Theatre for Peace & Justice is a group of PeaceAware people who put on short plays for classrooms, community events, and Peace Vigils. See Analytic Theatre Example page.

We apply Augusto Boal's 'Theatre for Social Change" sprinkled with a bit of Bertolt Brecht to help communities express images of exploitation and oppression. We do this in two ways.

Photo 1: Image Theatre Workshop at Food Not Bombs Event 8-23-03

First, we can come to your event and do a short 5 to 15 minute play about peace and justice. This can be a die-in or a simulated confrontation between Peace and War people. We also do a President Bush play in which members of the audience (pretending to be NeoCons) pull the strings on a life-size Bush puppet (see Photo 1). See how cleverly the wires are disguised, as the young lady on the right maxes Bush, disguised in hat and beard (stage left) mimics her every move. Activists and worshipers take up Image Theatre poses, in an animated silent theatr storyboarding exercise.

Photo 2: Theatre Aesthetics workshop at August Meeting - Academy of Management Aug 4-03

Second, we can spend 60 to 90 minutes with your group helping you develop your own skits about Peace & Justice issues in your community. In the first session we train your entire group to do (silent) Image Theatre exercises (as in Photos2 & 3). We help you express visual body sculpture images of exploitations and oppressions. We then work on animating the images in silent theatre. This is an improvisation workshop. In follow up sessions we work on adding dialogue and rehearsing performances you can do for your community.

Photo 3: University Students engage in Image Theatre training Aug 18 - 03

We are staging up Dialectic Theatre events. These are events where we portray both sides of a situatioin, such as pro-war and anti-war (capital & labor), and work on expressing the perspectives. In Dialectic Theatre, a continuation of Brecht's Epic Theatre, we try to get the audience out of their passive spectator role and into an intellectual and reasoned social critique. To learn more Theatre for Peace & Justice , please contact David Boje, Ph.D. peace@peaceaware.com

See more about PeaceAware.com Next --> See Analytic Theatre Example