2019 Year 12 IB Extended Essays

Using Image theatre, Jana Sanskriti trains its actor-activists and scripts their plays in order to develop a collaborative reflection about the situations of oppression. They employ sequences that draw on games and exercises by Boal and the joker/facilitator will vary and adapt them according to time, circumstance and the needs of the group that is participating. (Ganguly, Sanjoy. From Boal to Jana Sanskriti: Practice and Principles (Routledge Focus)) The workshops are structured to progress gradually. Each exercise is explored in-depth and quite often involves a number of variations. The process starts with a construction of individual images/symbols, then an analysis of what kinds of situation the images depict, and naming them; next a variety of methods are introduced to dynamise (activate) these images and begin to develop text related to them – participants might be instructed to conjure non-verbal sounds to accompany their images then with single words, then with a complete sentence and perhaps with an ‘inner monologue’ which articulates their feelings in the moment. Finally, scenes that can eventually be jotted down and later edited to produce a composite performance script, begin to emerge. Points of conflict, cycles of dilemma, crisis points, defenses, and justifications surface directly from the participants' experience. The outcome of JS workshops and training is a developed capacity of the body; to register and articulate experience through the senses, to investigate its social and political dynamics through reflection and analysis and the ability to use these processes to collectively create interactive and interrogative dramaturgies . (Ganguly, Sanjoy. From Boal to Jana Sanskriti: Practice and Principles (Routledge Focus))

Ganguly notes the existing methodology of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) allows participants to be spectators of their own reality. Jana Sanskriti regards games as social metaphors, a connection emerges between participants inside the room and the reality outside. The theatre workshops

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