Beyond academic work and theatrical projects was Ricky Abad’s outreach work to redress social inequalities. And it is in these efforts that he fused sociology and theater on the ground level. A substantial slice of his outreach work used theater practices to generate social change.
The success of his Dynamic Classroom workshops led to invitations, both within and outside Metro Manila to conduct similar workshops to teachers, guidance counsellors, and priests – in short, to people whose work was to connect with people. It also prompted the Ateneo Center for Continuing Education to have him design similar workshops to show corporate managers a way to exercise leadership with a greater sense of empathy and service – a task Ricky achieved by forming, in 2005, a group of former Ateneo alumni actors to assist in the training tasks. The group, called RolePlayers: Theater for Life, allots a significant portion of their earnings to finance outreach projects which aim to infuse people with cultural capital that one day they can convert into social and economic capital. It has approached communities that could ill-afford to defray workshop costs, like young offenders, former drug users, and underprivileged parents and children.
Ricky Reaches Out to the Community
Between 2017 and 2019 Ricky and his RolePlayers team reached out to Bilibid inmates, bringing dynamic theater to the constraining worlds of children and youth deprived of liberty. He would note of this undertaking he called “Shakespeare at Bilibid: Passport to Freedom”:
Much of what we experienced after three years in Bilibid reinforces the potential of prison theater as a ‘place of sanctuary’ and a ‘crucible of transformation’. The workshops and performances offered the young detainees a safe space for them to create characters, bond with others, and assume roles in production more edifying and diverse than those experienced in their incarcerated life. Their work also testifies to prison theater’s transformative potential for the detainees: the gaining of self-confidence, the learning of new skills, and the building of hope.
He did sociology with a critical lens on the structures of power and wielded the power of art at authorities who curtailed, dulled, and oppressed. He once explained to political science colleagues the role of sociologists in society. Sociologists regularly debunk presuppositions by “looking behind conventions of power and questioning official definitions of political reality.” His commitment to social justice as sociologist and artist emerged in his insistence that
theater is not just an art. It is a weapon of change. And the better the students become, the more effective they will be in liberating people (including themselves) from oppressive systems, intellectual rigidity, and moral backwardness.