Ever since he began on-stage experiments in the 1950s, Augusto Boal clearly conceived a form that did not preach messages from a high platform to their audiences. Instead, the Brazilian theatre director-author-politician was particular that they radically turned spectators into what he called “spect-actors”. When Boal died in a Rio de Janeiro hospital on May 2, Latin America lost one of its hugely influential proponents of theatre as a means of changing society.
In Boal’s famed Theatre of the Oppressed everyone is an actor, and theatre is a weapon for social change and resistance. Spectators are invited to intervene in the play and become protagonists themselves, protagonists of their own lives. Rather than watch and consume passively, they are empowered to enact possibilities to transform the real life crises that are being depicted on stage.
This is not a people’s theatre of the agit-prop kind, where enlightened actors convey a message to the masses, where audiences are dark, empty heads that need to be filled with high art, but one which fundamentally believes in people’s capacities to fight
and overcome oppressions themselves through artistic, creative means. If you can do something here on stage, you can do it out there in the world.
“Theatre may not be revolutionary in itself, but it is a rehearsal for revolution.” These famous words from Boal’s text Theatre of the Oppressed (1972) and the simple, powerful theatre praxis that he was instrumental in developing, have immensely inspired people in theatre all over the world.
The 1931-born Boal began his career in the Arena Theatre in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in the 1960s. He was strongly influenced by Marxist thinker and educational reformer Paulo Freire, who proposed a grassroots-oriented pedagogy of the oppressed. Facing increasing censorship, restrictions, arrest and even torture under the military dictatorship in the 1970s, Boal lived in exile in Peru, Argentine and later in France.
Boal’s “arsenal” of the Theatre of the Oppressed consists of several forms and techniques of breaking down the fourth wall in the theatre, ranging from invisible interventions in the streets and public places to the most popular Forum Theatre, where audiences propose solutions for constructively transforming crises and conflicts on stage. In India, the activist theatre group Jana Sanskriti has successfully adapted and developed Forum Theatre in their activities in several districts of West Bengal.
As Vereador or Member of Parliament of the People’s Party in Rio de Janeiro from 1991 to 1996, Boal experimented with legislative theatre as a form of participatory citizenship and law-making. This method is now being adapted by the Nepalese theatre group Aarohan in a unique theatre project that is meant to form part of the process of constitutional reform in the one-time Himalayan kingdom.
Boal placed great emphasis on passing on and popularising the methods of the Theatre of the Oppressed. Together with a group of trainers from the Centre for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio, he regularly travelled around the world — not only to the big European and North American metros, but also to Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, rural West Bengal and Colombia. He saw himself not as a teacher or a director, but as a joker (curinga in Brazilian Portuguese), one who stands on the same ground as the audiences, whose primary task is to listen and to question.
Boal will be remembered as a key figure in the history of the theatre of the world, as a thinker and practitioner, for whom art is a means of radical citizenship: “We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.”
— The writer is a Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner and assistant professor of theatre studies in
Amsterdam University. sruti.bala@gmail.com