As a young man during the 1950s and 60s, Brasilian director Augusto Boal wanted to use theater as a means to empower the poor and marginalized communities of Rio’s slums and favelas.
In doing so he abandoned the traditional divide between performers and passive spectators, creating a new form of participatory theatre that became known as Theater of the Oppressed (TO), designed specifically for ‘those who want to learn ways of fighting back against oppression in their daily lives.’
The mechanism that drives TO is simple. Actors portray a dramatic situation from everyday life and try to find solutions — workers confronting gender discrimination; farmers being evicted off the land; or a child attempting to overcome bullying by her peers. Audience members are then urged to intervene by halting the action, replacing the actors on stage and enacting their own ideas as to how the drama should unfold.
Boal calls the audience participants ‘spect-actors’, and believes that TO provides a unique opportunity for an integrative experience for both actors and audience that can also deliver social goods. Liza Ann Acosta, Assistant Professor of English at North Park University, writes that in his book, Teatro do Oprimido (Theater of the Oppressed), Boal rejects ‘classical notions of theatre in which the audience’s cathartic experiences paralyzed them and subjected them to the status quo. Theater of the Oppressed…urged oppressed people to become actors instead of spectators, to create solutions [to their problems] by using theatre as a tool.
By 1971 the Brasilian junta had recognised TO’s potential in raising the level of consciousness among the common people and Boal was imprisoned, tortured and exiled. He later invoked this experience in the moving parable of Chibuco.
Following his exile, Boal continued to develop the theatrical techniques of his new form of theater in France where he published Rainbow of Desire and in Argentina, where he developed Invisibility Theater. In doing so his reputation grew exponentially. In 2003 he attended the Radcliff Institute Exploratory Seminar on Cultural Agency at Harvard University and hosted a series of workshops. His work has been the subject of a number of theses and academic texts and continues to influence the study of modern entertainment phenomena, even videogames.
TO has proved popular in the USA, especially in Los Angeles where the Center for Theatre of the Oppressed and Applied Theatre Arts runs weekly workshops using Boal’s techniques in order to raise community awareness. This makes good sense, according to Suzanne Burgoyne, Professor of Theater at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who argues that TO ‘provides embodied learning experiences that engage the senses, emotions, and imagination as well as the intellect.’ She goes on to elucidate the argument that theatre can be an extremely useful tool in education.
This powerful proposition, attractive to both artists and educators, is now supported by a small but growing body of research, and may one day lead to the hopes of academics like Patricia Dunn, Associate Professor of Arts at the University of Albany, being fulfilled. Dunn has repeatedly suggested that school and college students would benefit if teaching techniques were employed that ‘make use of multiple intelligences, to engage our students’ various visual, tactile, and auditory ways of learning, rather than relying on traditional, text-heavy teaching practices.’
Meanwhile, at the tender age of 74, Boal himself remains committed to the aims of the experiment begun three decades ago. His most recent book, Legislative Theatre: Using Performance to Make Politics (1998), continues the evolution of the TO project. Acosta writes, ‘As a concept, ‘Legislative Theatre’ takes solutions rehearsed on stage to political and legal chambers by seeking the creation of laws that will benefit marginalized people who have little to no political representation.’
For all the recognition it has garnered in academic circles, TO movement remains on the fringes of mainstream entertainment. The reasons for this remain unclear; perhaps it is too subversive, or problematic from a marketing perspective. Even if TO remains somewhat below the radar for the vast majority of theater programmers, its influence may still be detected in the politicization of more mainstream works.
In an essay exploring the role of theater, David Diamond, the former Executive Director of Stage Directors and Choreographers, supported the view expressed by Boal in Theater of the Oppressed that: “All theater is political because all of the activities of men (and women) are political and theater is one of them. Those who try to separate theater from politics try to lead us into error and that in itself is a political attitude.”
In a bitterly ironic twist, Boal, now back in his homeland, is being denied a state pension even though authorities accept that he meets all eligibility criteria. An international letter-writing campaign has so far been unsuccessful in its attempts to shame the Brasilian government into fulfilling its obligations to one of the country’s most influential cultural exports. A man who spent his life fighting against oppression is again its victim.
