New BAY-Peace Forum Theatre Project in the Works!
Help us get our new program up and running!

Youth Action Team members practice a "Forum Theatre" warm up exercise as they prepare to begin leading artistic resistance workshops in local high schools.

BAY-Peace supports and empowers Bay Area youth to confront militarism and other forms of violence through youth organizing and artistic resistance. We are the only group of our kind in the Bay Area, offering a unique model that brings youth to the forefront of the movement for peace and justice. We cultivate creativity, critical thinking, and understanding among working-class students of color who are the targets of institutions and cultural norms that increase the level of violence in their lives. Our Youth Action Team develops Hip Hop, spoken word poetry, and Forum Theatre as tools for self-reflection and critical analysis. We use “Resistance Art Projects” that help guide young people toward greater awareness of oppressive social structures and ways to actively resist them. Our Youth Action Team has been building skills and developing curriculum all fall, and they will soon begin to lead weekly after-school classes in Oakland high schools.

We are currently in the process of applying for grants so that we can expand upon our existing work in Oakland high schools. We hope to develop an interactive “Forum Theatre” Project that will begin this coming summer. Our Program Leader, Abe Velazquez, will work in collaboration with an amazing actor and long-time friend of BAY-Peace, Luis "xago" Juarez, together with a crew of four young actors, to create a five-day performance/workshop series. The goal of the project will be to help low income youth of color—both urban and rural—to make more solid personal life-choice decisions and to more actively engage in the struggle to improve life in their communities. If you haven't made an end of the year donation, and if you are able to do so, your contribution will help us carry out this important work!

Forum Theatre is an element of “Theatre of the Oppressed” created by the groundbreaking Brazilian practitioner Augusto Boal. In Forum Theatre the actors create and perform a short play that dramatizes an example of the oppression of the community. Key scenes of the play are then repeated, and audience members are invited to stop the performance and step in to change the outcome of the conflict. By bringing audience members into the performance and giving them input into the dramatic action, the audience is empowered to take on these issues in real life. In countries around the world, Forum Theatre has proved an effective tool for adult civic education. In Brazil it has actually been used to develop grassroots participation in the legislative process.

The scripts for our urban Forum Theatre pieces will be based on real-life scenarios taken from interviews of low-income urban youth of color in the Oakland area. Over the summer of 2012 our team plans to interview, and videotape, the stories of at least twenty youth and elders from diverse cultural backgrounds who have been directly impacted by encounters with military recruiters, criminal justice and immigration agencies. From their stories, Xago, Abe and the young actors will develop Forum Theatre scripts involving characters that grapple with the conflicts and decisions that urban youth of color regularly encounter. These participatory pieces will be performed within the context of a five-day workshop series developed for urban high school classrooms, reaching 150-200 urban students during the following school year.

In 2013 our goal is to bring this project to the Central Valley, conducting a second round of interviews in three rural communities, each in close proximity to a military base, a prison and an immigration detention facility. Based on these interveiws, the Team will adapt our Forum Theatre scripts to reflect the realities of rural youth of color. During the summer of 2013 we plan to offer a second set of high quality performance/workshops to 80-100 rural youth in four or five communities. Video documentation of the workshops will be interwoven with historical and interview footage to create an online record of the project that we will share through social media with the goal of reaching thousands of youth in California and beyond.

Poor and working-class students of color are routinely disenfranchised by our failure, as a society, to make our educational, economic and democratic institutions accessible to them. Instead they find themselves disproportionately targeted by military recruiters, facing racial profiling by the police, and often living in fear of having their families torn apart by immigration agents.

As educational and employment opportunities become less and less accessible, low-income youth of color face increased pressure to be swayed by the $5 billion/ year military recruiting budget. These factors, combined with the criminalization of many of the communities in which disenfranchised youth live, have led to record incarceration rates for youth of color.  A young African American man has about a 1 in 3 chance of being incarcerated compared with a rate of 1 in 17 for white men. At the same time, deportations of immigrants have nearly doubled under President Obama compared to the rates under the Bush presidency. The decisions of the young people who are targeted by these institutions are critical to their survival, and important to the health of our community. The goal of this project is to offer positive, inspiring stories that will lead the way. Can you please help us with an end of the year donation?

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