Radical Doubt ― The Joker System, After Boal

Radical Doubt investigates ethical play across a spectrum of performances, on and off the stage. In witty, recursive, personal, and propulsive prose, Mady Schutzman elaborates on the Joker System, conceived by Augusto Boal, best known for Theatre of the Oppressed. The Joker System is a collaborative approach to representing social dilemmas through a rare fusion of destabilizing ambiguity and journalistic rigor. Schutzman models the Joker System while expanding well beyond the theatrical. In polyphonic compositions that perform their own philosophy, she uncovers illuminating links between calculus and conjuring, koans and resistance, humor and witnessing, complexity theory and sorely needed new practices of living in our divisive times. These life practices rely upon crafty and circuitous strategies to deliver their subversive punch. Jok(er)ing matters, Schutzman insists. When communities fragment and identities fixate, enter the trickster!

Sonja Kuftinec

Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota

Mady Schutzman is a writer, scholar, theatre artist, and filmmaker. She is author of The Real Thing: Performance, Hysteria, and Advertising, and co-editor, with Jan Cohen-Cruz, of two anthologies on the work of Augusto Boal. Schutzman is Faculty Emerita at California Institute of the Arts.