In fact, the Americans are also oppressed

I have been thinking about this question "what is oppression" for some time now in an applied way, so it is time to make some statements about it as I think this will make up the bulk of the work.

My starting point, a bold claim I will work back from, is the following: we are all oppressed. The statement is controversial because it is in many ways against the trend of Australian and indeed all societies with wealth, which think of themselves as at liberty. However, this is not a truth, as we inherently know. It is a convenient lie. We believe we are free because to believe otherwise is to dissent, and therefore not to share in the wealth.

To those with wealth, the oppressed are likely to feature as citizens of a nation state with a recognizably branded dictator (Iran, former Iraq, North Korea), countries with a social or cultural system that violates European-American concepts of human rights (China), or poor countries (India).

But one day I sat down and I looked at those people in my own life who I found oppressive, and I made an active attempt to try to understand them, and I came up with the following statement:

oppressive action is caused by oppression

What it means is that the individual makes an oppressive action because they themselves are the victim of some kind of oppression. This exists in both psychological accounts of domestic violence or behavioural malfunction. Like much psychology, it's an insight rather than exact science. But this does not reduce its power as a premise because:

understanding the oppressive conditions of the oppressor allows for a humanist moment

Likewise our disconnection to citizens of countries we feel are oppressed is caused by our inability to think of ourselves as oppressed. It is also how we fall back on common ideas of citizens of counties rather than conduction our own investigations or admitting we don't know.

This is the cause of many horrible things in the world, but especially, I think, it is the central cause of war. Just as an oppressive regeime is used to justify military action, likewise the inability to recognise the conditions of our own oppression is a direct cause of inhuman action towards others.

how does this play out in the theatre?

"We are all oppressed" locates all persons as sharing in this 'victim' status as a means of collectively overcoming this oppression, and places the primary task of the artist as an educator of the operations of power. The intent is not to patronise or to sentimentalise but to encourage good humanist action among all people with myriad claims to status, wealth or activeness. Narrative itself being an oppressive force which provides false understanding and validation, I prefer to think of the creation of moments which reveal the failure of the individual's power, in an ordinary setting.

This is not about being "natural", as we commonly say in the theatre, it is hyper-constructed to reveal the operations of power making slaves of all people.