Reflections on The Rainbow of Desires

Since we will be offering our first Rainbow of Desires course as STOP in Autumn this year, I thought it might be useful to share a few thoughts about that area of Augusto’s work. A more extensive meditation on the subject by me can be found in the second Routledge Companion to the Theatre of the Oppressed.

In that essay I was specifically thinking out loud about what the Rainbow work ‘does’; what changes does it actually engender or seed within those who take part in it. The same concerns are much more extensively studied when it comes to the more widely practised work of Forum Theatre; there is more than one study of the effect of our friends at Jana Sanskriti on the villages they tour to repeatedly with their productions- easily measurable quantities, like the generally older age at marriage, or the wider participation of women in education, proof positive that Forum theatre can and does make a difference, particularly when applied on a protracted basis. With Rainbow, a branch of TO much less practised, there is less ‘evidence’ out there, partly also because it would be much more difficult to collect; how do you measure the change achieved when a participant says ‘I feel like a weight has lifted’ or ‘I am dying to meet my parents again, now that we have done that’. In the essay cited above, I reference a few experiences during workshops I have led on Rainbow which to my mind instance moments of change, difficult to calibrate though they might be.

In this blog, I want to talk a little about working with Rainbow of Desires in a trauma-informed world. For those not familiar with the terminology, trauma-informed is a shorthand to describe working in whatever discipline with an awareness of the enduring power and reach of the effects of trauma on people’s lives. Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score is a very good text to start with if you are unfamiliar with these concepts; Van de Kolk sets out, with extensive examples, how deeply traumatic experiences permeate our being, our body as much as our mind, and how a multiplicity of common events in daily life may trigger the re-emergence of these traumas, however distant they are in time. At worst, things may ‘re-traumatise’ people, putting them right back into the state of terrifying powerlessness they experienced in the moments when whatever variety of awfulness actually happened to them.

This is pertinent for TO, since revisiting difficult moments is pretty fundamental for the practice of both Forum Theatre and Rainbow (and many other aspects of TO). So the question is, to what extent can we make it ‘safe’ to try out these still-experimental techniques, particularly if we have not been trained as therapists? How might we deal with it if a participant found themselves in such a state during a workshop? I should stress that over my long career of faciltiation, I have never had to deal with such an occurrence during a Rainbow of Desires workshop - though I have had such things happen in other contexts, and have not always known what to do. But the Rainbow techniques are powerful, and invite participants to immerse themselves deeply in enactments of different kinds, so it is not an inconceivable occurrence.

Boal always made a [point of making a distinction between theatre and therapy, putting his own work firmly into the former. But in reality, this was never an entirely satisfactory get-out. Because as we know, theatre can be therapeutic, and therefore, logically, it is sometimes therapy. We want theatre to be therapeutic, thank god that it sometimes is. Perhaps that therapeutic effect is best known as catharsis, both in its original Greek sense and in the Boal-adapted meaning of the removal of blocks; however it is defined it describes a deep-rooted psychological change.

And these days, when trigger warnings have become absolutely commonplace – a whole other essays probably needs to be written on a discussion of their actual efficacy, and why many theatres and other media are using them – the theatre world has clearly owned up to the fact that yes, we can be strongly affected by what we see. Hurrah.

Augusto was after all married to a psychoanalyst so was pretty interested in the life of the mind, though he was not himself a trained therapist. Perhaps his ‘theatre not therapy’ line was itself a little like one of these trigger warnings which at worst are designed to get theatres off the hook if someone should abreact to something – we warned you, this might affect you.

I have certainly witnessed the power of the Rainbow work and am appropriately respectful of it. I am not aware of any adverse consequences in the years that we did courses, with and without Augusto, at Cardboard Citizens elsewhere. You can build into it different forms of debriefing and de-roling, whilst at the same time allowing participants to live their discomfort for as long as is useful. More often than not, rather than re-traumatising people, I hope that I have witnessed some form of de-traumatising people (some brief examples are referenced in the Routledge compendium cited above).

Our own innovation on this iteration of the Rainbow of Desires course as STOP (which will be broadly similar to the weeks that I led at Cardboard Citizens for years) will be to have a therapist familiar with the processes but separate from them available to participants during and after the sessions. And it will be interesting to see if this helps deepen and embed any change that the work has stimulated, giving participants a safe place to analyse their feelings outside the techniques themselves. If they want.

I hope speaking about this doesn’t daunt any potential participants. Rather the intention is to remind us that we to be cognisant that this is exciting work to look at how we have internalised oppressions; that within, as without, another world is possible, though there is no magic - we end a session the same people as we started it, just with a few more perceptions of ourselves, courtesy of the others. Come and join us in Autumn.