Acting Our Way Into Thinking: Nonviolent Role-plays

Like anything else, the nonviolent life takes loads of preparation.

That’s why Pace e Bene has led over a thousand workshops and trainings across the US and around the world, with role-plays at the heart of them. Why? Because nonviolence is about doing things in new and more effective ways. Role-plays give us the chance to try these new ways out, “acting our way into thinking” with others in a creative and supportive space.

For example, for five years we were part of a bicultural team that led “César Chávez Retreats” with Latinx youth, held in Delano where Chávez and Dolores Huerta first organized the United Farm Workers. Virtually the entire weekend was comprised of role-plays. The young women and men—who had come from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Bakersfield, and many other cities and towns—created role-plays based on conflicts they had personally experienced. 

They got into groups, settled on a situation, developed a drama based on it, and parceled out roles. Then they’d present the play to the whole group, which in turn would reflect on this conflict and work with the presenters to come up with possible solutions. The actors would then present the role-play again, but this time dramatizing specific ways of transforming the conflict at hand. Sometimes this interactive process would go on for two or three rounds, each time discovering more ways to creatively solve the situation, and each time increasing the confidence of the entire group that alternatives beyond either acquiescence or attack were possible—just as Chávez taught.

This week Pace e Bene’s monthly online Affinity Group meeting focused on virtual role-plays. Two great nonviolence trainers, Kim Redigan and Mary Hanna of Meta Peace Team, led a wonderful session illuminating how to facilitate online role-plays, a skill they had honed during the pandemic.

Besides a couple of logistical tips (plug your computer directly into your modem in case the Wi-Fi freezes; make sure two people are presenting, in case things crash for one of them), Kim and Mary recommended video-recording a role-play ahead of time. The recorded role-play they played for us dramatized a conflict between an election poll-watcher and an irate conspiracy-theorist who lambasted the volunteer with an increasingly virulent verbal attack. The poll-watcher came across as grounded and receptive, asking questions and not fueling the fire that was coming at them.

They also led a real-time role-play where Mary needed to talk to Kim about something important, but Kim was scrolling through her phone. After debriefing what the group noticed, they re-played the same scenario, but this time Kim gave Mary her full attention.

Rivera Sun, moderating the program, then got the whole group to a role-play called “Rant.” She began by asking people how they center themselves. Answers included conscious breathing, making sure their feet were firmly on the ground, using a certain mantra or phrase (“Love”; “Here we go!”), but also developing feelings of empathy for the other. She asked us to get centered and then she went on, well, a rant. Afterward, she harvested what we were taking away from the exercise, and then had us go into break-out rooms and do the role-play ourselves.

Of course, online role-plays will likely never be as good as face-to-face ones, especially since you can build much more elaborate scenarios when you’re in the same space, like complicated nonviolent actions with scores of people. Nonetheless, Kim, Mary, and Rivera deepened our capacity as change-agents to face the conflicts that come with the territory of nonviolent social change. As Mary wrote recently, “A willingness to confront complex challenges will be uncomfortable in the short term, but will ultimately lead to a better future for all.”

Meta Peace Teams has been at the forefront of violence de-escalation training since 1993. You can learn more about it here. And you can explore Pace e Bene’s nonviolence trainings, some with role-plays, here.