In my first year of grad school, I took a class on using virtual reality and augmented reality for educational purposes. When my classmate and I originally developed a virtual reality version of Theater of the Oppressed, we envisioned that it would be used for groups that were geographically very far apart or actors and audiences that were isolated from one another such as prisoners and politicians. We never could have conceived at that time that the whole world would find itself in a new scenario where this kind of technique would be useful. The global pandemic has highlighted the need for more robust remote experiences like this.
First of all, what is Theater of the Oppressed? It was created by Brazilian theater practitioner Augusto Boal based on the ideas developed by educational theorist Paulo Freire. The name Theater of the Oppressed is derived from Freire’s famous work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is obligatory reading for anyone going into the education field. In interviews, Boal describes how he developed the idea from an experience he had performing for worker activists in the northeast of Brazil during the 1960s. At this time, there were major worker uprisings against the wealthy landlords that had dominated the economy and politics of the region for hundreds of years. Workers were struggling to gain more rights, improve working conditions, and ultimately have some land of their own. The farm workers called out Boal and his troupe for encouraging them to revolt with a lot of high-minded rhetoric while not being willing to put their own lives on the line for the cause. The actors would return home while the workers would be the ones fighting and dying for change. I have to confess that as a child, I mostly heard the story of this conflict in northeastern Brazil from the other side since parts of my family were the plantation owners.
From this hard life lesson, Boal created a form of theater where people would be able to tell their own stories up on the stage. All of the actors would be telling fictionalized versions of their own life stories, and the audience (referred to as spect-actors) would be able to come up on stage and reenact the same scenes working through the same problems in their own way. In performances that I have seen, the audience members who come up on stage will actually put on some of the clothes of the actors before taking the actors’ place in the scene. When the spect-actor does something that the original actors think wouldn’t be possible in a real situation, they might jump in and point out the flaw in the spect-actor’s plan. If, for example, the performance was all about homelessness and all of the actors had experiences with homelessness, they might interrupt if the spect-actor tries to do something unrealistic to get themselves out of their homeless situation.
In the case of our class project, my project partner and I decided that it was important that we not repeat Boal’s mistake of trying to tell someone else’s story. We settled on a mundane scene that we both had experienced of being a new arrival to New York having to figure out how to use the city’s subway system.. We prepared a script that cobbled together some of the different frustrations we’d experienced with a set of completely fictional characters.
A team of professional developers could create their own completely stand-alone product to allow for Theater of the Oppressed stories, but my partner and I decided to use an existing platform called VRChat. Some people have found VRChat’s public channels to be a godsend while others see them as a dumpster fire, and even those who love the experience will probably admit that you sometimes have to put up with the Internet’s more dubious characters. However, VRChat does allow people to create private rooms and even upload their own crafted scenes with specialized mechanics and behaviors using a Unity game engine plugin. This was the route we chose, and while we found the process of trying to upload our finished subway scene to VRChat’s servers to be quite a hassle, we eventually ended up with a scene where we could invite people and allow them to change into character avatars as they pleased.
This ability to take on different personas is an important part of the Theater of the Oppressed experience. This shift in thinking when one puts on a costume or takes on a different persona is called the Proteus Effect, and it has been observed in digital environments as well. Anecdotally, I tried a very powerful virtual reality experience called 1000 Cut Journey, which is a virtual reality experience developed at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford. In this experience, the user moves through several stages of life from young childhood to early adulthood of Michael Sterling, a black man growing up in urban America. Since it’s a first-person experience, you only get to see yourself as Michael during portions where you’re standing in front of a mirror. It’s a small detail, but being able to watch this character perfectly mirror your movement is surprisingly effective for tricking your brain into thinking this is your body now. The rest of the time, you are seeing through Michael’s eyes how the rest of the world treats you. Of course, going through this VR experience can’t really compare with actually living it, but it certainly made problems people face every day feel more real to me. The VHIL is now partnered with New York-based games studio iNK Stories, creators of games like Revolution 1979, to produce an even more immersive version of 1000 Cut Journey.
Unlike in real Theater of the Oppressed performances, spect-actors who choose to reenact scenes can experience a full-body transformation into a new avatar, and they can be dropped into a highly realistic environment without an audience or an auditorium to break the illusion. They can feel as though they are really there, and the actors can quickly transform their own avatars to play new parts as needed. Virtual reality experiences might have another affordance by giving actors a greater degree of anonymity. Particularly when the audience might be members of a group that are seen as oppressors by the actors, this small degree of separation and added barrier against retaliation might be valuable for actors to be willing to engage in this space. The actors can choose avatars for themselves that might look completely different from who they actually are while still accurately portraying someone who has had similar life experiences to them.The technology for this kind of interactive storytelling is only getting better. The Oculus Rift that we used in our project was heavy, expensive, needed sensors placed around the room to track player movement, and needed to be connected to a powerful computer to function. The Oculus Quest, which came out the following year, is lighter, cheaper, and is a completely stand-alone headset that doesn’t require any additional equipment besides the handheld controllers. As long as you have a WiFi connection, you can interact with others in an online VR environment like VRChat. Since the outbreak, I’ve had virtual reality conferences using the web-based Mozilla Hubs and the Oculus Quest, and the results were pretty good. Organizers could quite easily plan a Theater of the Oppressed event using these technologies. As activist organizations, charities, and other institutions have to plan activities that might bring in audiences that have to be separated for one reason or another, they should keep in mind the pairing of the Theater of the Oppressed technique and virtual reality technology.