THE THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED LABORATORY

The purpose of the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory, founded in New York City in July 1990, is to provide a forum for the practice, performance and dissemination of the techniques of the Theater of the Oppressed. TOPLAB is a group of educators, cultural and political activists and artists whose work is based on extensive training and collaboration with Augusto Boal since its founding. TOPLAB conducts on-site training workshops on theater as an organizing tool for activists in neighborhood, labor, peace, human rights, youth and community-based organizations. We work with educators, human service and mental health workers, union organizers, and political and community activists who are interested in using interactive theater as a tool for analyzing and exploring solutions to problems of oppression and power that arise in the workplace, school, and community—problems connected to AIDS, substance abuse, family violence, homelessness, unemployment, racism and sexism.
Since 1990, through the auspices of the Brecht Forum, TOPLAB has initiated and organized intensive workshops led by Augusto Boal in New York City. It has also planned and led hundreds of training workshops in the techniques of the Theater of the Oppressed. In this capacity, TOPLAB has brought together people from diverse backgrounds, occupations, and organizations, and functioned as a resource, information, and networking center serving individuals and groups interested in theater for social change. Each year, TOPLAB has a series of public workshops at the Brecht Forum in New York.
TOPLAB has presented training workshops elsewhere in New York, and throughout the United States, Mexico and Guatemala for numerous social action organizations, schools and colleges, religious groups, health care professionals, educators and others, as well for the general public. In addition to targeted training workshops, TOPLAB members have worked in various street theater projects around the themes of globalization, neoliberalism and international solidarity, and to protest United States aggression against Iraq, Cuba, the Balkan countries, Latin America and elsewhere, and its members and associates are involved in a wide range of progressive political and solidarity groups and movements.
The Theater of the Oppressed is an organizing tool for liberating our communities. In keeping with the vision of Augusto Boal,TOPLAB aims to assist communities-in-struggle to mobilize themselves as "spect-actors" of their own lives. We also share the objectives of the Basic Integrated Theater Arts Workshop developed by the Filipino Educational Theater Alliance (PETA): to help community members become "spect-actors"--simultaneously actors, teachers, organizers and researchers. TOPLAB will neither facilitate workshops for, nor accept funding from for-profit corporations and similar enterprises.