CTPO Practitioners
CTPO is emerging as a community practice and ensemble with members who walk with multiple forms of mastery and expertise from across the country.
Gail Burton
Joker, Educator, Thought Leader, Public Intellectual, Director, Center for Theater & Pedagogy of the Oppressed (CTPO)
https://www.creativeground.org/profile/gail-burton
Biography
Gail A. Burton began her work with Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory, Institute for Popular Education at the Brecht Forum in New York City in 2003 in the facilitator training internship. She had been working extensively with incarcerated women. Her practice of Theater of the Oppressed became a means of further clarifying and strengthening her political vision and skills as a community educator, and she soon contributed significantly to the growth and direction of Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory collective (TOPLAB) as a political project.
THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED LABORATORY (TOPLAB)
TOPLAB was a long standing partner with the Brecht Forum Marxist School (BF) and the Institute of Popular Education in New York City before the closing of BF in 2014. She continues the legacy of TOPLAB through the development of CTPO as a next generation multiplication of that collective. For TOPLAB, she pioneered, for example, multiple series of workshops on gender oppression, as well as for people of color addressing issues of internalized racism. Additionally, she served, for a decade, as a co-lead in TOPLAB’s national facilitation training program which served as the primary multiplication project of U.S political organizers and community based practitioners until the collective’s hiatus in 2018.
UNITED STATES
Over the years Ms. Burton has worked with diverse constituencies and communities using the Boal repertoire of Image Theater, Forum Theater, Cop-in-the-Head and Rainbow of Desire. She has also taught these techniques to university students and secondary school teachers nationally. She has created a strong curriculum based on TOPLAB’s popular education methodology, emphasizing the value Boal has placed on theater as a capacity- building approach to collective leadership, civic dialogue and community self-organizing.
AFRICA
In 2013, she began to support the development of practitioners in West Africa through the Senegalese Federation of Theater of the Oppressed groups. Burton is a trained and experienced practitioner of the techniques and methods developed by Boal as tools to affect radical social change and help bring about social justice, peace and empowerment of people whose voices have too often been silenced. Her life’s work has been focused on social activism and the uses of theater for radical social transformation.
In Ms. Burton you will find an informed and inspiring teacher and scholar, devoted to Boal’s mission and skilled in the means to carry it out.
--From Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) letter of endorsement
Photo: Gail Burton, selfie in preparation for 1920s: Black Flapper Costume Ball
The Joker Cohort
MASTER FACILITATOR APPRENTICESHIP
The current Joker Cohort began as a remote learning study group focused on the Pedagogy and Theater of the Oppressed. In August 2021, we put theory into practice and met for a practical workshop in Image theater and to establish the commitments of the group as a Joker cohort of Theater of the Oppressed (TO).
The Joker Cohort is comprised of community workers who are interested in the ways that embodied social justice practice, in the form of Theater of the Oppressed, can be used to address social issues. We also look at the practice in concert with multiple efficacies (contemplative, political, theatrical, educational, technological) that members of the Cohort have mastered.
In the future, new members will be decided through a curated process which considers the input of the existing group with final decisions made by the Director.
PHOTO: 2021 Joker Cohort Retreat, Providence, RI. L to R: Ivan Eusebio Aquirre Darrancou, Josie Bray, Brittany Owens, Brendan Curran.
Interested? Contact Us with requests and inquiries and join our mailing list for future stand alone technique trainings and Communiversity opportunities TBA on our Offerings page.