, to represent Pentheus's head. At the point of Agave's anagnorisis, she turned upstage to Cadmus who raised the mirror/head to reflect Agave's horror-stricken face to the audience.
The Theban Bacchae were particularly inventive when, prior to their Scene 8, they "pirated" the Asian Bacchae's costumes and substituted them for their own. In our discussion of the performance later, the performers explained that they wanted the exchange to signify that, from the Theban Chorus's point of view, they were no longer tied to Pentheus/Thebes, but had switched their allegiance to Dionysus. In this scene, the Theban Bacchae also reused lines that Pentheus had spoken in earlier scenes. They patterned the lines into an eerie and progressively louder chant that operated to mock or haunt Pentheus at his moment of death.
The four performers who played Pentheus crafted the character's gestural depiction into a kind of game. As each Pentheus scene began, the performer would reuse the key gesture(s) she or he had seen in the prior scene(s) and then add one of his or her own. The end result was a Pentheus who was signified not only by his costume but also by the four key gestures introduced by four different actors. The highly artificial conglomeration of gestures accentuated the grotesque, parodic depiction of Pentheus when, in scene 7, he dresses as a woman to spy on the Bacchae.
Finally, the Joker proved invaluable in stitching the scenes together. During her opening explanation, she distributed programs to the audience that delineated the basic structure of episodes and scenes, as well as the actor-character designations in each scene, and offered a brief preview of the play and how it would be performed. She had placed an easel in a prominent upstage position, on which were several placards and visual aids, and prior to each scene, or as she saw the scenes shift, she would "announce" the new scene by means of large cue card, e.g., "Scene Five: Dionysus Argues with Pentheus." The four episodes were similarly referenced by means of cue cards that hung below the easel. [End Page 145]
Since she had attended rehearsals of all the scenes, the Joker was able to prepare some commentary that she felt would be helpful to the audience. Many of these commentaries were performed as mini-lectures during transitions between scenes, either to elaborate or explain the Greek context of the play, or to elaborate the links the students were trying to make between the Greek context of the play and the local context of the performance. During one transition, she explained what she understood to be the relationship between Greek society and their gods, and how we, in our contemporary culture, perceive/enact our relationship to a god or gods similarly and differently. On another occasion, she simply retold the myth of Dionysus or Bacchus and, again, suggested how Bacchus might be perceived to be at work (or play) in our culture. She also interviewed the audience after her commentary, asking them to provide other examples.
The Joker had prepared two visual aids to supplement her commentary. One was a family tree diagram illustrating the relationships among the characters in the play, which she used during an interview with the audience to insure that they were following it. The other aid consisted of two simple maps--a map depicting
The Joker interrupted the playing of scenes three or four times to interview the performers about their performance choices--essentially asking in each case, "What's the point of this?" On other occasions, she would interview actors or characters "offstage," in the manner of a sideline sports reporter, asking them for their thoughts on what they had just done or about their plans for an upcoming scene or about the status of the contest. She also interviewed audience members concerning what they perceived to be the point of a scene, with whom their sympathies lay at different points, and about any confusions they were experiencing. The Joker also asked more general rhetorical questions, more to incite thought than to receive a concrete answer. These questions concerned the kinds of societal systems that the various characters represented and, because the Joker herself was interested in the issue, how gender was depicted in the play and in the performance.
In these ways, the Joker and the other performers combined the isolated scenes into an oddly unified piece with its own identity--for these students, at this time, in this place, with this play. On the whole, it was, of course, a much more chaotic production than my students were accustomed to doing; we ended up with a crazy quilt, rather than classical statuary. However, I felt that with [End Page 146] another week of group rehearsals to shape and focus the students' work, we could very easily have presented the piece as a mainstage rather than as a workshop production. 6 Boal's Joker System prizes extemporaneity and improvisation--"joking around" with a text and its possibilities--rather than a carefully planned and executed, "seamless" production ideal. Consequently, I know that the Joker System will not appeal to everyone. 7 In a pedagogical context, though, I am more than willing to live with a little chaos, as well as such presumably "low" aesthetic qualities as "patchwork" and "joking around," because the Joker System allows students to experience different relations to character, text, and performance than those to which they are accustomed in the majority of their theatre and performance classes.
First of all, the Joker System disrupts the more typical actor-character relation they learn and practice in most acting classes. Instead of the conventional ethos of actor-preparing-to-play-character, the Joker System values a more collective ethos: actors-playing-with-character. Because there is no continuity in the actor-character relationship from scene to scene, the students must find a way to mark and define each character's identity for the audience, while still leaving enough room in a character's identity so that different actors may inhabit it. In the performance of The Bacchae, the students achieved this by developing and sharing the character masks or markers, and by interpreting and performing their scenes in terms of fairly broad social-cultural forms of expression (e.g., a musical comedy, fairy tale, religious documentary). As a result, their depiction of the characters tended toward broad social (stereo)types. Or, to put it another way, the signifiers used to interpret and represent characters as social types (as functions and attitudes) were made accessible to the audience because of how the students (dis)played the characters. While the use of costume pieces to "label" or "mark" each character serves a pragmatic end in the performance, enabling audience members to identify each character easily and quickly by his or her "mask," Boal suggests that "reducing" characters in this way also serves a critical sociopolitical end: both actors and audiences may begin to think of "character" not in terms of individual personality or psychology, but in terms of such factors as social class, role, and gest. In other words, while many of us tend to think of characters and their motives as the cause of action and events, the Joker System poses the alternate possibility that character and action are effects of other (social) causes.
Consequently, this performance style does not value the actors' skills in revealing psychological subtleties in the characters. In those terms, it is much too broad--at times downright crude. However, the multiple depictions of the characters in the course of the performance allowed the "social complexity" of each character, as Brecht would have it, to come "to the forefront" (71; emphasis added). Because the actors were unable to fuse with the singular reality of a character--indeed, the system prevented them from doing so--the constructed aspect of dramatic character was shown and emphasized, as in the example of the performers' building Pentheus from a set of gestures. "Character" was revealed not only to be made up of multiple, often contradictory, parts; it was [End Page 147] also understood as something "worked on" by outside forces for a particular reason. The Joker's commentaries and interviews called attention to how the actors, as well as the production in general, were working on the characters from outside in order to produce a particular reading or interpretation of the play. From a certain point of view, calling attention to the conspicuous artifice of this process is potentially disruptive in terms of the norms and standards of theatrical production and reception. From another point of view, however, it is merely an acknowledgment of what always happens in a theatrical production. In short, the Joker System encouraged the actors to understand the play's construction of character as rhetorical and to embrace their own rhetorical deconstruction and reconstruction of character in performance. In subsequent discussions, the social-rhetorical understanding of "character" often became highly reflexive, such that students began to articulate the effects of "outside forces" and signifying systems on their own "characters." For instance, when we discussed the different performance choices that two of the performers had made in playing Dionysus--one a white female, the other a black male--the class began to articulate how the social categories of gender and race were imbricated in their presumptions about the play, as well as in their own identities.
Another pedagogical benefit of the Joker System is its capacity to alter the performer's relation to the text as a whole, shifting from a dramatic to an epic mode. Because the performers are constantly changing roles, it becomes necessary for them to direct their energies toward comprehending the entire story--the "Big Picture"--rather than focusing on just one character and the few scenes in which that character may appear. The actors become, as Boal would have it, co-narrators of the story--a team of storytellers (Theatre of the Oppressed 170). In virtually every scene of The Bacchae performance, the performers chose not only to explore and exhibit that scene's particulars, but also to offer a review or retelling of the "whole story" as a way to contextualize their reading of the scene under consideration. In the scene in which Agave enters
Furthermore, as with Brecht's theatre, Boal's Joker System asks the students to comprehend and make evident in their performance why this story is being [End Page 148] told to this audience at this time. In other words, the crafting of a social aesthetic becomes a key objective and trait of the performance. Initially, the students perceived a great distance between the social aesthetics of the world of The Bacchae and their own world; they did not, in a word, see its "relevance." And, clearly, its status as a "masterpiece" did not make it any more relevant to them. One of the virtues of the Joker System, especially in the classroom, is that it does not assume relevance, nor does it position the teacher as defender and explicator of the play's relevance. However "great" a classic work may be, the Joker System still asks that it demonstrate its relevance to us. It treats the relevance of a given story or drama--its ability to speak to us--as a problem to be investigated through performance, rather than as a "truth" to be demonstrated in the performance.
In order to perform the play, the students had to find "relevance"--to invent it, in the classical sense of that term. What is more, they had to find a way to show it, to communicate it to the audience and to each other. The students also were aware that built into the performance structure were devices, such as the Joker's interviews, that would test their comprehension of the links they had made between the text and their telling--i.e., test their performance choices. The Joker--or anyone else attending, for that matter--could at any time put them on the "hot seat," as it were, and ask them to defend what they were doing.
Certainly, some of the connections were crude or simplistic. Finding interpretive links between the ancient, mythical world of the play and our contemporary world is not a simple matter--though we, as teachers, often make it seem as if it should be, with our superior knowledge of history and scholarship. But the spectacle of seeing a group of students struggling to find them--to appreciate The Bacchae as representing a conflict that is in some sense still with us, rather than as an exotic remnant of a distant past--has always been more edifying (and entertaining) than my lecturing them on the meaning and significance of a classic drama. Indeed, what I continue to appreciate about Boal's Joker System, as well as TO more generally, is that it accepts the fundamental "otherness" of a given drama or story, its inscrutability, while at the same time proposing theatre as a forum in which we may still engage a textual "other" dialogically (cf. Boal, Keynote; see also Taussig and Schechner 29-32). Instead of treating the text's "otherness" as a problem to be eliminated via a seamless production (or, worse, as an impossible barrier to overcome), the Joker System sees it as an opportunity to explore, to invent, to discover, to play--to learn.
Ruth Laurion Bowman teaches performance studies at
Notes
1. See especially 146-148; 154 n. 8 in Schutzman. Also see Schechter. In his most recent work, The Rainbow of Desire, Boal has dropped the term "joker" in favor of "director" or, in a few instances, "difficultator."
2. Condensing the production process from two or three months to two or three weeks serves both a practical and a political-theoretical end. In practical terms, it allows us to engage more plays in performance than we otherwise might. From a political-theoretical standpoint, it is an attempt, like Boal's work generally, to subvert conventional theatre rituals and pedagogy: in this case, the fetishization of "performance" by its prolonged deferment in time through "rehearsal." By telescoping the production process in my courses, I seek to unhinge the rehearsal/performance binarism in a fashion similar to Boal's TO workshops.
3. During this scene, the Chorus of Theban Bacchae enacted a dumbshow behind Dionysus and Pentheus to represent the information reported by the Herdsman in Euripides's text (39-43).
4. There were fifteen students in the class. Two students were responsible for the Asian Chorus scenes (1 and 6), and two were responsible for the Theban Chorus scene (8) and the dumbshow during scene 7. One student was assigned to each of scenes 2-5, 7, and 9-10. Scene 11 was the responsibility of four students: three representing Agave, Cadmus, and Dionysus in the exhortation-debate, plus the Joker. Finally, the student playing the Joker would be responsible for composing the dedication and explanation and for preparing the commentary and interview matter.
5. As a result of the assigned and recruited casting of each scene, the performance featured four different performers playing Dionysus, four playing Cadmus, four playing Pentheus, three different Agaves, and two Teiresiases. Additionally, each student appeared in at least two scenes; for example a student would be responsible for staging and playing Pentheus in scene 3, then be recruited to play Cadmus in another student's scene 10.
6. In fact, I have used the Joker System successfully in just this way in several of my own productions. During the first two or three weeks of rehearsals, we replicate the classroom process I have described--group discussion and adaptation, independent rehearsals, workshop performance--then we spend another week or two collectively refining the performance.
7. When I described one of my Joker System productions at a professional meeting, for instance, one audience member testified, "If I pay twenty-five dollars to see a production of Macbeth, I don't want to see any damned jokers--I want to see Macbeth!"
Works Cited
Boal, Augusto. "The Joker System." Drama Review 14.2 (1970): 91-7.
--. Keynote Address. The 1996 Pedagogy of the Oppressed Conference: Keynote Addresses and Interviews. Videocassette. Pedagogy Videos, 1996.
--. The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy. Trans. Adrian Jackson.
--. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. 1979.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Ed. and trans. John Willett.
Euripides. The Bacchae. Trans. Michael Cacoyannis.
Schechter, Joel. "The Jokers of Augusto Boal." Durov's Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre.
Schutzman, Mady. "Brechtian Shamanism: The Political Therapy of Augusto Boal." Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism. Ed. Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz.
Taussig, Michael, and Richard Schechner. "Boal in
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