Augusto Boal and the Theater of the Oppressed
The article that follows originally appeared in the March 1995 issue of Red Pepper,
a British magazine, under the title "How to Play Boal" and was written by Aleks Sierz.
How to Play Boal
Agit-prop legend Augusto Boal has spent his life galvanizing passive spectators into action. Now he's tackling subjective as well as objective oppressions. Aleks Sierz met him.
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Political theater cannot work miracles, says Augusto Boal, the Brazilian author of the radical classic The Theater of the Oppressed, but it can be used to change the law. Having been elected to the city council of Rio de Janeiro in 1992, Boal is turning techniques first devised
to encourage audience participation into a way of making popular legislation.
Boal calls this new development Legislative Theater. A group of twelve "cultural animators," members of his theater center, go to "places in Rio where the oppressed are already organized, such as schools and churches in the slums." There they use a device called Forum Theater: the animators call a meeting a perform a short play on a specific issue, such as racism or problems with healthcare. Then, the piece is replayed, with the spectators encouraged to become "spect-actors" by stopping the action when they can see a different
outcome. Then they go on stage and act out their suggestions.
"This is a process of thinking together," says Boal, "a way of dynamizing spectators instead of just giving them a show. Unlike the dogmatic political theater of the 1960s, which told people what to do, we now ask them what they want." What excites him is the unexpected creativity
the process generates. "Many times we come up with a simple idea no one has ever thought of before."
The next stage is to use the resources of the Rio city council to put these new ideas on the statute book. One success has been a law which alters the design of public telephones on the street to help prevent blind people from crashing into them. In the pipeline are ideas for
improvements in healthcare funding and on the rights of pregnant factory workers. In Rio, says Boal, who is a member of the left-wing Workers' Party, "We are using theater to make changes."
Despite the party's local electoral successes, its leader, Lula, was defeated in the November 1994 presidential election. One reason was a dirty tricks campaign waged by the right. "Because we used to show the enthusiasm of the masses for Lula at our rallies on television," says Boal, "the government passed a law forbidding the screening of public meetings." Another law discriminated against the Workers' Party by forbidding it to use union resources to campaign. "Lula was almost prosecuted for using a union's loudspeakers," he says.
Even worse were the "subliminal attacks on Lula." As well as denigrating his private life, the right used an open palm with five fingers outstretched as a campaign symbol representing their five goals--Lula is known to have one finger missing, the result of an industrial accident. The
implication was that the left was deformed.
Yet Boal is confident that the Workers' Party--whose support continues to grow and which includes senators who still live in slum areas, "close to the people"--can still make an impact. "We are not fighting to get power, but because we want the happiness of the people," he
says. "If the government does good things, we will support it."
Though the party is "not at all homogeneous," and includes liberation theologists as well as socialists, it does have a precise program of land reform, health measures, and educational expansion. Boal also stresses the need to tackle international debt, which he calls "a form of modern slavery." As president of Rio's Human Rights Commission, he has been able to release prisoners being held in jail illegally. "We are a workers's party," he says, "we want to improve the life of the majority."
Born in 1931, Boal has spent most of his life as a theater director. Now head of two centers for the Theater of the Oppressed (TO) in Paris and Rio, he holds workshops around the world to teach TO skills. What makes his eyes sparkle, and gives you an idea of the energy that keeps him going, is his faith in the creativity, spontaneity, and ability of all people, however
underprivileged, to change their situation. Each new TO method originated when audience members showed him new possibilities. TO is about creativity from below.
Boal was initially an author (Lean Wife, Mean Husband, 1957), and then pioneered political protest theater with Revolution in South America at the Arena in Sao Paulo in 1961. Breaking with European models of drama, Boal began to use local traditions. Inspired by the educational
ideas of Paulo Freire (author of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed) and outrage at social
injustice, he started doing agit-prop theater in Brazil's poorest areas. In the 1960s, he was performing plays about taking up arms. On one occasion, a peasant in the audience stood up and suggested an armed raid on an oppressive landlord. Embarrassed, Boal and his actors
backed down. But the incident taught them to listen to the people.
Boal then progressed to the more audience-based TO. At first he just asked spectators for ideas to alter his plays' endings. But the real breakthrough came when he asked an angry woman, who was dissatisfied with how his actors interpreted her suggestions about how to deal with an unfaithful husband, to come on stage and show them. By inviting spectators to act out their ideas he created Forum Theater, which generates solutions to problems and
also functions as a rehearsal for action in "real life."
Arrested, tortured, and "persuaded" into exile by the Brazilian military in 1971, Boal came to Europe. Here he found that as well as "concrete oppressions such as poor wages, and objective problems about how to make a strike or fight racism," there were also "introspective and introjected repressions" such as "fear, loneliness, and the inability to communicate." In Paris in 1981, he started workshops designed to tackle what he calls "the cop in the head."
The Rainbow of Desire is his name for the skills needed to combat our internal police. His new manual of techniques has just been translated into English by Adrian Jackson of the London Bubble theater, which specializes in participatory drama and educational projects.
In Manchester and London for the launch of his book, Boal held four five-hour workshops for thirty to thirty-five people, mainly "psychotherapists, social workers, and theater people" to teach therapeutic drama. In this, Boal is aided by his wife, Cecilia, a psychoanalyst based in
Paris.
By confronting the "cop in the head" collectively, Boal says we can generate the confidence necessary to tackle social problems. Answering the criticism that such methods only "cure" participants and have no wider impact, he says: "We can never measure the social effects
scientifically--but wherever this work is done people notice that they have changed, often profoundly." Whether in Africa or Scandinavia, "people discover needs they didn't think they had." In India, for example, peasantswho were confronting "objective oppressions," such as
poverty, also "suffered subjective problems to do with family, couples, and sex."
Since 1990, Boal has worked with Deptford-based London Bubble. His work inspired them to set up Cardboard Citizens a year later. It is an eight-member theater group of homeless people, which takes Forum Theater to hostels, youth centers, and schools. It has completed
four nationwide tours. New members are recruited through workshops held at hostels and day centers. As well as performing to the homeless, Cardboard Citizens also spreads the word at conferences and other public events.
Widely praised for its summer tent tour, which attracts audiences that don't normally go to the theater, London Bubble's next project is _Too Much, Too Young_, an ambitious New Wave punk musical which tours in March. Other British applications of Boal's ideas include young
people educating their peers about AIDS, theater groups for people with learning difficulties in Bradford and Newcastle, Deaf Forum, and drama work in prisons. Each case exemplifies Boal's dictum: "People are tired of being preached at--they want to have their say."
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The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB) has
worked with Augusto Boal and has been presenting training
workshops in New York City and elsewhere since 1990.
TOPLAB can be contacted at
c/o The Brecht Forum
122 West 27 Street 10 floor
New York, New York 10001
Phone: (212) 924-1858; Fax: (212) 674-6506
http://www.toplab.org