Theatre of the Oppressed

The playwright and essayist Augusto Boal was the director of the Arena Theatre of São Paulo in the 1960th. This, his most influential work, was translated into many languages. It grew out of the practical theatre experience of staging and performing – some sections were written as introduction for plays - and out of the living experience of economic and political oppression. A.B. analyses the history of theatre in relation to the dominant economic classes (Aristotle and the Athenian ‘democracy’, Machiavelli and the emerging bourgeoisie, Hegel and Brecht). To Boal – and I agree – all human activity is political, even the refusal to be so, hence theatre is necessarily political.
A.B. reveals how the theatre has been used as an show more instrument of social and political control but how it can also be turned against the oppressor and become a force for liberation in the hands of the oppressed. Brecht has tried to do this: his plays reveal the world as subject to change. Boal goes further: ‘the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself!’ (155) In the latter part of the work Boal describes the experiences gained with the Arena Theatre, the People’s Theatre in Peru and in numerous workshops; he elaborates the theory and practice of transforming the spectator into actor: Theatre as language, Theatre as discourse (Newspaper theatre, Invisible theatre, …) etc.
This may be the most important theoretical writing on theatre since Brecht.

Much information on the Theatre of the Oppressed is available on the Internet, also videos of workshops and interviews with Boal who died in 2009. (VI-10) show less

This new edition of Theatre of the Oppressed brings a classic work on radical drama fully up to date and includes a new foreword by the author Augusto Boal. Boal restores theatre to its proper place as a popular form of communication and expression. He demonstrates the ways in which theatre has come to reflect ruling-class control, drawing on the theories of Aristotle and Machiavelli. He then shows the process reversed in Brechtian/Marxist poetics to the revolutionary potential of transforming the spectator into the actor. Throughout, Boal draws on his own experience in Latin America and illustrates his theory with practical examples.

Publicado originalmente em 1973, traduzido para mais de 25 idiomas e utilizado em mais de 70 países, o 'Teatro do Oprimido' é um método de pesquisa e criatividade que tem como objetivo a transformação pessoal, política e social e que pode ser usado por todos aqueles que se enquadrem na categoria de 'oprimidos', sejam operários, camponeses, mulheres, negros, homossexuais.