Ukraine After The Chernobyl Disaster in 1986

At the beginning of our project we considered Bertolt Brecht as a possible practitioner for our piece. By using his alienation technique we planned to create a multi-media theatre performance. As a collective, we considered doing this by examining relevant topics and implementing a mixture of verbatim theatre and devised script techniques. However, Augusto Boal is the name of the practitioner that we mainly used throughout the show. We chose Boal, because of the nature of his techniques, which allowed us to experiment with various themes and ideas throughout the performance. Our genuine idea was to create a piece that would show how the media can be used as a source of manipulation of the mass population. Furthermore, showing how the government can use this medium in their advantage, hence controlling the minds of the masses. We based this idea on Boal’s techniques that would involve the audience’s participation. A member of our group came up with the idea of luring the audience into believing that something is real, when in fact it was completely made-up by our group. By using Boal’s theatre techniques such as Forum Theatre, Joker System, Newspaper Theatre and Image Theatre we set out to convince our audience that the British government are planning to release into the atmosphere a new chemical compound called E307 that slows down cells degeneration, thus making people live longer and be healthier. The E307 compound stemmed from our initial idea to create a gas called “Anarchy Gas” that would have been used to counteract and absorb some of the nuclear radiation over Ukraine after the Chernobyl Disaster in 1986 and eventually speed up the neutralization process.

As we delved into our research we divided ourselves in pairs, in or...

... middle of paper ...

...-techniques.html. Last accessed 19th May 2014.

David Farmer. (2010). Image Theatre. Available: http://dramaresource.com/strategies/image-theatre. Last accessed 20th May 2014.

S. Leigh Thompson. (2006). What is Theatre of the Oppressed?: Image Theatre. Available: http://theforumproject.org/whatisto/imagetheatre/. Last accessed 20th May 2014.

Jaqueline D. Burleson (1991). AUGUSTO BOAL’S THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED IN THE PUBLIC SPEAKING AND INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION CLASSROOMS . Louisiana State University: The Department of Communication Studies. 17-30.

The Brecht Forum. (2007). AUGUSTO BOAL & THE THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED. Available: http://brechtforum.org/abouttop. Last accessed 22nd May 2014.

Alex Maccioni. (2009). AUGUSTO BOAL: THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED. Available: http://chiaroscuromagazine.com/critique/augusto-boal-theatre-oppressed. Last accessed 22nd May 2014.