Liberation or Propaganda: Transhistorical and Transcultural Applications of Participatory Theatre

Theatre for social change, or more generally, theatre that addresses political issues in a community, often leans on participation as a way of democratizing the theatrical space and opening the conversational floor to more than just the traditional creative team. In practice, participatory theatre nonetheless can and has been used as a tool of propaganda rather than a tool for democratic social change. These seemingly-incompatible applications of participation in political theatre present a problem for those who want to use it: what versions of participatory theatre provide a space for other voices, and what versions of participatory theatre ostensibly appear to, but ultimately only function as tools to justify an ideology? To explore this question I examine a common form of participatory theatre: interactive theatrical trials. Specifically, I analyze the agitation trials of post-revolutionary and early Soviet Russia using Augusto Boal's frameworks from his devlopment of Theatre of the Oppressed.