The Our Own Voice Theatre Troupe was founded twenty years ago as a project of the Mental Health Association of the Mid-South to empower mental health consumers to make their own theatre. The mission was to give voice to their experience, to express their concerns about mental health treatment and to attack the stigma attached to mental illness. We recruited actors from community mental health centers and mental health drop-in centers and ran a series of workshops, teaching basic improvisation skills and Augusto Boal’s image theatre techniques as tools for articulating experience. We used these to construct a series of group images of mental illness and its treatment. We also conducted writing exercises, gathering autobiographical sketches from our participants describing their experiences in the mental health system. These texts and images were woven together into our first script (with some borrowing from Lewis Carroll), Alice in…. Understand?, which represented the story of one company member’s teenage suicide attempt and first hospitalization as the archetypal trip down the rabbit hole. Initially, we targeted mental health service providers as our audience, seeking to raise awareness in the doctors, nurses and social workers who provide mental health services about the consumer’s experience of mental illness and mental health treatment. Subsequently, we found audiences in the community at large, touring to churches, schools and community groups.
So, in
1995, coincident with becoming a resident company at Theatreworks, a
small experimental theatre space in midtown Memphis, we expanded our
mission to invite everyone into our process. While we
retained many of
the original company members and our focus on mental health issues, we
recruited performers from other theatre and dance companies and
encouraged anyone who wanted to play to join with us. The
term
“inclusive” became a guiding principle, as we developed an approach to
casting our productions that allowed us to live up to our name, giving
every participant a voice. For each production, we conduct a
series of
open workshops centered around a chosen theme and immerse participants
in the method of ensemble playmaking which we have adapted from Viola
Spolin’s improvisation games and Augusto Boal’s image theatre
techniques. After exploring the theme together, we
invite everyone in
attendance (“if you enjoy what we’re doing”) to be part of the
production. We then fashion our script or scenario around the
ensemble
we have formed, building it out of the unique skills (and
“limitations”) of the performers. With this approach, the
troupe has
come to represent enormous diversity, across race, religion, age and
gender orientations. Casts have included children and the
elderly,
blacks and whites, gays and straights, people with physical
disabilities as well as those with mental disabilities, whom we
continue to actively recruit. We have shifted from a focus on
“mental
illness” to a focus on “mental health”, and from psychological issues
to issues of social justice and oppression. We like to say
“You don’t
have to be crazy to be in Our Own Voice, but it helps.“
The
theories and practices of Augusto Boal have been a primary influence on
Our Own Voice. His image theatre techniques are
almost always used in
the early developmental stage of a production to help each member find
their unique connection to the theme and to identify the images that
are meaningful to the specific ensemble and therefore central to the
production. Boal’s forum theatre has been used as a structure
for a
number of our scripts, allowing for audience participation
and input
in problem-solving during performance. In general, Boal’s
conception
of a theatre that empowers its audience to engage in dialogue with
performers to confront oppression and work toward change is a beacon
and inspiration to all our work.
The troupe has been
increasingly interested in using dance and movement ritual for
community building and healing, and the teachings of Anna Halprin have
been influential in this regard. Just as we believe that
everybody
can, and should, act, we believe that every body that can act can also
dance. The non-verbal communication of dance allows
us to engage our
themes on a different level and in a way that is in many respects more
inclusive than spoken language. In addition to a number of
modern
dance productions, we have created a disco show, a couple of rock
musicals and “a country-and-western space ballet.”
We expect
Halprin’s vision of healing and transformation through movement to be
an important aspect of our future direction.
Our Own Voice
currently presents two productions a year, one in the Spring and one in
the Fall. We tend to characterize ourselves now as
an “experimental
theatre company” rather than emphasizing our mental health
orientation. Every production is an experiment to find the
form and
content that will best express the unique ensemble to its specific
audience. Improvisation is always a part of the
developmental process
of our productions, and is very often included in
performance. We are
always interested in the opportunity for spontaneity provided by the
encounter between spectator and performer, and we nurture interaction
between them at every opportunity, always devising in our productions
some way to acknowledge, if not actively interact with, the
audience.
Our motto is: “Fourth walls are made to be broken.”
The Our
Own Voice Theatre Troupe has been documented on our website.
Under
“Past Productions” on our
home page, an archive of our twenty years can
be accessed, with photos, posters and press coverage. The
troupe
includes a few members (three, to be exact) who have been performing
with it since the beginning, a number who have been with us for many
years, and plenty of others who have joined us for one or two
productions. We are excited to be celebrating
twenty years, and look
forward to building and serving community for many more.