Page 268 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Introduction 243

by which the actor-animators became aware of the effectiveness of
words, gestures, expressive forms and situations.
The play was not an end in itself, as it prompted a reflexive social
awareness of the condition of abandoned women, more dynamism
in communicating and acting towards changes of attitudes, and it
created opportunities for social animators to establish contacts in
new villages. Its success could be attributed to a capacity to touch the
audience with emotions that were recognized by the same social group
it had originated from. Unlike top-down communication by urban
activists prescribing their own procedures for solving social problems,
it was imbedded with the genuine perceptions of actresses sharing the
same fate as their spectators, thereby triggering emotional energy,
motivations and ideas for social change.
A founder of the Action Theatre movement in Belgium, Paul Biot
asserts that ‘popular culture does not exist … because culture without
people is not culture but aesthetic products and expediency, matters
carried by communication systems or goods enforced by education’.
His assertion comes in support to the refusal of dichotomic categori-
zations opposing the ‘people’ to the ‘elite’, or ‘art’ to ‘non-art’. In his
chapter, ‘Action Theatre in Belgium’, he further advocates that the very
notion of ‘art’ and ‘audience’ in Europe emerged as culture became a
form of entertainment for the dominant classes, thereby losing ‘its con-
stitutive bond with people’s creation and social development’. In
contrast, Action Theatre stands as the reappropriation of a collective
creative process in which ‘action’ encompasses the ‘cry for justice’ at
the origin of the work, its elaboration, its performance and its critical
assessment involving the spectators.
This notion of ‘action’ implies a continuity of thinking in which the
focus is on processes, rather than forms and products, of committed
creative minds. ‘The play is only one of the tools for action.’ In fact,
Action Theatre is not a specific form. The form of each play is determined
by people telling ‘with their [own] words and gestures, their eyes and
their memory, their revolt, their hopes, their distress, their joys, how
they see the world, here and now, and how they want to change it’. This
approach is akin to that of ‘action research’ in that it binds together
popular cultures and socio-cultural action. According to the author,
when popular cultures are reduced to folk entertainment, socio-cultural
action falls in the hands of the dominant social groups who undertake