Concretion of the abstract
“This consists of making visible, sensible, through the use of analogy, symbols or any other equivalent, particular words or facts which, through over-use, have lost their capacity to give rise to the corresponding emotions in the reader or spectator. This is a matter of discovering which live images are capable of making certain dead or worn-out words real in a way they have not been. The concretion can take a direct form (the physical and concrete illustration of an action; physically showing the death of a miner stuck in a mine because of an explosion which was badly planned in order to save explosives: showing a graphic image of the lungs of a worker after 30 years of breathing the polluted air of a mine, eight hours a day); or an indirect form: the exhibition of the innards of animals, the dead bodies of small animals like pigeons, the burning of puppets, etc. to symbolise the death of human beings. The means employed to make the abstract concrete can be as varied as possible, the important thing is to awaken the spectator’s sensibility and capacity to absorb the news as something real and concrete.” Augusto Boal
The ways in which the news is presented and consumed often leads to a disengagement with the concrete reality that is being reported. Legal jargon and statistics in particular risk obscuring the human lives caught up in events. The Newspaper Theatre technique, concretion of the abstract, attempts to breathe life back into news stories by depicting ‘in the flesh’ what is described only in the abstract.
For example, a factual news item that reports on a change in visa requirements for family members may fail to communicate the emotional toll of separation for migrant families. In this case, the concretion of the abstract technique could be used to represent how the visa change is lived by those directly impacted by it, depicting separation in a real or symbolic way.
After a performance you could facilitate a reflection and discussion on the effect of this technique: Was watching the news performed concretely different to reading it in the abstract? How?
With access to smartphones and the internet, participants can readily find news items themselves. You do not need to restrict yourselves to using news items in text form, news in video or audio format could work equally well and may be more accessible.
Facilitating this technique it is important to be mindful of the group, certain topics may need to be handled with care. It can be helpful to set some collective guidelines for choosing news content.