Local environmental health advocates are taking a creative approach to addressing community and personal impacts of toxic exposure. Sponsored by the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences at the University of Texas Medical Branch, the community environmental forum theatre project helps impacted individuals understand the relationship between health and environmental toxins, while allowing them to explore problem solving tactics through the dramatic process. In conjunction with the Citizens’ League for Environmental Action Now, the next NIEHS forum theatre project will help residents in Seabrook and Clear Lake address local cancer clusters and toxico-genomics, the science of how individual body chemistry reacts to toxic exposure.

The three-day event, from June 25-27, will include a series of workshops geared at training participants in the science of air quality, environmental exposure pathways, and the basic process of improvisational performance.

Forum theatre was developed by director and Rio city council member Agusto Boal in Brazil to engage communities, empower individuals and enhance their interlocking struggles for justice. The idea has caught on all over the world, including here in Houston at the NIEHS. Other local forum projects have included a series on childhood lead poisoning and illness relating to the MDI Superfund site in Houston’s Fifth Ward.

NIEHS Center’s outreach coordinator John Sullivan explained that forum theatre works in stages. First, community members are trained through a series of workshops on the science of toxicity and receive acting instruction. Together, they then create a scene that confronts an environmental problem the community may be facing and explores possible tactics for resolutions. This leads to a performance before other members of the greater community.

“Through the workshops, you learn image making to look at your situation in a way that you can change it as an image. Once you’ve created an image, you look at where you want to go. Then you can create a scene,” Sullivan said.

The audience for the forum is not a passive, one as “spectactors,” as Agusto Boal called them, are allowed to jump in and replace characters if they think they have a better tactic to move the scene and achieve a desired result.

“The kinds of scenes we create don’t have a resolution, because that’s not real life,” Sullivan says. “Leaving the scene unresolved draws the audience in and allows them the opportunity to try to give it closure.”

"Bruce Elementary / MDI Super Fund Forum actors dramatize how conflicting views and interpretations of environmental risk may confuse & frustrate the community." MfCA / 2003.

As with other forum projects, scientists from the center will be on hand to ensure that the community receives sound scientific information. On Saturday, June 26, Ed Brooks, M.D. will conduct a workshop on asthma and ozone. Jonathan Ward, M.D. will host a workshop called “tox and risk” that will review the human health risks related to toxic exposure.

“I wouldn’t call it teaching; it’s working with people to uncover a truth,” Sullivan said. “People have more access to their lives, obviously, and they know what their exposure pathways are better than the scientists. So it’s a two way street and the information goes both ways.”

Noting that there should be more cooperation between communities and scientists, Sullivan said the workshops with NIEHS scientists are the most important part of the forum process but that language can create an unnecessary barrier. NIEHS employs a tactic called translational science to help communities better understand what might otherwise be complicated information.

“The language of science is pretty arcane and if you don’t speak the same language as someone else, then you don’t exactly know what they mean,” he said. “Instead of abstract (through translational science)it becomes a real, concrete event that has meaning and can be related to real life.”

After the workshops, citizens are ready to develop scenes that depict their environmental struggles. Often, citizens create scenes that dramatize their interaction with environmental regulators such as the EPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. The real-life process of seeking redress for pollution-related impacts can be frustrating and demoralizing for the citizens involved when they believe regulators do not empathize with their situation. With forum theatre, citizens can act out their frustrations in a safe space through improv.

“Some of these situations can get a little hot,” Sullivan said, “and if you channel that into the metaphorical world of acting, then you can go a little further than you could if you were just sitting around in a normal roundtable type of discussion.”

Forum theatre does not always result in concrete changes for a given community, such as, for example, the cleaning up of a nearby dump or remediation of contaminated soil or water. But Sullivan said the benefits of empowering individuals and uniting communities are immeasurable.

“These are little changes and they’re personal changes,” he said. “This is a very personal form of activism. It’s not something that appeals to a mass, but the personal changes are often the most dramatic ones.”

The upcoming community forum theatre project for Seabrook/Clear Lake will begin with workshops on Friday and Saturday, June 25 and 26. The performance follows on Sunday, the 27th, at 7pm. It all takes place at the Armand Bayou Nature Center, 8500 Bay Area Blvd in Pasadena.