ROiL
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ROiL is a performance art troupe from Ithaca, New York, which has conducted youth workshops in Portland, Maine, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. "ROiL" is not an acronym.
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[edit] Youth workshops
One aspect of ROiL's work is in youth workshops, often held in after-school sessions for two or more weeks. ROiL gives young people the opportunity to participate in an empowering, group-building workshop with their peers, write a performance piece about important issues, and ultimately perform for and educate their community.
The work can be physically and emotionally demanding, but it is also fun (there’s a reason it’s called a play). After performing, the young people answer questions from the audience and listen as audience members share their reactions and thoughts.
ROiL workshops with youth result in empowerment and leadership demonstrated by the performers. Youth are largely marginalized in current society, and that marginalization can be compounded by socioeconomic, gender and racial factors.
[edit] Portland, Maine
In a recent workshop, ROiL artists worked with young men and women from immigrant families living in a public housing development to create an original play based on their interactions with adults. The play was performed for an audience of adults who hold positions of authority in the kids’ lives, including the public housing management, the Portland City police department and Portland’s mayor. The dialogue that followed was intense, and both the kids and the adults came away with valuable information about each others’ perspectives. During this past winter of 2005, another group of youth wrote and performed an original play about the dynamics of appearances and assumptions in their schools. The principal of one of Portland’s two largest high schools saw the play when it was performed at the housing project. He invited the students to perform for a school-wide assembly, and shared his reaction to the performance with the principal of Portland’s other large high school. As a result, the students will be performing and leading a school-wide discussion at both schools in early February 2006.
[edit] Baton Rouge
Other workshops include work at Renaissance Village, a newly created FEMA resettlement area on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, which is the "temporary home" to about 750 evacuated families from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Most kids are enrolled in the now crowded Baton Rouge school system, but they and their parents have lost the lives they once had. ROiL is partnering with area artists, actors, youth workers and educators to facilitate a performance workshop that will be performed and toured in the area.
[edit] Process
ROiL performance development workshops delve into the layers below social issues through expression, communication, and healing. Through brainstorms about issues, improvisational story-telling, and group-building activities, students design and build a performance that addresses the issues they face and educates their audiences as a way of making change within their community.
The process used in workshops has roots in the Theater of the Oppressed techniques developed by Brazilian artist and activist Augusto Boal. Through movement, games and structured interactions, workshop participants learn to translate their experiences into the physical language of the body. They might explore themes like conflict, power, rejection, and exclusion, as well related themes such as support, alliance, recovery, and relief. The content of eventual performance pieces develops organically as group members bring their own stories to life.
Creating a performance piece together is an alchemical process that transforms the group participants. Collaborative work challenges each member of the group to take personal risks, to share openly of themselves, and to actively support others. Individual experiences are honored and synthesized to translate into a common group experience and thus a performance topic. With a performance, the group invites an audience to respond to the issues raised in talk-back sessions after the performance, creating a dialogue that may continue long after the performance has come to an end.
