La Xixa Lab or: How I learned to stop worrying and start acting

Rehearsal on July 24, 2025

The constant layer of sweat on everybody’s skin and the “Qué calor!” we greet each other with every morning before sitting down in our air-conditioned offices are the face of privilege in a body that aches more profoundly. 

In the context of environmental collapse, VIABLE UNKNOWS focuses on the possible but not-yet-real futures that give rise to collective visions of urban sustainability and inclusivity. It starts with Paulo Freire’s specialisation of potentiality and actuality within an urban context, daring to imagine the climatically optimistic version. The vicious circle of the low-emission communities being mainly affected by the actions of the biggest polluters is the breaking point through which environmental rights need to be reclaimed. La Xixa Lab continues to water the seedlings of Freire through Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, seeking to empower the affected communities to take ownership of their own narratives and free themselves from eternal potentiality, actualising their future as they envision it. 

As part of the VIABLE UNKNOWS project, La Xixa Lab asks itself to then ask you: what roles are we playing in the face of urban environmental inequity, and what are the layers of oppression that we find ourselves entangled in? 

It’s a common human experience to reminisce about an argument and think of what you could have said better. This essentialises Forum Theatre, the main mechanism that La Xixa Lab uses for social transformation: to rehearse real-life situations, to rehearse your future and freedom, and to furnish you with having lived a scenario of oppression in which you could safely navigate the viable unknowns. 

The artistic process that takes place during the development of Forum Theatre plays flows continuously all throughout, materialising theoretical concepts, while also playfully deconstructing them. The actors allow themselves to fully inhabit the oppressive reality of the play, immersing both inwardly and outwardly in the dynamics of oppressor and oppressed, and uncovering traces of both roles within themselves. The abstraction of notions is filtered by physically integrating them into the theatrical game, accepting that the rational backbone of the play bears a secondary role, allowing for the body and the emotions to gain greater significance. 

Forum Theatre plays present the conflict in its raw form and then open up the forum, allowing spect-actors to mould the scene and test out variables that may be applicable in real-life oppressive contexts. Forum Theatre, as part of the Theatre of the Oppressed, comes about as an empowering tool for social action as the public exits passivity and engages in the reality of the game. The experience that unfolds through the public’s active participation — both in the forum debate and when spect-actors step on stage to replace characters — becomes a powerful act of transformation, where the audience enacts change, rewriting the play to break the cycle of oppression. This grants the play a tridimensional perspective, which exceeds an initial screenplay and poses the challenge of the spontaneous unknown. 

The process of developing the Forum Theatre play for the VIABLE UNKNOWNS project rounds off the essence of Theatre of the Oppressed, calling attention to environmental disparities and injustices present amongst urban communities. At the same time, it resists a fatalistic or overly scholastic lens, instead embracing the transformative potential of new perspectives, interpretations, and collective imagination. 

We have to remember, though, that the artistic process and experience of Theatre of the Oppressed remain open and aim to reflect the fluidity of society while imagining and questioning the viable unknowns.