TEONE.COM.AU
This magazine-styled website is a digital catalogue of performing art works:- short films, community theatre projects, written works and visual arts produced by Teone Reinthal.
NECTARSONGS was my first narrative drama (made in 2006). The premise examines asylum seeking from the inside, looking out. Back then I asked (Mr Howard, Mr Ruddock..?) and again now, I demand to know 'How did we come to assume this ugly mantle of arrogant stupidity, how did we fall into such a black and icy chasm of hatred and fear as is promulgated by those upright 'Christian' political leaders who turn their faces away from the plight of so much desperate human suffering? How have we allowed our human values to decay in order to perpetrate such greed, so much racial and religious prejudice, indulging ourselves in endless, glittering festivals of self-promotion and gluttony, waving our facile banners of ignorance and cruelty? ...well...Tony?
COMMUNITY FILM MAKING AS SOCIAL ACTION - The practice of raising such stories as are found in places where rich and powerful stories have lain sleeping, silenced, immobile and stabled is central to the forum theatre developed by Augusto Boal. Conceptually, my own experimental works seek to communicate in the language of those who commonly go unnoticed; disregarded by the cultural ‘metropole’, (Connell, 2007) whether the person of racial minority, the person of disability, the gender-various, the traumatised, the wounded, such liminalised people as are struggling to exist at the fringes.
The creative engagement that results from the performed improvisation of interstitial events, centred within my screenplays and narrative templates, invites actors to become ‘firmly grounded in cultural analysis and self-observation’ (Boal in Schutzman, 1990, p80) as a direct means of revealing the ‘dialectic of the oppressor and oppressed within themselves as well as within society’ (Boal in Schutzman, 1990, p80). Boal’s theatrical activisms confronted, questioned and stridently challenged the socio-economic and political struggles borne by the oppressed peasants of Brazil, borne by women, borne by vicitms of military coups, borne by the illiterate, the unemployed, in forums, classrooms, invisible theatres that he initiated and inspired, frequently causing political debate to spontaneously erupt on the streets.
‘For Boal theatre is a form of self-consciousness, modelled on the post-partum division or the split posited by the mind-body problem before it is a transaction between actors and audience’ (Auslander in Schutzman & Cohen-Cruz, 1994, p125).
Boal successfully envisioned and actioned an ontological validation of self through an intense dedication to creating and supporting bold opportunities for creative expressions and social debate. Every subsequent and clearly derivative theatre of social therapy and activism, modeled on Boal’s Theatre of Oppression, has sought to explore such a richness of self-in-validation as imagined by Boal, by Brecht, Artaud, Grotowski, Brook, Stanislavsky and Schechner; each searching through embodied explorations of inner and outer oppressions in all of the theatres, forums, classrooms and open roads of intuitive, impulsively human responses to the active analysis of improvised performance.
What's New?...
Evolving projects and new art works are being developed in several areas - academic, (adaptivism.com) artistic (teonereinthal.com) and a creative social enterprise initiative (coconutdurden.wordpress.com). Please come and visit my companion blogsites to see what's cooking.