October 5th – Session 2 – Confronting the Oppressor
Location: Pam Miller Downtown Arts Center, Rehearsal Room
Time: 12:00pm – 2:30pm
1. Warm Up: Circle, stretching and breathing, check-in with body; walking through the space and noticing different things about the room (light v dark, textures, colors, skin sensations, emotions in the body, other people you see and acknowledge)
b. Long Meditation (12:20-12:35): finding a spot in the room, think through what you did yesterday evening through to this moment
2. Introductions: in a circle, seated: name, pronouns, what we do
3. Consent Game:
a. Reintroducing the "yes" aspect of the game and then practicing saying "no" when someone requests your spot in the circle; possibility of adding "maybe" as an option next time we play; debrief of the exercise
5. Group Agreements Check-In:
a. Decision to add "remember to use proper names and pronouns" for people participating in the course
Short break (1:30-1:35)
1:35 – 2:30: Image Theatre Exercises
1. Guided Meditation – Imagining Our Inaction (1:35 - 1:50)
Consider a recent time that you were witness to an act of oppression (in this exercise, picking an instance where we were the bystander in the oppressor-victim-bystander triangle) and did not intervene for whatever reason. We imagined these instances individually through a group meditation, calling to mind as many details about the instance as possible
2. Groups – Images of our Inaction (1:50 – 2:30)
a. In small groups (for us, groups of 3) tell your group members the instance you were witness to; include as many details as possible; include the feelings within the body at the moment of impulse to act and the moment of pushing down the impulse (this is a factual retelling who, how, what, where, when, and what we felt, and not an attempt to explain ourselves or our decision; no direct responses after the stories are shared or attempts to comfort)
b. After everyone has shared, each person creates an image of their instance of inaction, inserting themselves as the bystander
c. We begin to investigate the images one at a time.
i. We look all around the image, seeing it from all angles
ii. We make objective observation
iii. We make some subjective observations (not trying to fully project a story onto the image
iv. We get more understanding why using the following tools on the frozen actors in the image:
“I Feel” statement
“I Want” statement
Internal monologue
d. We ask the bystander (who’s image this is) how they would change something about the image if they had one wish granted (person can change on aspect of the image, bringing it closer to a liberatory image); we ask for another wish (another change is made), and is some cases a third wish (a final change is made)
i. As the image moves closer to a liberatory one from an oppressive one, we note the changes in the image, in the bodies of the actors, the reactions we feel happening in our own bodies
Short Talk Back on this day of Image Theatre
Final Group Image: “Confronting the Oppressor”
Closing Claps
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