The Point

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Pop

M.I.A., Sri Lankan-born UK hip hop artist

Lately I've been really into two things that have more in common than I thought. One of them apparently originates in Brazil, but it seems like an idea with a somewhat universal ring to it. The other has confirmed, for most of my friends, that I am indeed as crazy as I look, but hear me out. I have a hypothesis that hip hop and theatre of the oppressed are different leaves of a self-same tree.

Now, if you know me, you can testify that I probably seem like an unlikely fan of hip hop. I'm still sort of shaky on whether I can use that word interchangeably with rap, but I'm not exactly into Fifty Cent or Nelly, and I wouldn't even know where to buy a Fubu jacket. It wasn't until this summer, though, that I found out rap could be about more than bitches and bling and riding around in your new Benz.

I don't remember how I started listening to K'naan but as soon as Soobax fell into my ear, I heard sweet honey (okay, I'm thinking of this Persian snack, baunieh) and even though I couldn't understand any of the words in Somali, I felt like he understood me. Something about the music made me want to stand up and shout, and I couldn't believe someone was rapping about warlords and refugees. I had the immense honour of meeting him and some of the guys in his band this summer, and I was completely humbled by how quiet and dignified he was. He was singing about seeing his best friend shot in Mogadishu, about suffering and about telling children they're worth something, and yet he had the presence of the most reserved philosopher. I still can't believe it.

So I started wondering if there was more to this hip hop thing, if other people were singing about empowerment and about struggle, instead of just how sweet their new ride was. How could I have known M.I.A. and Cadence Weapon were way ahead of me?

And then I heard a line in one of K'Naan's songs that hit me: hearing rap from the US when he was seven, it made him feel eleven -- 'I understood it,' he says, 'as the poor people's weapon.' And like a glass of water settling down, it all became clear to me, why his music hit me so hard. It made me see hip hop as not just some ivory tower reserved for the beautiful, the educated, the classically trained or the gangstas with more ice than Reykjavik, but as something anyone could pick up as long as they told their story and told it well.

Which brings me all the way around to this Theatre of the Oppressed thing.

A couple of years ago in Beijing, I met Darren, the program supervisor from the other Canada World Youth group in the city and told him about my disparate, seemingly irreconcilable interests. I'd been doing theatre since I was a little kid, and I'd tried acting, directing, design, tech, everything I could get my hands on. At a certain point, though, I had to stop, because I realised I had stopped being passionate about theatre itself, and started craving only the applause. I felt hollow about it, but there was some magic to the act of performance I wanted to get back into. Someday. I told him I felt torn because that thirst was so far away from my other passion, which falls today somewhat loosely under the name international development. How could I reconcile a need to understand the world in the context of other cultures and languages, understand poverty, and still do the stand up on stage and sing thing? Can you see where this is going?

He told me to check out the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and his ideas about education as a tool for empowerment, rather than as a vehicle for filling empty vessels from some esoteric font of wisdom. He said Freire's ideas about popular education tied right back into theatre through something called Theatre of the Oppressed, and then he started talking about conflict resolution and helping kids work through crises through theatre and I remember my brain shutting down and thinking This is so depressing. Why on earth does he think I would want to be part of something about oppression?

Fast forward to about two months ago. My friend Gus called me up and asked me if I wanted to do a cool education thing about globalisation with a Canada World Youth group in Camrose. I'd never been to Camrose (which is shameful, since it takes longer to drive to West Ed from my house) and I think you get a sense now for how much I love CWY, so I said yes in a heart beat and came to the brainstorming session at Remedy with pencil and paper and eager eyes. Well, lo and behold, his idea for this globalisation thing turned out to be a form of popular theatre, better known as... theatre of the oppressed.

As our group started talking about it, I realised what the label meant. We decided to do two skits; one about access to HIV/Aids drugs, and the other about cross-cultural marriages. Rather than doing a conventional sort of morality skit with a wag of the finger, though, we came up with some seemingly insoluble situations for the characters, and let the 'audience' work them out. In the Aids scene, I played a CEO of a pharmaceutical company trying to explain why I couldn't sell our anti-retrovirals for less in poorer countries without losing my job. One of the other characters was a little girl who had no friends at school because they were afraid they would catch her 'bugs.' Tough. So what did they do?

The audience got to ask us all questions in character after the scene. Why are you so heartless? would be a good summary of what came my way. Why couldn't you take a tiny hit in profits in order to save people's lives? And as we broke into smaller groups with a handful of audience members to talk about why our characters made the decisions they did, I realised why this type of theatre ties back to popular education. Rather than pretending we knew everything about the issues involved (which we didn't), the audience members got a chance to throw in their experience and knowledge about HIV and its impact, and threw open doors we hadn't realised existed. Some of the participants who came were from South Africa and Mozambique, so when the girl playing an Aids orphanage relief worker talked about how hard it was for her to watch the kids suffer needlessly because the ARVs were too expensive, there were people in the room who understood exactly what she meant, and weren't afraid to say so. We started having a roomfull of people discussing why a corporation's bottom line comes before a human life, and they started coming up with solutions none of us performing had even considered. It was pretty incredible.

And I last week I realised why this type of theatre works, and what it's capable of. Augusto Boal, the originator of the concept, talked about popular theatre as a tool for confronting the parts of our lives that oppress us, and those that empower us. By using the convention of performance as a tool for discussion of very real issues that shape the way we live, you quite literally begin a 'rehearsal for revolution.' And you don't have to have to go to Julliard to do it. Popular theatre works when everybody in the room is simply there to tell their story and to tell it well.

So finally understanding the way this kind of theatre can be a platform for people who may not have a voice, I started connecting dots with hip hop and thinking again about rap being 'the poor people's weapon.' What they have in common is their ability to let anyone, of any standing or colour, from any country, in any language, speak up and be heard. But I wonder now, who am I, mostly white, able to afford a university education, living in a middle class family in Canada, fluent in English, to tell other people how they can become empowered, to identify with the hardships of my brothers and sisters struggling to feed their families, to fight Hollywood imperialism, to live through civil war? I wonder as I wander.

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posted by Christopher at 7:28 p.m.

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