Despite having adblock software on our computers, recording television to then fast forward through commercials, and muting the radio when the adverts come on, we are still bombarded daily with marketing propaganda.

Every day we see transit advertising, billboards, flyers, posters, adverts in the paper, and sidewalk signs — and that’s just walking down the street. In the 1970s, the average person was exposed to an estimated 500 marketing messages daily; by 2000, that number had risen to approximately 5,000 per day.

Artistic and managing director of Theater for Living, David Diamond, believes that these corporate messages are invading our psyche, which “affects the way we make really profound decisions about how to be, who to aspire to be, our definitions of success and failure, our relationship with ourselves and others, our relationship to the planet, all kinds of things.” Diamond has developed a process project using theatre to explore these messages: Corporations in our Heads.

With no actors, no script, and no play, there is only a Joker, a maestro of sorts for the event, “Everything comes from audience involvement,” explains Diamond. He starts out the evening by explaining the event, the general purpose of the project, and then asks for stories from the audience where the messages of corporations affected or influenced their decisions.

“They are not big stories, but the ones that seem inconsequential,” says Diamond, stressing that the event isn’t trying to psychoanalyse the storyteller, but use these stories as an entry point to theatrically open up these ideas.

[Corporate messages] affect the way we make really profound decisions about how to be.”

David Diamond, artistic director of Theatre for Living

In a previous project about global warming, Thetre for Living had a similar event and a woman told a story about standing in the grocery store picking out tomatoes. Should she buy the lovely hot house ones, all perfectly round and plump, or the local organic ones with minor bruises and flaws?

The technique used is based on Augusto Boal’s The Cop in the Head theatre game. Boal developed a method called Theatre of the Oppressed where the audience become active participants in the outcome of the theatrical event. In Cops, individuals explore internal voices, fears, and oppressions rather than focus on external oppressors.

Diamond has used The Cop in the Head as a jumping off point for Corporations in our Heads, but also incorporates Forum Theatre techniques where audience members can stop the action, replace an existing person on stage, and change the message. Diamond explains that it is a way of opening up serious topics, learning and figuring out how we internalize these messages.

During the tour, Diamond is visiting 22 communities throughout BC and Alberta. “I’m imaging the messages will be different, and the event will change dramatically from community to community.”

One of the final nights of the tour in Vancouver is in partnership with the Simon Fraser Public Interest Research Group (SFPIRG), which seems like an ideal on-campus partnership.

“One of the things that we like about [Theatre for Living’s] work is that it gives participants a chance to engage in an experiential process,” says Shahaa Kakar, the Media and Outreach Coordinator for SFPIRG. “It’s exciting to see this kind of live process unfold because it connects with where people are actually at right now and that includes and builds from our lived experiences.”

There is no illusion that these conflicts will be solved in two and a half hours, but Diamond believes identifying and understanding the source is the first step to changing the behaviour: “As an activist, there is an error of tricking ourselves into thinking structural change needs to happen. But it is patterns of behaviour that create structure, and if we only engage in structural change, we will just recreate the same structure.”