From Bystander to Subject in Bullying: Forum Theatre and the Politics of Witnessing

The aim of this workshop is to create space to critically and politically reconsider the position of the bystander within peer bullying processes. Throughout the workshop, forum theatre will be used to explore, at a bodily and performative level, how silence and non-intervention reproduce specific power relations. Participants are encouraged to evaluate their own positions through a critical awareness; to recognize that being a spectator is not a neutral stance but an ethical and political position; and to consciously reconstruct this position.

The workshop approaches peer bullying not only through the perpetrator–victim binary, but also through the concepts of witnessing, silence, institutional power, and bodily positioning. The bystander position, often rendered invisible in bullying processes, is reproduced within school culture through practices of non-intervention, ignoring, and normalization. In this context, silence is discussed not as a neutral or impartial condition, but as a bodily and political position that sustains and reproduces existing power relations.

The theoretical background of the workshop is grounded in Augusto Boal’s forum theatre approach, which transforms the spectator into a subject, and Paulo Freire’s concepts of the myth of neutrality and critical consciousness. Within this framework, bullying is addressed not merely as an individual “problem behavior,” but as a practice of power nourished by cultural codes such as social norms, constructions of masculinity, regimes of success, and the discourse of “just joking.” The bodily organization of power (gaze, distance, classroom arrangement, and the regulation of movement), the traces left by experiences of violence and silence, and the transformative potential of intervention or non-intervention are examined together.

Forum theatre is a participatory theatre approach that brings invisible forms of oppression and unequal power relations from everyday life onto the stage. Rather than leaving the audience in a passive witness position, it invites intervention and transforms them into subjects of the process. When considered together with Paulo Freire’s understanding of critical consciousness, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed practice makes visible that neutrality is not an innocent stance, but a political choice situated within specific power relations.

The workshop process will proceed through forum theatre practices. Drawing on their own lived experiences and social contexts, participants will create images, fictional situations, and improvisations; they will reconstruct oppression, manipulation, oppressor–oppressed relations, and the bodily organization of domination on stage. Within the constructed forum scene, participants will be invited to move beyond the position of “spectator” and to intervene; the performative process will examine that being a spectator is not only an ethical choice but also a political responsibility. The state of non-intervention itself will be made visible as an action.

The workshop opens up discussion on how bullying is sustained not only through the actions of the bully, but also through collective silence; it seeks to make visible how neutrality can, at times, become a position that reproduces oppression. In doing so, the workshop aims to create space for participants to critically reconsider their own ethical and political subject positions and to recognize together that silence, too, is aligned within a particular order of power.