Making Bodies Talk in Forum Theatre.

Most Forum Theatre practice encourages as many ‘spect‐actors’ as possible to intervene directly on stage as part of the investigation of an oppressive social situation. Such practice is in line with Boal's advice (in Games for actors and non‐actors) that ‘the keener the desire to take action, the more the spect‐actors hurry on to the stage’. While it is certainly understandable that jokers should seek to maintain interest by encouraging frequent interventions, there are risks attached to this strategy—particularly when the efforts to involve people on stage obscure the very important pedagogical function of all the talk that happens in a Forum Theatre session. Much of this talk is devoted to framing and evaluating what the intervening spect‐actors are attempting to embody. This article shows that the joker is able to exercise a high degree of control over what gets talked about in Forum Theatre and that such discursive regulation may be critical in shaping the ‘ideological contours’ of the event. The article concludes by suggesting that careful discourse analysis—insofar as it helps clarify the relation of a Forum Theatre event to the broader discourses which enable or constrain social change in daily life—provides a strong indicator of the event's potential ‘socio‐political efficacy’ (as Baz Kershaw puts it in The politics of performance).