In Italy the main T.O. organisation is called "Giolli Centro Ricerche su Teatro dell'Oppresso e Coscientizzazione". There are other groups in some cities, often where we did some workshop, and some individuals who use T.O.; compared with ten years ago nowadays T.O. is known enough.

The purpose of our organisation is to develop and spread all over in Italy the method of T.O. and to work against all sorts of oppression through the Freire approach called "conscientization". The organisation was founded the 15th of February 1992 in Medesano (Parma). It has been re-founded 2 times more, following the group-evolution. At the moment we are 4 members full-time and 12-15 outer collaborators that help us in some big projects or lead short courses.

CONTEXT FOR OUR WORK

We are a special association because our members are spread off all over in Italy; that meant having difficulty for meeting and to reduce our play production; in fact we work mostly in projects leading groups or playing Forum but with non- actors involved in the project locally rather than as a Theatre Company.

We started working in connection with a Peace Center (Centro Psicopedagogico per la Pace di Piacenza) running courses for teachers, about conflict resolution. Later on we found our own way and based our work on groups of marginalized people.

We have never had any public funds and we've survived till now thanks to volunteers and our work.

Politically we don't want to be involved in ideological questions and elections but we collaborate sometimes for special events with some left-wing parties. We are more interested in collaborating with associations and grass-root movements as much as possible.

OUR DEVELOPMENT OF T.O.

We developed Theatre of the Oppressed in different ways in order to create a set of instruments useful for our Projects. The first connection was with Active No-Violence; that means taking in account the personal power that each person has, to believe in the richness and creativity of no-violence techniques, taking the risk to explore different solutions over violence, to better analyse the structure of oppressive situations (resources, levels of power...), to deep the "third part role", and so on. It influenced also our way to manage the association so that we chose to use consensus during inner decision making process. The second connection was with Community Development Approach (C.D.A.) and Freire's thought. It arrived that T.O. wasn't enough to influence a community towards change and the work on oppression. We discovered that C.D.A. was a powerful framework that we could use to invent actions and activities where T.O. instruments could be organised in a coherent structure. C.D.A. taught to search groups to be engaged in the project; to believe in the community resources in order to solve its own problems; to find special persons in the community, as opinion leaders and "privileged witnesses", who could be used to improve our knowledge of community. The third point was finding connections with some psychological approach as Psychodrama, Systemic Communication (Watzlawick), N.L.P. etc. These fields enriched our work with special sensitiveness in leading workshop.

DETAILS OF THE GROUPS WHICH WE WORK WITH

In these last years we have been working mostly with marginalized people as drug addicts, mentally disabled, prisoners, old people, youth at risk. With such people we work either to built sense of group or facilitating communication, to help them to express their own problems or to prepare their life outside, to discover their hidden skills or to prepare a play. Part of our work concerns schools where we work with students and teachers, sometimes parents; in school we run projects about "welfare at school", "AIDS prevention", "Intercultural education", "group building", etc. One third of time we work to educate people in T.O. method or we use T.O. to educate social workers.

MEANINGFUL PROJECTS

Since 1992 we leaded a lot of different projects. In the first years our involvement was mainly in Peace-Education, so we have been working a lot at school with classes, teachers and parents, in order to explore conflicts between generations and how to deal with that. Later on we moved towards the social field and we opened projects with mentally disabled people and psychiatric patients, drug addicts and youth at risk. In parallel we had some political involvement and created some Forum-Theatre about 500 years from America discover/conquest, ecological issues, social oppressions. We've been working in the streets to sensitize people, in theatre, at school, in therapeutic communities, in prison, in social centres for disabled, with old people and children... At the moment our main project concerns youth disease prevention in Ravenna town. We have also worked: - in Parma with teen-agers following the Community Approach - in communities for drug-addicts - in secondary school about Intercultural Education.