FREE ESSAY ON BOAL, AUGUSTO- NOTES

BOAL, AUGUSTO- NOTES

Brazilian Augusto Boal was raised in Rio de Janeiro. He was formally trained in chemical
engineering and attended Columbia University in the late 1940's and early 1950's.
Although his interest and participation in theatre began at an early age, it was just
after he finished his doctorate at Columbia that he was asked to return to Brazil to work
with the Arena Theatre in Sao Paulo. His work at the Arena Theatre led to his
experimentation with new forms of theatre that would have an extraordinary impact on
traditional practice.
Birth of the Spect-Actor Prior to his experimentation, and following tradition, audiences
were invited to discuss a play at the end of the performance. In so doing, according to
Boal, they remained viewers and reactors to the action before them. In the 1960's Boal
developed a
process whereby audience members could stop a performance and suggest different actions
for the actors, who would then carry out the audience suggestions. But in a now legendary
development, a woman in the audience once was so outraged the actor could not understand
her suggestion that she came onto the stage and showed what she meant. For Boal this was
the birth of the spect-actor (not spectator) and his theatre was transformed. He began
inviting audience members with suggestions for change onto the stage to demonstrate their
ideas. In so doing, he discovered that through this participation the audience members
became empowered not only to imagine change but to actually practice that change, reflect
collectively on the suggestion, and thereby become empowered to generate social action.
Theatre became a practical vehicle for grass-roots activism.
Boal as a Threat
Because of Boal's work, he drew attention as a cultural activist. But the military coups
in Brazil during the 1960's looked upon such activity as a threat. Shortly after the
publication of Boal's first book, The Theatre of the Oppressed, in 1971, Boal was
arrested, tortured, and eventually exiled to Argentina, then self-exiled to Europe. While
in Paris, Boal continued for a dozen years to teach his revolutionary approach to
theatre, establishing several Centers for the Theatre of the Oppressed. In 1981 he
organized the first International Festival of the Theatre of the Oppressed in Paris.
Return to Rio
Following the removal of the military junta in Brazil, Boal returned to Rio de Janeiro in
1986 where he continues to reside. He has established a major Center for the Theatre of
the Oppressed there (CTO - Rio) and has formed over a dozen companies which develop
community-based performances. The vehicles for these presentations are Forum Theatre and
Image Theatre. Forum Theatre relies upon presentation of short scenes that represent
problems of a given community such as gender for a conference on women or racial
stereotyping for a class on racism. Audience members interact by replacing characters in
scenes and by improvising new solutions to the problems being presented. Image theatre
uses individuals to sculpt events and relationships sometimes to the accompaniment of a
narrative.
Boal at ATHE
In 1992, Boal was invited to be the keynote speaker for the National Conference of the
Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) in Atlanta, Georgia. This is the
national association for teachers of theatre in higher education in the United States,
with international connections to Canada, Europe, South America, and increasingly Asia.
His address, together with three 5-hour long workshops during the conference, infused the
participants with both a desire to use the techniques and a workable understanding of how
to take the approaches to their schools and communities. Perhaps no other name now
appears as often as does Boal's in the annual conference program.
Second Book Published
In 1992, Boal also published his second major work, Games for Actors and Non-Actors
(Routledge Press). This is a splendid basic introduction to the entire range of TO theory
and practice, and useful to people both experienced and inexperienced in theatre making.
Boal as Politician; Festival of TO
In the fall of 1992, Boal ran as an at-large candidate for the position of Vereador of
Rio, a position similar to a City Council seat in the United States. Over one thousand
candidates ran for forty-five seats; Boal was one of those elected. Because of the
increased visibility brought about by his winning a seat, he was able to obtain funding
to hold an international festival for the first time in Brazil in July, 1993. The Seventh
International Festival of the Theatre of the Oppressed attracted one hundred, fifty
Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners from around the world in an extraordinary
confluence of languages, theatre styles, and social issues. The Eighth such Festival --
the Ripple Effect sponsored by Mixed Company Theatre -- just recently concluded in
Toronto, Canada, and was held from May 29 to June 8, 1997. Three hundred practitioners
again from around the world attended. One of the featured performances was by the company
Boal directs in his hometown, the CTO - Rio. This performance and the magnanimity of the
CTO-Rio group was one of the true highlights of this extraordinary gathering.
Boal in Omaha: Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed Conference
1994 saw Boal's first arrival in Omaha, Nebraska, as he presented an introductory
workshop to students, faculty, and regional social service personnel. In 1995 Boal
keynoted the Pedagogy of the Oppressed Conference sponsored by the University of Nebraska
at Omaha and presented numerous community and educational workshops demonstrating his
theatrical approaches. At this same time, Boal's third major book, The Rainbow of Desire
(Routledge Press), was published, which elaborates a psycho-therapeutic application of
the Boal techniques, especially Image Theatre.
Boal & Freire
Over many years, Boal continued to strengthen his relationship with liberatory educator,
Paulo Freire, author of the acclaimed Pedagogy of the Oppressed. At the Second Annual
Pedagogy of the Oppressed Conference in Omaha in March 1996, both men appeared together
on a public platform to reflect on liberatory education and to answer questions from an
audience of around one thousand people. Because of their several necessary flights for
personal and family safety during the 1960's -1980's, this co-appearance was the first
time Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire shared a common public stage. Sadly, Paulo Freire
passed away in early May, 1997. Said Boal: I am very sad. I have lost my last father. Now
all I have are brothers and sisters. The Third Annual Conference of Pedagogy & Theatre of
the Oppressed was held in mid-May, 1997, where Boal led workshops in Forum Theatre.
Several of the pieces developed kicked off the Conference with much interaction,
reflection, action, and discussion from the conference attendees. Boal also concluded the
Conference with an image exercise which amounted to a fascinating visual critique of the
Conference itself.
Legislative Theatre
Though he lost his bid for re-election in the fall of 1996, while in office, Vereador
Boal developed a Forum type of theatre -- which he called Legislative Theatre -- to work
at the neighborhood level to identify the key problems in the city. Using the Forum
concept, he employed the dynamics of theatre to discuss what kinds of legislation needed
to be enacted to address community problems. The resulting discussions and demonstrations
became the basis for actual legislation put forward by Boal in the Chamber of Vereadors.
Current reports indicate that Boal is working diligently on a new book that will, as have
the others, document this phase of Boal's ongoing activity.
Boal in England
The summer of 1997 found Boal in England where he worked with the world-renowned Royal
Shakespeare Company. The RSC has asked Boal to employ his Rainbow of Desire techniques in
working with them on a production of Hamlet. Boal is considering a second RSC proposal to
direct a Hamlet in London in the summer of 1998. Typical of Boal, he is not interested in
the central story but in the characters who are usually cut from the play, and is thus
thinking of a text of the marginal characters, the ones without much power. He says it is
similar to the national dish of Brazil which is based on a stew made by slaves of the
leavings from the masters table.
ATHE Award
In August, 1997, Boal was awarded the Career Achievement Award by the Association for
Theatre in Higher Education during their national conference in Chicago. At the
Conference, Boal conducted yet another of his five-hour workshops for conference
attendees as well as received the coveted Career Achievement honor.
Boal's International Travels
Traveling extensively between Rio, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, and now North
America on a substantial working tour, Boal labors tirelessly to make his processes
available to as many people as he can reach. December 1998 found him in England offering
his remarkable Legislative Theatre not only as a model of public performance, but as a
communication network on the Internet. For this reason, the entire performance day was
on-line on the World Wide Web so that people around the world could respond.
Boal went on a first major tour of the US in February and March, 1999, traveling to the
following universities and colleges: New College in Sarasota, FL; Vassar; Dartmouth;
Colby College; University of Georgia; Florida State; and Kansas State. New College,
Dartmouth, and Kansas State, and perhaps others of these, now have student TO companies
working regularly on Boal techniques.
Recently Boal has been devoting considerable time to directing a samba version of the
grand opera Carmen, his first formal directing project in Brazil since his exile in 1970.
Early reports indicate that the event was thrilling, rich in the sounds and rhythms of
Brazilian culture while following the core of the original work.
The objective is always to leave behind at least a core of people who can offer
Boal-style workshops, analysis, and ideas. Hopefully there are hundreds and even
thousands of people carrying out this liberatory approach to community animation.
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The writings and workshops of Augusto Boal have influenced many theatre makers and social
change organizations around the world. Combining many of the aspects of IMPROVISATION
with some of the techniques associated with J.L. MORENO's concept of SOCIODRAMA, Boal's
unique synthesis extends Brecht's Epic Theater concepts into a new realm of practicality.
Groups which use Boal's methods vary widely. 
GROUPS: 
HEADLINES THEATRE
David Diamond and Headlines Theatre have been doing TO work (they now call it Theatre for
Living) in Canada for the last 13 years. They do 15-20 sessions per year, including a
recent series on gay and lesbian youth and homophobia. They have also done work about
biodiversity, AIDS, and racism. Past work includes: -- a series of workshops, using
Cop-in-the-Head and Rainbow of Desire techniques to present a a Power Play on racism,
focusing on the Tl'atz'en Nation, in central British Columbia, with workshops in Campbell
River, Vancouver, Mount Currie, and Tofino/Ucleut; --a Skill Development Workshop on
techniques for anti-racism and multicultural workers in Vancouver in November 1995;
--youth workshops in substance abuse, teen pregnancy, racism, and violence in Hazelton
and Fort St. James in Oct. 1996. --a workshop for docents at the Vancouver Holocaust
Center to help students comprehend the current exhibition in non- threatening way;
--Reclaiming Our Spirits, a community-based theater project which helps individuals and
communities deal with the effects of Canada's Indian Residential School legacy.; --a
site-specific program called Safer Communities, Safer Campuses, which developed a forum
play, then toured it to several communities from late February through March 1996. Their
college work continues with a personal safety workshop at Capilano College.
In February 1996 David Diamond of Headlines was given the City of Vancouver's First
Cultural Harmony Award for his work in community-based theatre, used to explore such
issues as diversity, racism, homophobia, and refugee concerns.
On the last Friday of every month, Headlines hosts a Theatre for Living Cabaret at
Havana, 1212 Commercial Drive at 8 PM; tickets are $5 or Pay What-You-Can. Everything
comes from the audience!
TOL workshops and performances for a wide range of groups and private organizations. A
few recent
projects have included: 
-- Uprooting Racism at Washington State University
-- Sexuality & Risk with Lummi tribal youth
-- Sexual Harassment trainings for the Seattle Public Schools
-- Working with Youth -- Americorps
LANDMARK CONFERENCE 
Augusto Boal, Paulo Freire, and Peter McLaren were the featured speakers at a conference
on Pedagogy of the Oppressed held in Omaha, Nebraska from March 21-23, 1996. This was the
first ever appearance of Freire and Boal together. The conference featured over 350
workshops, performances, demonstrations, debates, and dialogues. Doug Paterson
coordinated a parallel series of TO workshops led by Boal before and after the conference
period: 
The conference was extraordinary...Perhap upward of 900 people, perhaps as much as 25%
people of color including a contingent of 20-25 First Nations people. There was tension,
distrust, joy, insight, pressure, confrontations, dialoque, and a final sense of genuine
achievement, if I may be so bold as to characterize a larger experience from my own
personal one. - Doug Paterson. 
____________
In Boal's work around forum theatre, invisible theatre and the theatre of the oppressed
we see some fascinating expressions of socio-cultural animation. He writes of theatre as
the art of looking at ourselves:
The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic
application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they
act!) and Spectators (they observe!). They are Spect-Actors....
Everything that actors do, we do throughout our lives, always and
everywhere. Actors talk, move, dress to suit the setting, express ideas,
reveal passions - just as we do in our everyday lives. The only
difference is that actors are conscious that they are using the
language of theatre, and are thus better able to turn it to their
advantage, whereas the woman and man in the street do not know
that they are speaking theatre. (Boal 1992: xxx).
In these words we can see some immediate connections to what we do as informal and
community educators.
What Boal has done is to work in workshops - perhaps with workers from a particular
factory
(Forum Theatre) or to take performance to the street (Invisible Theatre) where people are
confronted with what at first sight appear to be events - but are revealed as theatre. He
begins by seeking to integrate the group and to explore political and economic questions
(2 days). In this there is an emphasis on exercise - 'actors must work on their bodies to
get to know them better and to make them more expressive' (ibid.: 1). The group would
then work for a couple of days on preparing 'scenes' (through exercises, games etc.). On
the fifth day they may take the scenes to the street (Invisible Theatre) and then on
sixth make a presentation to an audience (Forum Theatre).
What we can see in this is a fairly straightforward process that carries within in many
of the concerns and a significant amount of the analysis that runs through Freire's work.
For example on dialogue: 'I believe it is more important to achieve a good debate than a
good solution' (ibid. 230). However, two of the fascinating elements of this approach
concern the animating force of performance; and the focus on emotion. In the case of the
former, engaging in performance can bring forward questions, experiences and issues that
are difficult to express in initially in words. It can reveal elements for the group to
work on.
Second, Boal has picked up on the concerns of Stanislavski and the need to move beyond
the mechanisation of the actor's body into allowing emotion to shape the final form of
the actor's interpretation of a role. However, he is also at some concerns to explore
that emotion. 'The important thing about emotion is what it signifies. We cannot talk
about emotion without reason or, conversely, about reason without emotion; the former is
chaos, the latter pure abstraction'. (ibid.: 48).
I have focused here on Boal so that we can get a little of the flavour of socio-cultural
animation. The links with Freire are there - we have a Theatre of the Oppressed as
against a Pedagogy. But what we have been talking about here is essentially a short-run
exercise. The associationalism we began with, is much more long term - and may involve
this form of intervention - but it also entails an active appreciation of ourselves as
animateurs, educators and agents of formation.
________
Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal developed The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO)
during the 1950s and 1960s. In an effort to transform theater from the monologue of
traditional performance into a dialogue between audience and stage, Boal experimented
with many kinds of interactive theater. His explorations were based on the assumption
that dialogue is the common, healthy dynamic between all humans, that all human beings
desire and are capable of dialogue, and that when a dialogue becomes a monologue,
oppression ensues. Theater then becomes an extraordinary tool for transforming monologue
into dialogue. While some people make theater, says Boal, we all are theater.
From his work Boal evolved various forms of theater workshops and performances that aimed
to meet the needs of all people for interaction, dialogue, critical thinking, action and
fun. While the performance modes of Forum Theatre, Image Theatre, Cop-In-The-Head and the
vast array of the Rainbow of Desire are designed to bring the audience into active
relationship with the performed event, the workshops are virtually a training ground for
action not only in these performance forms, but for action in life.
The typical Theatre of the Oppressed workshop comprises three kinds of activity. The
first is background information on TO and the various exercises provided by the workshop
facilitator (or difficultator, as Boal prefers to describe it). Such information begins
the workshop, but is also interspersed throughout the games and exercises. Moreover, the
group is brought together periodically to discuss responses to games and to ask questions
of the various processes.
The second kind of activity is the games. These are invariably highly physical
interactions designed to challenge us to truly listen to what we are hearing, feel what
we are touching, and see what we are looking at. The arsenal of the Theatre of the
Oppressed is extensive with more than 200 games and exercises listed in Boal's Games for
Actors and Non-Actors alone. Several years ago Boal's Center for the Theatre of the
Oppressed in Paris (CTO - Paris) proceeded methodically through all the TO activities;
the inventory took two years to cover. Ultimately, these games serve to heighten our
senses and demechanize the body, to get us out of habitual behavior, as a prelude to
moving beyond habitual thinking and interacting. We also become actively engaged with
other participants, developing relationships and trust, and having a very good time.
Finally, the third area of activity involves the structured exercises. Although there is
a kind of gray area at times when one might call an activity a game or an exercise, the
exercises are formulated so as to infuse a given structure with genuine content. 
These activities are designed to highlight a particular area of TO practice such as Image
Theatre, Forum Theatre, Rainbow of Desire, etc. Thus we are invited not only to imagine
new possibilities and solutions, but to actively participate in them, Forum style. Group
problem solving, highly interactive imagining, physical involvement, trust and fun
combine to create vigorous interpersonal dynamics. As a result, we learn that we are, if
not the source of our difficulties, at least the reason for their maintenance. More
importantly, we are clearly the source of our mutual liberations.
_________