COMMUNITY THEATRE: Augusto Boal

WHO IS AUGUSTO BOAL AND WHY IS HE IMPORTANT TO OUR PRACTICE?

"Observing itself, the human being perceives what it is, discovers what it is not and imagines what it could become. It perceives where it is and where it is not, and imagines where it could go".
-Augusto Boal

BIOGRAPHY:

Augusto Boal was a Brazilian theatre director and dramatist who lived from the 16th of March 1931 to the 2nd May 2009 who is integral to the development of a lot of theatrical techniques and ideas in the landscape today, for example the ideas of 'forum theatre', 'invisible theatre' and 'legislative theatre'. He is best known for his 1974 book 'Theatre of the Oppressed' which put across ideas on how to create a theatre led revolution, challenging authority and the injustices in society.

"When I read a story and did not like it, I would rewrite it" - Augusto Boal, 2001:89 - Theatre of the Oppressed

Boal was born and grew up in Rio de Janeiro (an area of great wealth disparity which may have informed his work) to his wealthy parents Jose and Albertina Boal who were both Portuguese. His father was exiled from his home country in 1914 after not supporting Portugal in WW1. Boal had a happy childhood, where he already exercised an interest in theatre and performed in his dining room with his siblings and cousins.

Initially, Augusto Boal grew up as a industrial chemist graduating in 1952 and then going on to research at the Columbia University in New York. In the US, Boal studied drama as well as chemical engineering, making links with the Arena Theatre in São Paulo, becoming its director in 1956-1971. He ran writers'/actors' workshops but having quickly become influenced by the revolutionary surge of the 1960s, he took agitprops shows into the countryside where the audience would decide the subject matter of the play. Here Boal began to develop his techniques.

However, Boal's agitprop group was forced to back own when a peasant in the audience suggested that the group staged an armed raid on a local landlord. Nevertheless, Boal used this in his notion to learn from the people and thus developed the 'Theatre of the Oppressed', where audience members were asked for alternative endings to plays about oppressions, evolving to plays that included audience participation to satisfy the needs of audience members.

By 1971, Boal's group came to the notice of Brazil's military junta. He had worked throughout Brazil trying to provoke and inspire the people living in the slums to rise up against inequality and injustice. He was captured and tortured for three months. He later reinacted the trauma of this as street theatre.

A quote from Boal that echoes this is: "I always did a kind of theatre that is upsetting to the poower when the power is not democratic". (SOURCE: Guardian article) Following this, Boal was exiled to Argentina where he continued to practice and develop his ideas. Notably, a new form of theatre called 'image theatre' was created by Boal in 1973 in Peru, which aimed to use physical theatre over the spoken word.

The book 'The Theatre of Oppressed' published in 1974 argued the weaknesses of mainstream theatre which reinforced social boundaries and measures that sedated the audience, as well as the power of the theatre in turning the oppressed into 'revolutionaries'. Based on the teachings of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher, Boal's ideas wanted to challenge the passive spectator, inviting audiences on stage to act out their issues, becoming 'spect-actors' and giving them the opportunity to find solutions to the problems and invite personal and social change. This became known as 'forum theatre' where audience members replaced the protagonist. The key to this theatre was participation, which challenged the notions of mainstream theatre.

TOTO became translated into 25 languages and his techniques were adapted into places as diverse as Estonia, India, Puerto Rico and Sweden.

"At some stage we are told we are too old to play and act, we must become spectators. But we should not be spectators in the theatre, even less in our lives. We should be actors. In the Theatre of the Oppressed, we don't have spectators in the sense that you go there and consume something. We have what we call 'spectactors'". - Augusto Boal on his ideology

In 1976, Boal settled in Lisbon, becoming a professor at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1978 where his radical ideology was taught. He set up a TOTO centre and organised international TOTO festivals from 1981-1985. In Europe, Boal became more interested in how subjective oppression can be to each person's experience. With his wife Cecilia Boal, who happened to be a psychoanalyst, he began workshops in Paris to tackle what he addressed as 'the cop in the head'. In 1986, Boal returned to Rio de Janeiro after the fall of the Brazilian military junta. Here he set up a massive TOTO centre and formed more than a dozen companies to develop community based performance. Invisible theatre was experimented with, where shows are put on in public spaces and the audiences are unaware of it. This would stimulate debate among the viewers and spectators, creating solutions to the problems. Cultural theatre was also used, where members from one ethnic group would perform a play from a culture antagonist to their own, for example Palestinians putting on a Jewish play.

In the 90s, Boal became a member of Rio de Janeiro's city council, and turned techniques and his ideology into new popular laws, known as legislative theatre.

"Unlike the dogmatic political theatre of the 1960s, which told people what to do, we now ask them what they want" - Boal on legislative theatre

More books were published such as 'Games for Actors and Non Actors' in 1989, The Rainbow of Desire in 1995 and a book on 'Legislative Theatre; in 1998. An autobiography called 'Hamlet and the Baker's Son' was published in 2001. He has been awarded countless awards, icnluding the Pablo Picasso medal. In London, Boal did a lot of work with a company called 'Cardboard Citizens', a homeless people's theatre company, as well as working with the RSC. The RSC asked Boal to employ his Rainbow of Desire methodology on their production of Hamlet. He worked on numerous projects until his death of deteriorating leukemia at age 78.

"I believe in democracy, not phony democracy". - Augusto Boal

WHY IS BOAL IMPORTANT TO OUR PRACTICE?

After having conducted research on Augusto Boal and his everpresent legacy, I feel so inspired and refreshed on what theatre should be and what myself as an artist should strive towards. As someone who is quite politically minded, I have always believed that theatre should be a force for change that calls out the injustice in society and opens peoples' minds, making them feel a need to change things. The work of Boal has made me believe this convinction even moreso, and it's so incredible to see how much he went through in his life which only drove his art form more. His legacy seems to be so relevant today in a time when injustice and craziness seems to be all around us, and theatre should be one of the ways that we seek to represent the wrong in society and equally inspire ourselves and those around us to change it. I was particularly taken aback by the idea of legislative theatre. It's quite surreal that Boal used the practice of theatre to implement law, and that only accentuates the power of theatre further.

Boal is so important to our practice because he was intertwined in everything we do. Not only do so many drama games derive from his methodology, but a lot of the theatre we see and create is driven from Boal's principles and ideas. His legacy is something I truly think should carry on forever, and I hope it does. I personally believe that all theatre should challenge society like Boal's work did, and this is something that as creatives and actors we should work to honour in our projects.

SOME INTERESTING AND THOUGHT PROVOKING ARTICLES ON BOAL:

SOME VIDEOS ON BOAL AND HIS INFLUENCE: