Well-known Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal led two workshops at the 2002 Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed (PTO) Conference in Toledo, Ohio.Footnote ³ These were three-day workshops; the Joker workshop took ten hours over two days, and the Invisible theatre workshop took five hours on a single day.Footnote ⁴ As an educator and theatre enthusiast myself, it was with great pleasure that I attended his workshop. Despite his well-established international popularity, I did not expect the homogeneity of the participants, in terms of race and ethnicity. I was the only Asian participant, and felt marginalized and remained on the periphery while Boal and the other participants seemed to feel comfortable using English as the medium.

When commenting on the intrinsic ‘democratic’ qualities of the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), Boal stated, ‘True democracy lets people choose what they do or what they do not do’. This comment, as well as his democratic attitude, which was reflected throughout the workshop, influenced me to reconsider his approaches. The basis of Boal's methods involved the spectators’ voluntary participation in the forum theatre scene, where they would replace the protagonist, thereby transforming themselves into ‘spect-actors’. Though never imposing upon the participants, his method relied purely upon the spect-actors’ self-motivation and willingness to join in themselves. As a result of this experience, I started to reconsider the meaning of democracy that Boal used in his TO.

Forum theatre is the principle technique of Boal's TO. In forum theatre, Boal or the Joker figure facilitates the workshop as the master of the ceremony. When I attended the Joker workshop, the participants were divided into several groups and were asked to create an oppressive situation with both a protagonist and an antagonist. Each group then acted out their dilemma twice in front of all the workshop participants. For the first performance, the spectators quietly observed the other group. However, during the second session, any spectator could interrupt the scene, replace the oppressed protagonist and perform their own resolution. Meanwhile, as the Joker, Boal encouraged the audience to take part. Despite his enthusiasm, the same participants would repeatedly volunteer as spect-actors, leaving most of the audience quiet spectators. The lack of participation by the majority of the audience was a detail impossible to ignore, for I, too, lingered on the sidelines. What could have been the cause of our inhibition to partake in the exercise, thus impeding our transformation to become empowered spect-actors? Personally, it was due to neither lack of desire nor lack of motivation, for we were all there to learn Boal's techniques first-hand. Was I transformed? If I had participated in the scene, would I have felt empowered after replacing the protagonist? Why did I choose to remain silent? Is remaining silent safe? The questions that I posed to myself were beyond count.

After much reflection, I concluded that the most important factor in my inhibition – despite my eagerness – was my insecurity in speaking English. As a Korean living in the United States, I felt that the cultural and linguistic barriers overwhelmed my desire to undergo a self-transformation into a spect-actor. Boal frequently stressed the importance of physicality, which is supposed to overcome spoken language barriers. Yet since forum theatre is led by dialogues between a spect-actor and professional TO actors, I could not disregard the inequality of the language between the participants. During the workshops, I found myself feeling somewhat out of place. I could not bring myself to interrupt the scene and play the role of the protagonist. Culturally specific resolutions to the dilemmas I encountered were bound tightly by my language insecurities. First of all, if I became the spect-actor, playing my role with the rest of the participants in the scene, and my partner did not understand what I said to him/her, might it be embarrassing to me as well as to the others? Moreover, if I suggested something for the problematic scene, what would happen? I might have looked at the problematic scene differently and my suggestion might have appeared inappropriate to the others at the workshop. Finally, I realized that I could not enter into a scene on an equal footing with the native English-speakers already involved. It was very possible that the entire context of the scene would shift and suddenly, rather than being about the protagonist role, it would mutate into a situation about me: the non-native speaker trying to interact with native speakers. Since I was not the same as most of the participants in terms of race and ethnicity, why would they have cared for my suggestion? These were just a few of the concerns that plagued my participation as a spect-actor. I regretted the fact that Boal and/or his techniques did not help empower me to become a spect-actor; I reluctantly sat back and played the stereotypical quiet Asian girl.

As a ‘democratic’ educator, I linked my reflections about this TO experience to classroom settings. Should I encourage my students to stand up and become the spect-actor? How can I urge or assist them to stand up? Did Boal give possible answers or suggestions for how to do this? Also, what makes students choose to be silent? Will my teaching, informed as I believe it will be by Boal, create the same demoralizing dynamic that I experienced in that disappointing workshop? Just let-them-be does not sound like a responsible strategy for a radical educator. Post-structural educational theorist Elizabeth Ellsworth proposes that individuals are situated in various kinds of social positioning and association, in which variable power dynamics govern.Footnote ⁵ Every TO participant was situated in different positionalities and associations. What inhibited them from transforming into spect-actors?

By analysing my personal experience and reflection on Boal's workshop, this article examines how Boal's democratic methods ignore the process of ‘becoming’ and how this omission can create isolation among participants. Furthermore, I would like to offer some suggestions to TO practitioners by underscoring the significance of silencing among spect-actors. Before discussing Boal's methods, particularly forum theatre and rainbow of desire, it is crucial to address how he began to conceive the idea of the TO. The political and social environment in which Boal found himself at the time of the development of TO will explain explicitly how he perceived the transformation and social change resulting from TO.

Augusto Boal started his theatre career during the 1960s in Brazil, when that country was ruled by a military junta and suffering from the effects of long-term colonization. Using theatre as a weapon for social change, Boal attempted to decolonize people's perceived inner inferiority as the colonized and to challenge the junta's oppressive rule. At that time most theatre companies in Brazil modelled themselves after European traditions. The prevalent European tradition fed off a Brazilian society ‘whose values were founded on a colonialist mentality that regarded anything from within an indigenous or local background as automatically inferior to anything of foreign or, better still, European origin’.Footnote ⁶ Moreover, because of the influence of Catholicism, Brazilian people believed that the conditions of their lives were predestined by God's will. According to Boal, the primary obstacle that he faced when engaging his theatre techniques was people's mindset that they were inferior human beings and were destined to live as they did.

While looking for a solution, Boal encountered Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) and was heavily influenced by that text. Freire tried to help people, particularly peasants, see that they could control their own lives and not be passive recipients of either God's will or the whims of their human oppressors. Freire coined the term conscientizacao (‘conscientization’), which goes beyond the literal meaning of consciousness-raising

In short, Freire claimed that the people (the oppressed) were the subject in the world rather than the object controlled and created by the oppressors.Footnote ⁸ According to bell hooks, Freire's concept of conscientization in decolonization movements such as Boal's work is significant in that ‘this is the important initial stage of transformation – that historical moment when one begins to think critically about the self and identity in relation to one's political circumstance’.Footnote ⁹

Boal directly used Freire's radical concept and engaged it in the theatrical format. That was when TO was born:

Much like Freire, Boal saw the oppressed as subjects who have the power to change the world; however, due to external and internal oppression, they appear to others and believe themselves to be objects. Boal made a concerted effort to help people reimagine themselves as subjects, and as he engaged his beliefs about human beings with his TO he consequently shaped the concept of ‘spect-actor’.

Before discussing Boal's essential term, ‘spect-actor’, I will link Boal's perception of the human being to the philosophical study of subjectivity. I am hoping that when Boal's perception is placed in this context, it will become clear why I felt left out and isolated at Boal's workshop. Primarily based on the book Subjectivity by cultural-studies scholar Nick Mansfield, I use bipolar frames to re-examine Boal's conception of the human being. Mansfield designates two big streams of the subject – one is subjectivity and the other is anti-subjectivity.Footnote ¹³ Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud is the representative of the former group while philosopher and literary critic Michel Foucault belongs to the latter group.

Freud and his followers see the subject as a thing quantifiable and knowable.Footnote ¹⁴ To post-structuralist eyes, Freud is an essentialist in that he defined the nature and structure of the subject, which assumes that there are some levels of innate natures and essences in human beings. The subject is influenced by its surrounding. So one's nature is changed by nurture. Freud argues that a subject has a ‘knowable content, and an analysable structure’.Footnote ¹⁵ Meanwhile, to Foucault, subjectivity does not really exist. Rather it is the invention of power/knowledge. The subject is ‘the primary workroom of power, making us turn in on ourselves, trapping us in the illusion that we have a fixed and stable selfhood that science can know, institutions can organize and experts can correct’.Footnote ¹⁶ Although these two frames look wholly incompatible, Mansfield points out their common ground: both positions ‘reject the idea of the subject as a completely self-contained being that develops in the world as an expression of its own unique essence’.Footnote ¹⁷ How, then, did Boal see the human being?

I believe that Boal positioned himself in the former group with Freud. Boal demonstrated an essentialist tendency to suppose that the human being is knowable. Boal remarked in his book The Rainbow of Desire, ‘The human being is – to a limited extent and with a large margin of error – a knowable entity; we know more about its body than its psyche’.Footnote ¹⁸ In one sense, Boal took a Freudian stand on human beings. Ironically, Boal did not seem to put as much stress on the psyche while carrying out his TO.

To Boal, the human being first and foremost is a body that has five main features: it is sensitive, it is emotive, it is rational, it has a sex and it can move.Footnote ¹⁹ I have a hard time believing Boal's argument that the body itself has emotive and rational features. Among these five features, I focus on emotive and rational, which Boal simply addressed in five lines, because they are perhaps least familiar to us when thinking in terms of a body. As for the emotive feature of the body, Boal states, ‘the sensations of pleasure or pain can lead us to emotions of love, hate or fear, or any other emotion’.Footnote ²⁰ The sensation of the body causes the emotion; the body itself does not have the emotion. Additionally, when elucidating the rational feature, Boal plainly remarked, ‘The human being is a rational creature, it knows things, it is capable of thinking, of understanding, and of making mistakes’.Footnote ²¹ This is a leap in logic from the (presumably physical) body's features to the human being. Does the human being equal the body? Certainly the body makes up a big portion of the human being, but the body is not the sum total of what a human is and, to me, rationality and emotion are not physical. Boal missed the clarification of an inner aspect of a human being as a constituent and to some extent blended these two elements.

Boal placed great emphasis on ‘doing’ through the body in his theatre rather than talking and talking. He stressed the presence of the material body onstage, which he thought has more power to challenge oppression than simply talking. This emphasis on the body kept me silent and in my place because it did not touch either my emotional or my rational nature. Essentially, I did not feel safe in front of the other, native English-speaking participants. This shocked me because I fully expected to be swept up in the activity, but I found myself unable to participate and untouched by the ‘democratic’ invitation to step into the action.

Boal believed that human beings contain a number of possibilities within themselves that can change an oppressive situation. Specifically he used the word ‘person’ rather than ‘human beings’ at this time, saying,

Boal understood human beings as people who have the potential to change the world and challenge their oppression. Yet, echoing Foucault's concept of ‘discourse’, Boal also acknowledged the socially structured rules that regulate our behavior. But Boal was not entirely in agreement with Foucault. Standing with Freud on subjectivity, Boal believed that human beings are ‘subjects’ who can control power structures. To Boal, the subject has a considerable, innate autonomy, which has been, for the time being, oppressed by various reasons and surroundings. Thus the subject precedes power or environment or the oppressors. Meanwhile, Foucault argues that ‘the “individual” – and all the things we identify as making up our individuality (our separate body, its idiosyncratic gestures, its specific way of using language, its secret desires) – are really effects of power, designed for us rather than by us’.Footnote ²³ I find Boal's idea of the subject more optimistic than Foucault’s, which makes human beings the object ‘contrived by the double work of power and knowledge to maximize the operation of both’.Footnote ²⁴

Boal's positive image of the human being connects with his creation of the ‘spect-actor’. He coined this term in opposition to the concept of a passive watcher, a spectator in a theatre space. Traditionally the audience in the theatre is expected to calmly occupy their seats and watch the show. However, Boal challenged this idea. To him, this idea had been imposed on people by the oppressive class since the time of ancient Greece in order to repress any revolt against society. Boal argued that Greek tragedy made the people obey their destiny chosen by gods, and so by watching the hero's failure and pain, the people experienced catharsis, harmlessly defusing their pent-up energy. In the times before ancient Greece, all ranks got together at festivals, had fun and everyone was equal.Footnote ²⁵ Boal argued that his Theatre of the Oppressed helps people return to prehistoric eras and become one of the participants, as they did in those days.

In the chapter titled ‘Poetics of the Oppressed’, Boal strongly claimed that ‘spectator’ is a bad word.Footnote ²⁶ And it is always ‘less than a man and it is necessary to humanize him, to restore to him his capacity of action in all its fullness. He too must be a subject, an actor on an equal plane with those generally accepted as actors, who must also be spectators’.Footnote ²⁷ A spectator is ‘less than a man’ and to become a human being to the full – in other words, to awake his/her autonomy – s/he should take actions. To Boal, a ‘true’ person, namely a subject, has the ability to take action for one's liberation from the oppressive situation. Therefore, a spectator in a forum theatre space should stand up and act out an idea, which Boal calls becoming a spect-actor. Boal's manifesto is as follows:

These passages are extremely powerful and have greatly influenced many social activists and theatre practitioners. They were forerunners of the radical and transformative techniques that Boal later introduced. At first glance, becoming a spect-actor seems to function as the essential step toward solving the problem of oppression.

There is, however, no detailed discussion about how a person becomes ‘true’ or mobilizes the ability to launch into action. In other words, the process of how I am becoming a ‘true’ person who has the ability to take action – or even spending time to consider why people chose not to take action – was not dealt with at the workshop. As an educator, I was anxious to learn how to help a student become a ‘true’ person. I wanted to know how to motivate students to recognize their ability to create action for their respective liberation from any kind of oppressive situation. As the Joker, Boal did not touch this issue; rather, I felt that during the workshop Boal tended to take this capability of action for granted. By focusing on action, he seemed to disregard the significance of critical thinking and the step of generating the impetus. In my case, I had an impetus to become a spect-actor with some responses to the forum scene. I wished that the workshop space had been a safer place for me given my concerns about language and cultural differences. If that was my case for silencing, I wondered about other native speakers’ silence. Nobody knows what and how the most silent participants had thought; yet I, as an educator, ought to mull over students’ various silencings. His disregard for various silencings among the participants made me reconsider my unquestioning attitude to Boal's fascinating techniques and eventually deromantized TO.

According to a scholar of Boal, Hernan Flores, the process – from spectator to spec-actor – is based on ‘transitive learning and collective empowerment developed through theatrical investigation’.Footnote ²⁹ First, I did not feel any collective empowerment at the workshop. Since Boal restrained activities of discussion with other participants, I only had my own response to the problematic scene to work with. Therefore there was no kind of collective consensus, nor any shared opinions, among the participants. Second, I did feel a strong desire to step into the scene, but in the end felt unable. My status as spectator did not feel like my ‘democratic’ choice and I was most certainly not empowered by my physical silence. His method did not account for my situation. Third, it is worth noting that many other workshop participants did not take part, and I started to doubt Boal's definition of democracy and the importance of becoming the spect-actor.

Boal stressed that the process of becoming a spect-actor is a revolutionary power for the oppressed. While he pointed out the importance of becoming one, he seemed not to address how to do it. That is to say, the process of transforming from a spectator into a spect-actor is not addressed from a practical point of view. There is no mention about exactly how the spectator stands up and steps into the scene. Ellsworth admits, ‘I could not unproblematically “help” a student of color to find her/his authentic voice as a student of color’.Footnote ³⁰ She continues, ‘Educational researchers attempting to construct meaningful discourses about the politics of classroom practices must begin to theorize the consequences for education of the ways in which knowledge, power, and desire are mutually implicated in each other's formations and deployments’.Footnote ³¹ Likewise, TO practitioners endeavouring to create meaningful discourse and consequences must be sensitively aware of diverse implications in an individual's formation, and consider what may be causing the underlying reasons for silencing among the participants.

Boal's techniques should have explained the process of how TO helps a human being as a subject – a multilayered self – decide to step into the scene. Or, at least, he ought to appear to acknowledge the fact that people are situated in diverse kinds of positioning. If he simply came to me as I struggled with my ‘democratic’ choice whether or not to participate, and said, ‘Stop talking and just do it’, I would have perceived this to be insensitive and unempathic. I would have lost faith in TO. TO scholar Kelly Britt Howe seems to agree with my concerns. Boal suggested, ‘it is in the Forum that everyone is able to act democratically…[E]veryone can participate and has the space to say what they want’.Footnote ³² Howe points out that his remark may be heard thus: ‘“Everyone here is welcome to speak or act. Why don't you feel comfortable doing so?” It neglects the multiple vectors of power and oppression that structure a theatre workshop space even when everyone is supposedly invited to participate freely and without self-censoring’.Footnote ³³ Democratic participation means more than equal access and free choice. Somehow I experienced a simplified definition of democracy at the workshop.

Leading the horse to water and letting it drink are the most important factors in radical theatres as well as educational spaces. Despite a democratic context, students/participants need to be guided to water. Whether to take an action or not depends on students/participants’ decision, a ‘democratic’ decision; however, I believe that as an educator or facilitator, the action to lead the horse to water is inevitable. To some extent, I could assume that Boal intentionally did not impose power over the participants, which demonstrated an aspect of a democratic atmosphere. However, I do believe the decision either to drink water or not is mine (or that of the students/participants) and I needed to be ‘safely’ guided to the water. Creating a desire to take a step is by far the most essential thing to do for educators/practitioners. Theatre scholar Ken McCoy shares this concern, noting, ‘it may be that the desire to engage in a dialogue is more important as a liberation strategy than the dialogue itself’.Footnote ³⁴ On the ground, Boal's method did not provide for the nurturing of these individual desires and choices to become a spect-actor at the Joker workshop.

According to Jan Cohen-Cruz, renowned scholar of community-based performance, Boal showed ‘how theatre is not necessarily a closed system – and not something reserved for experts’.Footnote ³⁵ But TO can easily become the property of some specific participants who have the guts to step into the scene. This feels like elitism especially when the same people participate over and over. Without an explanation of how TO helps a spectator become the spect-actor, TO may only reproduce the hierarchical relationship. In addition to my experience, some TO practitioners share concerns regarding this matter. Theatre scholar Steve Ball notes, ‘Similarly, some of those that do participate regard Forum Theatre as an exercise in theatrical virtuosity and seize the opportunity to show off their acting abilities at the expense of focusing on the nature of the problem under examination’.Footnote ³⁶ At the Joker workshop I attended, the majority of participants appeared to be theatre practitioners who had ample theatre experience and skills. When some of them acted out as spect-actors in a problematic scene, their performances were generally impressive. It could be my presumption, but a particular spect-actor who repeatedly came up onstage seemed to enjoy performing in front of all the participants. Somehow, the rest of us became an audience watching this particular spect-actor's scenes. There, a hierarchy was suddenly formed between him and the rest of us – he was the actor, we were the spectators.

Furthermore, McCoy points out that in reality TO produces hierarchical relations, saying that ‘Boal's forum theatre is not completely non-hierarchical. The Joker[Footnote ³⁷] is a figure of control; the course of the action rests on his authority over the actors’.Footnote ³⁸ Maybe that was the reason Boal attempted not to impose his authority over the spectators who took silent positions at the workshop. Instead, he respected their ‘democratic’ decision of non-participation. But he emphasized the significance of becoming a spect-actor. At the workshop, most of the participants did not experience the role of spect-actor, much like myself. As an educator, I am wondering what is more important – helping spectators/students become a spect-actor or respecting their ‘democratic’ decision in both TO and educational settings.

Since Boal focused on the point that action is important for revolution and social change, the silence of the majority of the observers was ignored. However, we need to examine how silence and indifference are produced in Boal's TO. Boal's remark on democracy on the first day of the workshop, ‘True democracy lets people choose what they do or what they do not do’, needs to be examined in relation to the issue of being silent. The non-participation of the majority of the spectators at the workshop cannot be simply viewed as a democratic gesture. I wanted to join the spect-actors, but my insufficient English prevented me. Even though I chose not to join the spect-actors, I did not feel empowered. Rather I felt oppressed, not liberated. Gradually, I compromised my expectations in order to be in a safe zone as a silent observer. My attitude was not democratic or revolutionary. I consciously ignored the situation and kept silent. That was my limited ‘democratic’ decision in that a desire for becoming a spect-actor was repressed by my concerns about language.

I strongly believe that TO practitioners should consider why people are not standing up and speaking for themselves, as well as how TO may transform indifference and silence in a more active way of confronting outer or inner oppression.Footnote ³⁹ Boal's focus on doing instead of talking did not address the problem of getting the oppressed to think and discuss. The emphasis on doing may replicate oppression. Scholar of feminist pedagogy Bernice Fisher asserts that ‘TO also assumes that someone – the group using the techniques or the person introducing it – has a fairly developed consciousness. Without such consciousness, TO runs the risk of reproducing rather than representing oppression’.Footnote ⁴⁰ For instance, at our workshop, a scene where an African-American waitress is abused by some racists ran the risk of just portraying oppression by stereotyping people. Unless all participants in the workshop were of the same ethnic group, the scene could just be representations of solutions. Since Boal asked the spectator who identified with the oppressed protagonist to come forward, his request exempted most of the people at the workshop. Some non-African-American spectators stepped into the scene and replaced the protagonist. To me, these spect-actors looked brave, because my own racial difference from the African-American waitress led me not to participate. However, despite racial differences, these participants stopped the scene and took the place of the oppressed. One spect-actor made an effort to converse with those racist customers logically and gently, but their conversation did not go well and instead the racists in the scene sneered at this particular spect-actor. Another spect-actor tried ignoring the racist customer's remark, yet that attitude had no impact on the workshop participants. Their enactments were appreciated on the spot, but Boal and other participants agreed that their suggestions were not realistic. These two particular suggestions enacted by non-African-American spect-actors furthered my questions about TO in light of a spect-actor's identification with the protagonist in an oppressive scene.

Regarding the spect-actor's identification with the protagonist, Fisher says, ‘Boal's theatre forum works best with a high degree of homogeneity among the people using it … members of the audience do not always identify with the protagonist or protagonist-substitutes’.Footnote ⁴¹ Reflecting on my experience at the workshop, I noticed my non-participation resulted primarily from the language barrier and less from identification with the protagonist, which had generated stereotypical suggestions to the problematic scenes. I could not identify with anyone at the workshop in terms of the intersection of identity factors such as race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexual preference and physical ability. In fact, it is hard for one person to ‘literally’ identify with someone due to intersectionality. If Boal's TO – especially forum theatre – works only in a homogeneous society, then obviously the US is not the ‘right’ place to practise it because it is a heterogeneous and multicultural society. Furthermore, there is no place for forum theatre practices in the world. People are never in the same positions even when they have much in common. Therefore I believe that TO practitioners require more awareness of various identities in cultures that are more heterogeneous, and need more dialogue about crossing identity in interventions.Footnote ⁴² Also, it will be helpful not to utilize TO alone and to engage TO with other theatre techniques that can enable practitioners to become more sensitive about participants’ multiple identity factors.

Alternatively, Marc Weinblatt, a longtime TO practitioner and now director of the Mandala Center for Change in Port Townsend, Washington, thinks that Rainbow of Desire (RD) techniques are better applied in US contexts because RD focuses on internal oppression and ‘explore[s] the conflicting forces that impinge on both our desires and our decisions’.Footnote ⁴³ RD techniques move away from the bipolar dynamic of one oppressor (antagonist) and one oppressed (protagonist), as often seen in forum theatre, to ‘explore the multitude of voices, personae, and forces that act together to create oppressive conditions’.Footnote ⁴⁴ I assume that integration of forum theatre and RD techniques may work out efficiently in most contemporary societies.Footnote ⁴⁵

Even if the workshop members are homogeneous in terms of race or ethnicity, it does not mean that they all agree on who the oppressor and the oppressed are. In the classroom setting, the teacher is often depicted and chosen as the antagonist; however, Weinblatt explains that in his TO workshop some of the participants think the teacher to be oppressed by students and school systems. He continues, ‘Within heterogeneous communities, among people with divergent political views, disagreements can erupt over how to read the power dynamics – in Boal's terms, whom to define as oppressed or oppressor’.Footnote ⁴⁶ How Boal's TO engages ‘such diamentrically opposed perspectives in a dialogue’ is an essential critique that TO practitioners have to deal with today.Footnote ⁴⁷

Boal resisted globalization as another form of colonization, destroying difference and homogenizing the people of differences into the dominant discourse in terms of cultural, economic, political and intellectual aspects. On a small scale, how did he respect the differences of people in his workshop? In reality, he generalized the specificities of individuals’ identity formations when he engaged his TO. Due to the focus on doing onstage rather than talking, he seemed not to care about the factors of an individual's historical achievements such as why a certain person performs in that way or not. He facilitated the problematic scene with the few limited spect-actors, asking, ‘Do you think this approach will work?’ If someone said no, Boal immediately asked him/her to show his/her own solution as a spect-actor.

There was one spectator who responded to Boal's question. He was asked to become a spect-actor and to demonstrate his solution for the scene; however, he refused to be onstage. So we could not hear his approach. I was wondering what he would have suggested for the scene. Why did he refuse to become a spect-actor despite having a suggestion for the scene? Were there any other ways for him to share his thoughts with the other participants? ‘Stop talking, just show us’ did not work for this particular case either. Since this workshop was intended for future Jokers, we needed to discuss more deeply diverse responses and reactions of participants that could be encountered some day and should have had time to consider the ways in which Jokers might deal with silencing/non-physical participation. If a student resists becoming a spect-actor, or in other words withdraws from ‘going to water’, what should I do? I am acutely aware that not all students are willing to become spect-actors. I questioned how TO, which resulted from the movement of decolonization, did not appear to deal sensitively with tricky factors of identity. Maybe it was because Boal was a white male and the colonizers of Brazil were European people. At least to me, he did not seem to recognize such sensitive issues as ethnicity, gender and sexual preference.Footnote ⁴⁸ Unlike race, ethnicity is considered changeable, yet it is an essential element for an individual's identity formation, which is more than one's cultural inclination. Regarding the importance of ethnicity in the study of subjectivity, Mansfield argues,

Mansfield continues his argument that ethnicity seems to only exist in the minority groups who have ‘visible markers of difference’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Therefore, based on this logic, white people do not belong to any ethnic group and Boal might not consider this ethnic issue important. I believe that this is a crucial omission of TO. TO overlooks how individuals perform in a certain way according to their historical formations constituted by differences of identity factors. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak remarks on the differences among the oppressed groups. Often these groups are treated as a single collective group, so the problem is that ‘the internal differences are suppressed in the name of a single program of action which automatically ranks participants as more or less loyal, or more or less attuned to the collective project’.Footnote ⁵¹ At the workshop I attended, Boal appeared to ignore the differences among the oppressed groups by not sensitively addressing different responses to the problematic scene of forum theatre. I hope that TO practitioners do not overlook the silence, and instead endeavour to pay further attention to their silencing; if possible, this may prompt silent participants to become spect-actors.

Moreover, through postcolonialists’ perspectives, Boal appeared to disregard the constitution of the subjectivity of the colonized and the oppressed. When inventing TO techniques, Boal examined less the colonized subjectivity, which was imposed by the colonizers’ discourse, than the way out of the imminent, external oppression of Brazil. This trend continues in TO. Philosopher of postcolonialism and critical theorist Frantz Fanon regards ‘the subjectivity of the colonized as a direct product of the colonial system: “it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and perpetuates his existence”’.Footnote ⁵² Henceforth, like Foucault's subjectivity, the subjectivity of the colonized is ‘not a pre-existing thing that encounters the colonizer with an underdeveloped consciousness and an undercivilized emotionalism, that must adapt or submit to a more advanced European civilization’.Footnote ⁵³ Standing onstage and rehearsing the role of protagonist sounds somewhat naive in the face of such big issues of the interior consciousness. I am also aware that there are some countries facing imminent, external oppression rather than internal oppression. Yet hooks quotes Freire in order to stress the significance of raising critical consciousness, saying that ‘we cannot enter the struggle as objects in order to later to become subjects’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Boal's term, it could be that we cannot enter the struggle of life as spectators in order to become spect-actors. My question and the point I have discussed in this article is how we, spectators, become the spect-actors of our lives. My desire to step into the scene was repressed and Boal's TO did not address this issue. At the workshop, I experienced oppression despite the TO goals to ‘safeguard, develop, and reshape’ human nature in doing theatre. My human nature did not feel safeguarded or developed; rather, I felt frustrated with myself as well as with TO.

I do not want to conclude negatively about Boal and his practices. As theatre scholar Sharon Green points out, TO ‘is a simple yet radical idea that has captivated artists and activists across the globe and offered numerous people opportunities to reclaim the role of protagonist in their own lives, albeit momentarily’.Footnote ⁵⁵ As long as TO's emphasis is on how people face their oppression more actively and critically, and find a solution to the oppressive situation, I do not doubt that TO will play the role of ‘a rehearsal of revolution’ in people's lives, communities, societies and the world.Footnote ⁵⁶ Meanwhile I ardently hope that TO practitioners do not disregard people's silencing, but pay close attention to an individual's identity differences in the grid of power dynamics. I also hope that they strive to find complementary techniques with TO and share those successes with the rest of us.