Augusto Boal 1931–2009

I came to know of Augusto Boal’s theory of long before I came to know Augusto Boal. It was in 1979 and I was teaching my first class in the theatre department of Mexico’s National University (UNAM) as I worked on my dissertation. I had been assigned three classes a semester—each with about 80 students. The first day of class, a student asked me how theatre could bring about the revolution. My doctoral work at the University of Washington had not prepared me for this. Still, I ventured a response: theatre does not bring about revolutions. Theatre does other things—it can change the ways in which people envision social conflict; Augusto Boal at the Celebration of the it can help spectators identify issues that had World Theatre Day, 27 March 2009, Paris. not seemed apparent before; it can energize (Photo © Antoine Veteau 2009) populations around problems, and so on. But it doesn’t bring about revolutions. The next day, I had 20 students in each of my classes. If theatre could not bring about the revolution, of what possible use could it be? What could theatre do? My entire life as a theatre and performance scholar has been an attempt to answer that question. Boal’s work was never the “answer” to my question, but he became one of my most important guides and mentors. My earmarked copy of Teatro del oprimido had a pirated Susan Meiselas Nicaragua photograph as its cover. The Sandinista fighters were photographed as puregestus in the Brechtian understanding of powerful, recognizable, and quotable social gestures that performed the revolutionary hope of the late 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s throughout Latin America. Youthful Davids throughout the region fought to unseat a continent of authoritarian Goliaths backed by the US military and economic forces. Augusto Boal’s personal story was, in a way, the story of a whole generation of activist/ intellectuals in Latin America. He, like many of the region’s great playwrights, started off studying something else (chemical engineering, in his case). He went to the US to study but soon gravitated towards theatre and went back to to work as an artist. As a progressive and important presence in Brazil, it wasn’t long before he ran afoul of the dictatorship—in 1971 he was imprisoned, tortured, and exiled. This trajectory, unfortunately, was a shared one for a great many artists and intellectuals as military dictatorships took over most of the area’s govern- ments. Boal’s response, however, was brilliantly unique. While he wrote some plays about that experience (Torquemada [1972] being perhaps the best known), his real response came through his activism. In 1973, inspired by ’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Boal started working in on a literacy campaign. Boal used theatre and theatre games to encourage people to become active participants in their own learning. During this political moment of renewed revolutionary fervor, Boal knew that his methodology was both liberating and replicable—other people could use it in their own struggle. His internationally acclaimed Theatre of the Oppressed argued that “theatre is a weapon. A very efficient weapon. For this reason one must fight for it”Theatre ( of the Oppressed, 1985:ix). As a Marxist artist—like most artists in Latin America during that InMemory

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2009.53.4.10 by guest on 30 September 2021 period—Boal determined that traditional theatre was oppressive because the means of produc- tion lay in the hands of the theatre owners, producers, impresarios, and so on. Theatre of the Oppressed took theatre out of traditional spaces and transformed the “passive” spectators into active spect-actors, the true directors and protagonists of their own dramas. “I believe that all the truly revolutionary theatrical groups should transfer to the people the means of production in the theatre so that the people themselves may utilize them. The theatre is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it” (12). The theatre, for Boal, was not a representation of what had been but, more importantly, a promise of what could be—a rehearsal for the social acts that would usher in the utopian future of self-determination. Much has changed in Latin America since 1978, the year Boal started his Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) in Paris, and since the early 1990s, when most of the countries seemed to settle back into democracies of sorts. Theatre as rehearsal for revolution lost some of its urgency and appeal. And, not insignificantly, its funding. Boal and his collaborators were preparing to “put an end to the [TO] Centre” in Brazil, a “compassionate euthanasia on our moribund dream” (Legislative Theatre, 1998:11), when suddenly they got caught up in the elections of 1992. As Boal chronicles in Legislative Theatre, TO started as the performance branch of the Workers’ Party and ended up winning a seat in the Legislature—with Boal himself as the elected official. Theatre was still a forceful weapon, but now it served as a rehearsal for a more open democratic process. The first time I had the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time alone with Boal was in 2000, before the Hemispheric Institute’s Encuentro in . Boal offered a workshop at our event. He seemed surprised that I still cared about TO. He said nobody cared about that any longer. He took me to see a theatre piece he had directed that cast many of his friends in a musical—all these folks in their 60s and 70s who, he said, loved to sing. Some were pretty good at it, and had spent decades singing in the shower. At some dinner or other, they had come up with this idea for a show. I told him that’s what had happened to theatre in the last 30 years in the Americas—from theatre of the oppressed to theatre of the repressed. I said it as a joke but he didn’t think it was funny. And of course he was right—the comment in a way signaled the failure of our utopias. Did Boal’s followers know back in the late 1970s that the economic disparities would only get worse? The lack of activism and hope that inspired Theatre of the Oppressed demonstrated the enormous gap between the aspirations of the past and those of the present in which, instead of social justice, people would settle for food and low-paying jobs. Looking back now, TO hadn’t failed as a methodology, but the hope for radical change had faded. The future as a space of potentiality had been curtailed. No one now would ask how theatre brings about revolutions. What does (can) theatre do? Boal’s lifetime of work offers a response—TO did not bring about revolutions, but it did many things. The TO projects and organizations around the world illustrate the degree to which Boal’s method—with Forum Theatre, Invisible Theatre, Image Theatre, and so on—actually did put the means of production into the hands of those who wanted to bring about social change. His system is replicable—others can learn it, use it, and teach it to others. Those involved understand their social roles in a more nuanced way—he reminds us we are both social actors and spectators: “we are the protagonist and principal spectator of our actions” (Legislative Theatre 1998:7), a simultaneous inside/outside approach that allows us to imagine options and rethink possibilities. Social change, moreover, went beyond the Marxist class struggle to include all sorts of different things in different places at different times. Boal’s work changed the ways in which people think about theatre and its social potential. Theatre is no longer thought of as merely representation—even in the activist Brechtian form of representation. Theatre can be a provo-

cation to dialogue, a form of reflection, an instrument of legislative change, a pedagogical tool, In Memory a rehearsal for revolution, and a lot of fun—in and outside the shower. While some may still ask what theatre can do, Boal’s work has forever expanded the range of possibility. Viva Boal.

—Diana Taylor

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