Dialogue for Empowerment: Jana Sanskriti’s Experiment with the Method of the Theatre of the Oppressed in Rural Bengal

Abstract

Since the 1970s, belief in the importance of participatory empowerment has been constantly asserted through various mass-inclusive developmental strategies. The growing interest in theatre for generating socio-political capacity-building among people gave rise to the Theatre of the Oppressed, conceptualized and developed by Augusto Boal. This article provides a brief outline of the modus operandi of Boal’s practice, and focuses on investigating the theoretical and practical methodology of Jana Sanskriti, the West Bengal group of practitioners of Theatre of the Oppressed. The article investigates the dialogical relationship between actors and audience in the three phases of the group’s theatre-making process: pre-performance; during the performance; and after it. It proposes an illustrative model of Jana Sanskriti’s dialogical approach towards experiencing a developmental surge in society. Shubhra Ghoshal is a research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) in Dhanbad, India. Nirban Manna is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) in Dhanbad.