Theater of the Oppressed

Latin America's most famed dissident artists, Brazilian Augusto Boal. He reflects back on his life in exile and his use of theater as a tool of resistance.

Brazilian artist and activist Augusto Boal sees theater as a dialogue and an opportunity to act out social change. Drawing on Paulo Friere's pedagogy of the oppressed, Boal developed Theater of the Oppressed out of his experimental work at the Arena Theater in Sao Paulo during the 1950s and 60s. Boal took the theater to factories and farms throughout Brazil and developed plays around the experiences of people silenced by poverty and oppression.

Boal's plays were increasingly censored by the government and in 1971, the military dictatorship imprisoned him for four months. When he was released he was forced into exile and spent fifteen years in Argentina, Portugal and France before returning to Rio.

Theater of the Oppressed techniques--from QUOTE "Invisible Theater" on the streets to solution-oriented "Forum Theater"--spread around the world. Boal is in New York this week running a theater workshop at the Brecht Forum and he joins us now in our firehouse studio.

JUAN GONZALEZ: We are joined in our studio, in our firehouse studio here, by one of the extraordinary people’s artists of Latin America. We go to Brazilian artist and activist, Augusto Boal, who sees theater as a dialogue and an opportunity to act out social change. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Boal developed Theater of the Oppressed out of his experimental work at the Arena Theater in Sao Paulo during the 1950s and 1960s. Boal took the theater to factories and farms throughout Brazil and developed plays around the experiences of people silenced by poverty and oppression. Boal’s plays were increasingly censored by the government and in 1971 the military dictatorship imprisoned him for four months. When he was released he was forced into exile and spent 15 years in Argentina, Portugal and France, before returning Rio. Theater of the Oppressed techniques, from (quote) "Invisible Theater" on the streets to solution-oriented “Forum Theater” spread around the world. Boal is in New York this week, running a theater workshop at the Brecht Forum, and he joins us now in our studio. Welcome to Democracy Now!

AUGUSTO BOAL: Thank you very much.

JUAN GONZALEZ: It’s a pleasure to have you. Talk to us about how you got started in the 1950s in using theater and art to open up and explain and help folks in Brazil be able to deal with their social conditions.

AUGUSTO BOAL: Yeah. In the 1950s I did not do Theater of the Oppressed. I did theater like everybody else in that you call the spectator to come, you charge a price for the ticket and then you do plays, the best that you can. But soon I understood that I was doing good plays, wonderful plays for people that were good writers for an audience that came just to look at it and say, “Okay, it's nice.” And then they went away and nothing else happens. And always for me theater should be more than that. Shakespeare used to say – not used to say, but he said in Hamlet that the theater should be and is like a mirror in which we look at the mirror and then we see our vices and our virtues. I think that's very nice, but I would like to have a mirror with some magic properties in which we could -- if we don't like the image that we have in front of us to allow us to penetrate into that mirror and then transform our image and then come back with our image transformed. The act of transforming, I always say, transforms she or he who acts. So to use the theater as a rehearsal for transformation of reality. This was my idea, but not my practice until the dictatorship was every time more severe on us and they started forbidding our plays, not allowing us to do our plays to do nothing. So when we lost our theater, we lost everything. We found theater.

JUAN GONZALEZ: This would have been the military dictatorship of the late 1960s?

AUGUSTO BOAL: Yes. It started from 1964 and then it lasted until 1980 and something, and some structures are still there. We talk about now we have democracy. What kind of democracy? Democracy is a word that you can fill in with whatever you want. I believe that words, they are like trucks. They are like means of transportation. You can put inside what you want. And democracy we call democracy. Many countries in which you have to choose between two people that are very rich and buy time on the television. Why you call democracy in Greece in which the women did not vote. We call democracy anything. We say that now in Brazil we have democracy, but that's not true. Half of the population cannot read or write. Half of the population live under the poverty limit of life. So that's not democracy.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Paulo Freire. Many people have said you began to implement in theater some of his ideas and perspectives. Could you talk about how you began to develop the Forum Theater and your Theater of the Oppressed? {mosgoogle right}

AUGUSTO BOAL: Yes. Paulo Freire was a very good friend of mine, and he started more or less in the 1960s. Once we were talking to try to remember when we have met for the first time. We do not remember well. We had the impression that we have met for all our lives. And his work inspired me, of course, and did develop parallel one to another. But of course he wrote the Pedagogy of the Oppressed first, and by title Theater of the Oppressed is a homage to him. No? Well, how it started when I was in the 1970s I was already persecuted by the police, by the army, by all of them, and then I could not do theater anymore.

So I said, I cannot give the population the artistic product [inaudible], so what I am going to do is to try to give them the means of production. Then me and a group of my colleagues of the Arena Theater, we started developing what we called the Newspaper Theater, in which we would translate news from the newspaper into scenes of theatrical scenes. But we would teach them how to do it. But we would not do for them. So we wanted to democratize the means of production. Then we developed lots of groups that did the Newspaper Theater about their own problems. We worked in factories. We work in churches. Because in Brazil there is a church, which is very reactionary. But there's also a church which is very progressive, the theology of liberation and all that. Well, then we start doing that.

I was arrested in 1971. And then I had to leave the country, and then I went to Argentina. In Argentina I had to do something else, and I like to do theater in the street. But my friend said don't do theater in the street because if you got arrested again here in Argentina they’re going to send you back to Brazil. And in Brazil they do not arrest the same person twice. The second time they kill directly. So Simona had a good idea, he said, why don't we do the play, but we don't tell anybody that it's a play. So you can be there and no one’s responsible for anything because you explode the scene in front of everyone. Everyone can participate. So we did that. We did what they call Invisible Theater.

We went to a restaurant. It was a law that said that no Argentine could die from hunger. And Argentine had the right to go into any restaurant, eat whatever they wanted, but not drink wine, not take dessert. The rest he could ask for two, three beefsteaks, and it will be okay. And then sign the bill and show the identity card in which they prove they were Argentine. So I said, “Okay, let's go to a real restaurant instead of spending money to make the settings and spending money to make propaganda. Let's go to a real restaurant and play the play there. And then me, Augusto, I was sitting far away at another table eating my beef. So when we exploded the scene, everyone participated. And then it was very nice because the actor became the spectator of the spectator who had become an actor, so the fiction and reality were overlapping, no? That was in Argentina. In Peru --

JUAN GONZALEZ: What was the reaction?

AUGUSTO BOAL: The reaction is always very good because we never create violence. We want to reveal the violence that exists in society. We don't want to duplicate it, don't want to bring our violence, but just to show society's violent. If there is people who is dying from hunger and food is plenty, why should they die? So we try to show the absurdity of the system in which we live, you know?