Join us on May 18, 2018 at the UCLA Northwest Campus Auditorium at 6 p.m. to engage in a transformative Legislative Theater event bringing together community, campus and incarcerated participants to envision and propose solutions to racialized mass incarceration. Legislative Theater is a technique in which public dialogue, debate and performance are used to develop legislative solutions to problems identified by community participants. Emerging from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, this methodology was used to passed 12 laws during his tenure as a vereador (legislator) in Brazil.
Absolutely no experience in the arts, theater or legislative process is necessary to participate.
During a Legislative Theater event, community participants stage a play demonstrating an oppression they face. Participants in the audience —“spect-actors”— are invited into the scene to rehearse strategies for transformation. Between scenes, participants draft ideas for new laws aimed at ending that oppression. All of these ideas are collected and given to a lawyer and legislator on site who work together to organize the ideas into related groups. As the group builds consensus, with the council of the lawyer and legislator, participants debate the proposed laws until an agreement is reached on a new law the community agrees to champion. The legislator then takes the legislative proposal to their governing body for a vote in hopes of implementation.
