Augusto Boal’s

Theatre of the Opperessed.

What is the Theatre of the Oppressed?

Created by Brazilian visionary, Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed is a form

of popular community based education that uses theatre as a tool for
transformation. Originally developed out of Boal’s work with peasant and worker
populations, it is now used all over the world for social and political activism,
conflict resolution, community building, therapy, and government legislation.
Inspired by the vision of Paulo Freire and his landmark treatise on education,
Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the oppressed invites critical thinking. It is about
analyzing rather than accepting, questioning rather than giving answers. It is also
about “acting” rather than just talking. In the theatre of the oppressed, the
audience is not made of spectators but “spect-actors”. Through the evocative
language of theatre, everyone is invited to share their opinion on the issues at
hand.
Theatre of the Oppressed is an aesthetic method created by Brazilian playwright
Augusto Boal that stimulates critical observation and representation of reality,
envisioning the production of consciousness and concrete actions.
In the last decades Theatre of the Oppressed games, exercises and techniques
have became powerful tools for many practitioner across the world. It is a
participatory art form that is meant and applied as an empowering and
liberating practice that inspires individual and collective transformation.

The ‘THEATRE OF THE OPPRESSED’ Techniques

NEWSPAPER THEATRE – This system of 12 techniques represents the first

attempt that was made to create the Theatre of the Oppressed, by giving the
audience the means of production rather than the finished artistic product. They
are devised to help anyone to make a theatrical scene using a piece of news
from a newspaper, or from any other written material, like reports of an political
meeting, texts from the Bible, from the Constitution of a country, the Declaration
of Human Rights, etc.

INVISIBLE THEATRE – To be a citizen does not mean merely to live in society, but
to transform it. If I transform the clay into a statue, I become a Sculptor; if I
transform the stones into a house, I become an architect; if I transform our
society into something better for us all, I become a citizen. It is a direct
intervention in society, on a precise theme of general interest, to provoke debate
and to clarify the problem that must be solved. It shall never be violent since its
aim is to reveal the violence that exists in society, and not to reproduce it.

IMAGE-THEATRE – Words are emptinesses that fill the emptiness (vacuum) that
exists between one human being and another. Words are lines that we carve in
the sand, sounds that we sculpt in the air. We know the meaning of the word we
pronounce, because we fill it with our desires, ideas and feelings, but we don’t
know how that word is going to be heard by each listener. IMAGE THEATRE is a
series of Techniques that allow people to communicate through Images and
Spaces, and not through words alone.

FORUM-THEATRE — Music is the organization of sound in time; plastic arts, the

organization of colors and lines in the space; theatre, the organization of human
actions in time and space. Theatre is a representation and not a reproduction of
social reality. FORUM-THEATRE presents a scene or a play that must necessarily
show a situation of oppression that the Protagonist does not know how to fight
against, and fails. The spect-actors are invited to replace this Protagonist, and act
out – on stage and not from the audience – all possible solutions, ideas,
strategies.

Forum Theatre –
Forum theatre is one of the more commonly used tools from Theatre of the
Oppressed. It begins with the crafting and performance of a short play that
dramatizes real situations faced by the participants and that ends with the
protagonist(s) being oppressed. After the first performance, the play or scene is
repeated with one crucial difference: the spectators become “spect-actors” and
can at any point yell “freeze” and take the place of an actor to attempt to
transform the outcome. Forum theatre is an exercise in democracy in which
anyone can speak and anyone can act.

One of the first things that spect-actors realize is that, as in life, if they don’t
intervene, nothing will change. The next thing spect-actors find is that doing
“something” is not enough, it must be a strategic something. The people acting
as oppressors on stage will maintain their oppression until they are authentically
stopped — and just like in life, stopping them isn’t easy. Forum theatre thus
becomes a laboratory to experiment with different courses of action.

The protagonists should be characters that all or most of the people in the room
can identify with, so that when they intervene, they are rehearsing their own
action. The point is not to show what we think other people should do — it is not
theatre of advice. The point is to discover what we can do.
Forum theatre is facilitated by someone called a Joker, who engages the spect-
actors both on and off stage in dialogue throughout the process. After an
intervention, the Joker may ask, “Did this work?”, “Was this realistic?”, “Can you
do this in real life?”

Forum theatre was developed in a context in which it was very clear what the
oppression was, who was oppressed and who the oppressors were.
Forum theatre is an effective tool of creative activism, useful for generating
interventions, as an intervention itself, and for building common strategic
frameworks for movements.
Birth of ‘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 character experiencing oppression, and the
actor playing that character 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.
Rainbow of Desire
Many concrete oppressions provoke deep damage inside our subjectivity and
psychic life. Under the general title of Rainbow of Desire, there are fifteen
Techniques – complex, but not complicated! – Which help us to visualize
theatrically our oppressions, and deal with them more clearly: no one interprets
anything, but all participants offer the Protagonist the mirror of the multiple
regards of the others.

LEGISLATIVE THEATRE – Theatre is not enough to change reality, we all agree.

Legislative theatre is the utilization of all forms of the Theatre of the Oppressed
with the aim of transforming the citizens legitimate desires into Laws. After a
normal Forum session, we create a space similar to a Chamber where laws are
made, and we proceed to create a similar ritual of lawmaking, following the
same official procedure of presenting Projects based on the spect-actors
interventions, defending or refusing them, voting, etc. At the end, we collect the
approved suggestions and try to put pressure upon the lawmakers to have
those laws approved.

Augusto Boal, Rio de Janeiro 2004 (Via the International Theatre of the Oppressed
Organisation)