Introduction
Alienation is a contested term. However, it seems to describe something tangible: that many of us are able to go on living through a capitalist mystification where we can choose to ignore the unjust structures that put food, and other goods, in our hands. A recurring question for revolutionaries of the past century is how to break this spell, and many have tried to do this through art. It is on this topic, and in particular on the possibilities of revolutionary theater, that this essay will focus.
The essay takes as its subject the life and work of Augusto Boal, a Brazilian playwright, theater director, and political activist. Boal, under the influence of the work of Bertolt Brecht and Paolo Freire, created what is probably the most innovative and successful way of doing theater to achieve political consciousness: the Theater of the Oppressed. This is a pedagogical method for radical education and social transformation. To understand Boal’s revolutionary contribution, we first need to explore his life and social context, before discussing what he takes from Brecht, contrasting him to other proposals, such as those of philosopher Jacques Rancière, and ending with an evaluation of the Theater of the Oppressed’s possibilities and what it achieved in Brazil.
Boal’s Life and Social Context
Augusto Boal was born on March 17, 1931, the son of two Portuguese peasants who emigrated to Brazil. He was always enthusiastic about theater: at the age of ten, he was already directing small productions with his cousins and siblings. However, he first pursued a degree in Chemical Engineering, and only began studying drama after moving to New York.
Boal enrolled at Columbia University, becoming a student of John Gassner. Gassner focused on the techniques of two playwrights: the German Bertolt Brecht and the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski. Brecht was famous for his “Epic Theatre,” which was highly politicized, and will be discussed below extensively. Stanislavski was the co-founder of the Moscow Art Theater and developed an eponymous system of pedagogy for actors. The Stanislavski system helped actors correctly interpret their roles on a level deeper than the lines they had to memorize by cultivating “the art of experiencing.” Both of these playwrights had a persistent influence on Boal’s understanding of theater. And although Brecht’s influence on Boal is better known, Stanislavski’s influence should not be ignored, as his pedagogy for actors is reflected in the emancipatory role of the actor in the Theater of the Oppressed.
While at university, Boal began writing and staging plays with a group of young writers. His first two productions were performed in 1955: The House Across the Street and The Horse and the Saint. Boal returned to Brazil in 1956, and quickly joined the Teatro de Arena in Sao Paulo as co-director. It was there that he deepened his acting work by adapting Stanislavski’s methods to Brazilian conditions as well as the Arena Theatre format. He taught his actors to go beyond voice and movement training. The actors searched for inner motives to justify the character’s actions and for examining what the characters sought to achieve at any given moment.
Boal played an important role in the political commitment of the Teatro de Arena. The actors wanted to center their work on the nationalist discussions which were in vogue in the second half of the fifties. The nationalist evolution of the theater was accompanied by an increasingly radical politicization. However, the process by which Boal acquired increasingly anti-systemic positions was slow. In 1956, shortly after starting to make theater, Boal directed a stage-adaptation of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, a novel about misery in California during the Great Depression. This earned him the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Artes award for best new director. In 1957 he staged his first original play: Marido Magro, Mulher Chata. Although this first work did not contain a deep social analysis, it did speak to the problems of sexism in the institution of marriage. During this first, more nationalistic phase, Boal developed a proposal for a Brazilian popular theater aimed at debating the country’s reality with a leftist political aesthetic. This proposal was radical, not only in terms of the themes of the plays staged, but also because theater became an instrument of struggle for social transformation. Theater classics would be reshaped in a more Brazilian setting, with Boal assuming the direction of the cast. An example of a production of this period is Machiavelli’s Mandrake which was critically acclaimed for its aesthetic construction.
In 1964, a military dictatorship took power in Brazil. This was also the year Boal moved to Rio de Janeiro. While there, he contributed to the direction of the Opinião show, a musical performance-manifesto that would become a referent in Brazilian “protest music.”1 He also participated in the Movements of Popular Culture of the Northeast of Brazil, where education theorist Paulo Freire, author of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, was active.
These were the key influences that led to the creation of the Theater of the Oppressed. When he returned to São Paulo in 1965, Boal found Arena’s team working on the project of reconstructing the historical episode of the Quilombo of Palmares. With his new outlook, Boal began the cycle of musicals in the company, integrating the cast around a new language. With Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and Edu Lobo, he molded Arena Conta Zumbi, the first experiment with the “joker system,” which would later become an integral part of the Theater of the Oppressed and is explained below. Music was an essential element of the language of the show; it interconnected the scenes and enriched the plot with lyrical or exhortative tones, using events of the past to criticize the present. With this same perspective, Boal elaborated new versions of plays, such as Arena Conta Tiradentes. This play sought both to create empathy with the revolutionary character of Tiradentes and awaken enthusiasm in the spectators, while providing a critical view of the events.2 Once again, music played a fundamental role. With musical direction by Theo de Barros, the refrain “de pé, povo levanta na hora da decisão” was the emotional climax of the work, explicitly calling on the audience to resist the dictatorship.3
Conflicts with the dictatorship intensified in 1968, when A Primeira Feira Paulista de Opinião was staged. The company ignored the cuts established by the censors and incited civil disobedience, and, eventually, the play was banned. After the Institutional Act No. 5 was decreed in 1968, the Arena company traveled out of the country, touring until 1970.4 Boal was arrested and went into exile in 1971. He continued his career abroad: first in Argentina, where he developed the theoretical framework behind Theater of the Oppressed and then to Portugal, where he lived for two years, working with the group A Barraca. It was during this period that he published several theoretical works, such as O Teatro do Oprimido e Outras Políticas Poéticas (1975) and Técnicas Latinoamericanas de Teatro Popular (1979).
After the Amnesty Law, Boal returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1984.5 In 1986, he founded the Centro de Teatro do Oprimido do Rio de Janeiro (CTO-Rio), where theoretical and practical studies of the Theater of the Oppressed were carried out. This group discussed how concepts such as citizenship and culture are expressed through theatrical language, and based its research program around the question of how new subjectivities are created through theater. Alongside founding the CTO-Rio, Boal won an election for vereador (city councillor) of Rio de Janeiro. After taking office he implemented a dramaturgical method called “Legislative Theater,” where social problems were worked out in an improvised street theater. Boal summarized Legislative Theater in an eponymous book. His national and international recognition only grew, and he continued to develop theatrical techniques linked to political and social problems until shortly before his death in 2009.
What was the Theater of the Oppressed?
Since the mid-seventies, Boal’s work has been linked to a popular, revolutionary, and educational theater that he called Theater of the Oppressed. Today the Theater of the Oppressed is a trend that has evolved beyond its origins, although it maintains the same core. It is best defined as a theater of the oppressed classes and for the oppressed classes, to develop a struggle against oppressive structures.6 The three major influences on the development of this theater are Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theater, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the Stanislavski acting system. Before we discuss how Boal drew on Freire’s concepts to overcome what he saw as the limitations of Brecht’s theater, I will discuss examples of the Theater of the Oppressed, and distinguish between the different modalities (or lines of work) within it. In particular, three modalities of Theater of the Oppressed are discussed in the book Games for Actors and Non-Actors: Invisible Theater, Image Theater, and Forum Theater.7 Another modality, Legislative Theater will be critically evaluated in a later section. Aesthetics of the Oppressed, which was the last line of theatrical research developed by Boal before his death, is beyond the scope of this essay.7
In Games for Actors and Non-Actors Boal discusses many of the techniques of his theater, which are mostly dynamics and games for multiple participants. These techniques are then used to analyze the power relations that exist, the different types of oppression that can be revealed, and the ways in which they can be combated. According to Boal, it is difficult to delimit where one form begins and another ends. Each modality overlaps and interacts continuously. The choice of the specific form depends on the context in which the play is performed and the aim of the theatrical act.
For example, in the introduction to this book, Image Theater is described as follows:
Image Theater is a series of exercises and games designed to uncover essential truths about societies and cultures without recourse, in the first instance, to spoken language, although this may be added in the various “dynamizations” of images. Image Theater participants create still images of their lives, feelings, experiences and oppressions; groups suggest titles or themes, and individuals then ‘sculpt’ three-dimensional images under these titles, using their own and each other’s bodies as ‘clay’. However, the work with the images never remains static: as in all Theatre of the Oppressed, the frozen image is simply the starting point or prelude to the action, which is revealed in the process of dynamization, in which the images come to life and in which the direction or intention behind them is discovered.7
In other words, it is a theater where the image takes precedence over everything else. Boal says that the underlying idea is that an image is worth a thousand words. He looked for alternative ways of expressing himself beyond the grammar of words, as it was our over-reliance on them which led to the confusion and obfuscation of central issues. Images, according to Boal, can be closer than words to our true feelings, even to our subconscious feelings, since the process of ‘thinking with our hands’ can short-circuit the brain’s censorship, the ‘cops in the head’ placed there by society or personal experience. It is interesting to think about the role of images in a less educated population, who may have trouble expressing themselves. According to Boal, working with images can be more democratic, as it does not privilege the people most articulate in the dominant forms of communication. He also believed that the polysemy of images is a vital factor in this work. Images overcome linguistic and cultural barriers and, as Boal shows, often reveal unexpected universalities. Image Theater can be used in preparation for other kinds of theater and here we can see Boal’s dedication to thinking about how best to make his works representable, and the debt to Stanislavski’s methods for “authentic” acting.
Invisible Theater is a public theater that involves the audience as a participant in the action without them knowing it.7 During Invisible Theater, its “spectators” do not know that they are taking part in a performance as it takes place in situations very similar to “real life.” Boal claims that in this case, it is also “real life”, because it is happening, the people are real, the incidents are real, the reactions are real. It is theater that does not take place in an obvious theatrical context, with an audience that does not know it is an audience. One can again see the influence of Stanislavski, whose maxim was that when an actor was on stage, he was in the here and now.8 By the same token, Invisible Theater is not even theater for many of its participants. During its course, several actors perform a scene in an appropriate public space. This scene usually involves an unexpected subversion of “normal” behavior within that particular society. In reaction to the incidents of the scene, the audience engages in a discussion, usually with the help of a pair of agent-provocateurs who mingle with the audience and express extreme and opposite reactions to the events of the scene.
An example of this theater was when a man in Boal’s group went to a store front with a friend and started trying on women’s dresses; another actor, as part of the assembled crowd, expressed strong indignation at this “perversion,” while a third actor took on the role of defending the transvestite: why shouldn’t he wear women’s clothes if he wanted to? In this way, an unwilling crowd is drawn into a heated discussion about the rights of people who are not normally seen or heard. Theater is used to stimulate debate, making people question uncomfortable issues in a public forum. According to Boal, although Invisible Theater can be compared to “agitprop” street theater, the essential difference is that the audience is free to take any position they wish and is not a mere spectator.9 Invisible Theater asks questions without giving the answers. This is a fundamental component of the Theater of the Oppressed: it is never didactic for its audience, influenced by Freire’s ideas, it involves a joint learning process rather than one-way teaching; it assumes that street theater is a means of communication.
The third type of Theater is Forum Theater, a theatrical game in which an unsolved problem is shown, to which the spectators are invited to suggest and represent solutions. In these cases, the problem to be solved is always a symptom of an oppression suffered by the characters, usually involving visible oppressors and an oppressed protagonist. In its purest form, both the actors and the “spect-actors” will be people who are victims of the oppression under consideration, and using this, the audience is invited to offer alternative solutions as they themselves personally know the oppression.
Participation is introduced in the following way: after a screening of the scene, which is known as “the model” and can be a complete play, it is screened again slightly accelerated, and follows exactly the same course until a member of the audience shouts “Stop!,” and takes the place of the protagonist to attempt to defeat the oppressors. This game is a form of competition between the spectators who try to bring the play to a different ending (in which the cycle of oppression is broken) and the actors who make every effort to bring it to its original ending (in which the oppressed are defeated and the oppressors triumph). The rhythm and process of the Theater of the Oppressed is carried out by a figure that Boal calls the Joker (Coringa in Portuguese). This figure, which will be discussed in more detail in the next section, can also be removed from the stage if the spectators desire. Moreover, almost any rule can be changed if the spectators so wish, giving them complete creative freedom. In the course of a single forum many different solutions are put into practice: the result is a sharing of knowledge, tactics, and experiences, as well as what Boal calls a “rehearsal of reality.” What is done in this theater can only be briefly described here, but Forum Theater is the best known of all forms of Theater of the Oppressed, and the one that serves as the basis for Legislative Theater. Boal used these forms in all sorts of places, from schools, factories, day centers, community centers, with groups of tenants, homeless people, disabled people, ethnic minorities, and so on. It serves anywhere there is a community that shares an oppression, with the intention always to stimulate debate (in the form of action, not just words), to show alternatives, and basically to allow people to “become the protagonist of their own lives.”
An Example: The Theater of the Oppressed in Godrano
The first example Boal gives in his book is from his experience in Godrano (Italy), in 1977.10 Godrano is a small town in Sicily, forty kilometers from the Sicilian capitol Palermo. At that time, the town’s population of two thousand was evenly split between peasants and recent immigrant laborers. Godrano had few shops, no hotel, no supermarket, no cinema, but it did have a grocery store and a butcher. It also had a long history with the mafia. The town was close to a mountain where corpses were often dumped.
Boal comments that he noticed that all the inhabitants were unhappy, and that among the unhappiest were the women, and among them the girls. Here was oppression in plain sight, as he remarks: “Everyone was oppressed, but the most oppressed were the women who were married or about to be married. In the evenings I used to walk through the few streets of the village, and in front of almost every house I saw a woman sitting sewing. She was preparing her trousseau or that of her daughter. In these places, the trousseau is called corredo, and it was an Italian national institution which [in Sicily was] even more horrible and alienating than in the rest of the Italian nation.”10 What repelled Boal most was the “valuation” event, an event open to all friends and family, who gathered to put a price on the contents of the corredo. During this event, the price of each object, such as pieces of cloth, sheets, and rugs, is haggled over until a final tally is reached. This is what the woman’s family will bring to the marriage, and the woman cannot marry without it.
Boal and company established a Forum Theater in Godrano, but eventually received news from the local police station that they needed permission from Palermo to do the play in the main square. The local police, the carabinieri, were suspicious of the motives of a foreigner and feared that he would introduce strange ideas into Sicilian society. Boal protested that he was not going to introduce ideas, but wanted the villagers to speak for themselves about their conditions. After hearing this, the carabinieri branded him a subversive and banned the play. However, Boal obtained permission from the Sindaco,11 the local authority, and with this the screening could go ahead, as long as the authorities were involved. This provided him with a unique opportunity: Boal could conduct Theater of the Oppressed with the oppressor and the oppressed in the same place, something he found very interesting.
For this purpose, two pieces were chosen to be performed. The first one focused on the problems of Giuseppina, a 20 year old girl, who wants to go out for a walk after dinner. Her father refuses to allow this unless one of her brothers accompanies her. The brothers oppose her in different ways, some more hostile, others simply stating that they already have made plans. Giuseppina stays at home, helping to do the dishes while the brothers go out to have fun, even though they are younger than she is. After this the Forum opened, and the audience began to argue. Some men downplayed the problem, while others tried to order their wives to go home so as not to see the perversion of the play. Three young women tried to replace Giuseppina and argue against their oppressors, and failed. A fourth woman found the solution: to leave without permission on the sly. The men were also asked to take the place of the oppressors. It was revealed they thought that the only thing Giuseppina was looking for was to go out with her boyfriend, and that this was the fault of the mother who had brought her up wrong.
The women were happy with this play, because they were able to say things that they would never dare say at home. Boal was also happy with this, as his reading of the events was that “when an actor performs an act of liberation in a normal play in which the audience is not allowed to intervene, he does it in place of the spectator, which is a catharsis for the spectator. But when a spectator occupies the stage and performs the same act there, he does so in the name of all the other spectators, because they know that, if they disagree, they themselves can invade the stage and show their opinion, and the event is thus for them not a catharsis but a dynamization.” Only in this way does one leave the theater galvanized and ready to bring about a change in what is unjust and oppressive.10
The second piece had a surprise element: an actor was to play the Sindaco, who was present in the audience. In Godrano, a group of shepherds wanted to form a cooperative to solve the problem of lack of market for their products. They felt that the Sindaco had not helped them at all. The shepherds prepared the play to show the Sindaco the problems, and Boal, proud of the play, only modified parts of the form, without touching the content.
During the performance, the tension was very high. The oppressor-defendant (the real Sindaco) was present in the audience, and while his imitator, the actor-Sindaco was speaking, the audience could see the face of the real Sindaco, who was smiling and trying to treat the whole thing as a joke. However, the spect-actors were very serious. According to the rules of the Forum Theater, if someone shouted “Stop!,” the actor was replaced and the next spectator gave his version of the events and the behavior of the authorities present. Eventually, one of the actors, with tears in his eyes, shouted that if the co-operative had existed and had been as effective as it had the potential to be, he would not have been forced to emigrate to Germany. Another shepherd exposed the benefits that Sindaco obtained from blocking the co-operative.
The Sindaco was right there, listening to everything and preparing his answer, until he nervously shouted “Stop!” and took the place of the actor playing his role. When he went on stage, he tried to transform it from a theater to a game in which he moved with more familiarity: the parliamentary game. In it, he could direct the process, modifying it or interrupting it at will, unlike the process that the Theater of the Oppressed had imposed: a theatrical democracy in which any spectator could shut him up by shouting “Stop!” Such was the effusiveness of the people that the Sindaco ended up giving up and saying that if the people loved the idea of a co-operative so much, he would set up a cooperative of his own, and he left the play in a huff. Boal mentions that the show was a complete success, and spread to other nearby towns in Sicily.
This example clearly shows the kinds of results Boal was trying to achieve, and reveals the emancipatory potential of Theater of the Oppressed in making people leave the theater energized. But where exactly is Boal’s innovation?
Brecht and Boal: The Avant-Garde and the People
To understand Augusto Boal’s immanent critique of Bertolt Brecht’s theater, we have to start with Boal’s understanding of the history of theater up to Brecht. In his book The Theatre of the Oppressed,6 Boal tells the history of the Theater of the Oppressed following an outline of the historical materialism of Marx and Engels.12 Boal began the history of the theater with the Greek chorus. He claimed that the chorus was the free people, creator and recipient of the theatrical spectacle. The chorus was a party where everyone could participate. It resembled the “primitive communism” postulated by Marx and Engels, where the ownership of the means of production was held in common. As the productive base of society changed from primitive communism to an aristocratic system, so did the superstructure. And just as the ownership of the means of production was divided, so it was in the theater. Some people were selected, they could go on stage and only they could perform the play. The rest of the people would be spectators, passive recipients of the theater. Moreover, in order to propagate and reflect the dominant ideology, certain aristocratic protagonists were chosen. These protagonists were separated from the rest of the actors who made up the chorus. For Boal, this represented the separation between the aristocracy and the masses.
In his Poetics, Aristotle spoke about this way of doing theater.13 You assign the role of tragedy to stimulate sensations in the spectators. The idea was to make a theater in which people identified with the protagonist through empathy, and had to suffer with him when he made bad decisions that lead to misfortune, and rejoice when he reached the climax. This requires creating a conflict between the fundamental and personal values (ethos) of the protagonist, and the fundamental values of society, which leads the protagonist to make a serious mistake, after which he must be redeemed. At the end of the staging, a catharsis would take place, in which the spectators undergo an emotional, corporal, mental, and spiritual purification of the soul. This catharsis serves to remind us of our limited position in life, heal us of the arrogance that makes us feel equal to the gods, and remind us of the values of our society.
The protagonists of Greek tragedy were usually heroic (mortal offspring of gods and humans) or aristocratic characters, with practically excellent virtues who had a good social position. According to Boal, with the arrival of capitalism the theater changed as the bourgeoisie transformed these protagonists. They stopped being perfect objects of abstract and superstructural moral values and became multidimensional, although for the major part they remain exceptional individuals who are separated from the people, the new aristocrats.14
For Boal, the first example of the bourgeois mode of theater is Machiavelli, and, in particular, his play La Mandragora, which Boal performed in his theater in its early days. In this play, the young protagonist, Calímaco, wants to conquer a lady who is married to an old doctor, Nifia. The lady, Lucrecia, represents the idea of power, and Callimachus disguises himself and tricks Nifia into sleeping with her. The moral of this work is in accordance with the phrase with which Machiavelli is known: “the end justifies the means.” According to Boal, the new capitalist theater spoke about the individual worth of the man who lived in concrete circumstances of the real world. This bourgeois man owed nothing to his fate or to his good fortune, like the Greek hero, but only to his own moral excellence or virtuousness (virtù). With his virtù he would overcome all the obstacles that birth, the laws of the feudal system, tradition, religion placed on him. His virtù is the first law, and with it he could bend the world as long as he managed to apply it to the material world. This change had represented the transition between the means of production, between the aristocracy and capitalism. The morals of the theater were no longer about keeping the gods happy, but about the pleasures and rewards of the material world itself.
Bertolt Brecht represents the completion of this “materialist” scheme of the development of theater. For Boal, Brechtian theater is no longer the superstructure that corresponds to the productive forces. Brecht, being influenced by Hegel (as well as by Marx), manages to break with the subjective forces in the theater and return the subject-object to its place in the play.6 In Brecht’s Epic Theater we no longer have to identify with, or substitute ourselves for, the protagonist, who at the same time is no longer the driver of the story. The plays are no longer about individuals and their personalities, but about social forces. The space that each person occupies in society determines the way he or she behaves in the environment in which he or she finds him or herself. It is a self-consciously materialistic theater. The productive base, which can be capitalism, feudalism, etc. determines the superstructure, are embodied in the actions of the characters. Theater no longer comes from collisions of subjects, nor do the actions precede the personal character.15 There is a subjective collision of objective forces. Characters are denied freedom, and instead are portrayed as objects of external socio-economic forces. When the characters act, it is because there is an objective, economic cause that makes them act. They are spokespersons for economic forces, almost stereotypes.16 The work in which Brecht’s rigidity is most prominent is Mother Courage, discussed below, where the protagonist is totally beholden to the war she lives in. Other plays he authored, such as the Life of Galileo, contain more interaction between historical role and subjectivity and do not neatly follow the scheme laid out by Boal.
Another notable characteristic of Brecht is that he opposed the use of empathy to educate people and instead tried to make the spectators see the plays in a distanced and alienated way. Brecht called this the “V” effect, where “V” stands for “Verfremdungseffekt,” a word usually translated from German as estrangement, or mistranslated as alienation. Through the “V” effect, he attempted to make the play appear as distanced from the spectator, constantly reminding them that they were watching a play. Brecht did not attempt to imitate reality, instead wanting to “[strip] the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them.” Examples of the ways this was achieved was through the actors directly addressing the audience, very harsh bright stage lighting or the use of placards and making the actors recite the stage directions out loud during the play itself. Brecht thought that by this, he could help liberate theater from just imitating reality, and change it from a mirror of reality into a dynamo for change.17
These ideas went against the theatrical thinking of the time, in which the spectator’s immersion in the play and empathy with the characters was crucial. In this respect, Brecht defined his theater as “anti-Aristotelian.” His aim was to make people distance themselves from the play, in order to make visible the social relations underlying theatrical stories. Only at this point, with an audience finally free to think for itself, a political intervention could be made to convince the spectators of the need for a change of the economic system. It did not remain a play to be enjoyed for aesthetic criteria alone. The proletarian audience, shorn of its illusions, was intended to leave the play energized to change the world.
As mentioned earlier, Mother Courage is a prime example of Brecht’s concepts of alienation and character estrangement. The play is about a traveling saleswoman during the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48).18 The protagonist lives in a wagon from which she navigates the struggle between Catholics and Protestants in order to sell her wares to the armies of both sides. Mother Courage manages to survive the war (at least up to the point where the action ends), but she loses her three sons at different points in the play. At practically no point in the play is there space for the spectator to develop feelings and empathize with any of the characters, who are moved by forces greater than themselves, even if there is space to pity Mother Courage. Furthermore, the protagonist is not portrayed as a noble character, but as a mere saleswoman. She is not above average, nor does she have exceptional qualities, she is just trying to survive in an adverse world.19 Nor is any desire to imitate the main character inspired. During the play we can see how Mother Courage ends up unhappy in spite of her perseverance. Her alliance with the war, which for Brecht symbolized the alliance between capitalism and war, ends up being paid for with the lives of her three children.
Brecht wrote this play in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II following the German invasion of Poland. In aiming to expose the bankruptcy of conventional ideas Brecht’s ouvre contrasts with an Aristotelian theater intended to make us more inclined to follow the norms of society. He wants us to end up with a sense of revulsion at war, and to assimilate the concept that commerce and war go hand in hand, and that commerce benefits in times of war. The simple settings in which this play is usually performed are intended to maximize the “V” effect, of estrangement, and further emphasize the message. Aside from the ones mentioned previously, another example of this is shown below, where Mother Courage’s cart is shown as a bare skeleton.
Brecht Seen from Paulo Freire’s Point of View
Boal was a great admirer of Brecht’s work. However, he believed that the theatrical revolution was not over. Brecht’s theater was still avant-garde theater, in which the playwright showed reality to the audience. In this sense, it resembled the role of Lenin’s vanguard party, whose job it was to bring socialist consciousness to the masses through a variety of methods such as newspapers or other media.20 The play, according to Boal, invited reflection and a critical view, but did not sufficiently dissolve the actors (party) into the spectators (masses). In order to take the next step, the actor had to be brought together with the spectator. Here we can see not only the influence of Stanislavski, but also the theories of Paulo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed.21
One of Freire’s main concepts was a critique of the “banking” model that was the standard in education.22 Freire understood the education of his time as a vertical relationship of subordination in which the absolute sage educated the absolute ignorant about life, depositing data in the latter’s head. In this model the sage privileges narration, with which the student’s head is gradually filled with what is considered necessary education. It assumes that the student is an empty vessel, refusing to take into account the student’s previous knowledge, nor the situation in which he/she finds himself/herself, and at no time is the submission of the student to the educator in question. In order to emancipate pupils, problems must be posed to them, rather than simply narrating facts. In this way, students begin to think, and they are pushed to analyze the world in which they live. Freire’s model takes advantage of existing knowledge in contrast to the banking model of education and students direct their own learning.
The similarities between Freire’s critique of banking education and a possible critique by Boal of Brecht’s work become more apparent under this lens. Although Brecht does not want to dominate the spectator to educate them, and wants them to think for themselves, he did not sufficiently overcome the banking model in political education. He does not create more subjectivities, but rather reinforced the intellectual barrier between actor-educator and audience-pupil. This is true even if Brecht was convinced that the actors and creators of the play are fellow workers and that the play is a product of labor, and not just a spectacle. Against this model, Freire proposed a method of horizontal dialogue, in which the students gradually become aware of themselves as they learn from both the educator and through practice. A helpful analogy is the difference between learning by reading a communist newspaper, which invites you to reflect, or learning through a strike or a demonstration which casts you in the middle of the action.
Freire holds that the oppressed begin to question their domination through dialogue, and the person being educated is changed. He argues that within a hierarchical society, dialogue is an act of “love, humility and faith” in humanity, and requires hope, mutual trust, and critical thinking on the part of the people who dialogue together. Towards the end of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire set out his theories about the methods people use to create cultural change. He divided these cultural actions into two types, “dialogic action” and “anti-dialogic action”: while oppressors use anti-dialogic action to protect their power and separate groups of people, radical political leaders can use dialogic action to unite people in the struggle for freedom. Freire discussed in detail the various methods of “anti-dialogical action”: conquest, divide and rule, manipulation, and cultural invasion. He then directly contrasted these methods with the “dialogic action” of radical political leaders: cooperation, unity, organization, and cultural synthesis. Freire also spent much of the last section examining radical political leaders and the characteristics they must have to authentically help the oppressed. These leaders must understand the barriers that prevent the oppressed from engaging in struggle, while avoiding the techniques that oppressors use to keep them at bay. An advantage is that with dialogic action, a more symmetrical situation is created between educator and learner. The educator also learns from the student, recognizing their own humanity and ignorance. They adapt the contents of the curriculum to each student, to each place and to each time.
Freire called this the Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and it should be emphasized that his ideas do not come from a theoretical elaboration but from long experience in adult education and literacy in the early 1960s. In fact, he begins his book with this fact: that the insights gathered here come from his long experience.
In a way, Freire criticizes the Leninist model of the vanguard party by forcing, with his method, the unity of the educator and the educated. He hopes, in a manner similar to the political tendencies influenced by Mao, to dissolve, or at least subordinate, the vanguard party in the masses.23 It was in this same spirit that the Theater of the Oppressed was created, which wanted to go one step further in Brecht’s revolutionary ambitions. To fully liberate the theater, the barriers created by the ruling class must be destroyed in order to reconquer the means of theatrical production. This is a movement that is analogous to the Marxist theory of society, which wanted to return to a communal ownership of the means of production. To liberate theater, first, the barrier between actor and spectator had to be destroyed, everyone had to represent and play a leading role in the play in order to transform society. Secondly, the barrier between protagonist and chorus had to be destroyed, everyone had to be both chorus and protagonist at the same time. We already saw in the previous section an example of the Theater of the Oppressed that was planted in a Sicilian village, using actors really involved in liberating themselves from their oppression, and using the audience as actor-spectators. With these advances, the Theater of the Oppressed aimed to distance the performances from the spectators, treating the characters as effects of social causality, rather than individual psychology, like Brecht proposed. However, Boal used different techniques including role reversal, the reduction of characters to an alienated social mask, gender eclecticism, and the use of music to complement or contradict the dramatic action.
One of Boal’s important creations was the “Coringa System,” which we will translate as the Joker, or Wildcard, System. It is important to note that the meaning of Joker used is the “Person or thing that serves for various purposes, according to the convenience of the one who disposes of it,” rather than the meaning sometimes used in English of Joker or clown that evokes the Batman villain. In this system, the Joker usually explains things to the audience or asks the opinion of the actors. The Joker represents the author of the play, is above the rest of the characters, and acts to create a mosaic that alters the way the audience relates to the play. The Joker stands close to the audience and coolly explains things. The play is presented on two levels. First as a fable, the usual form in theater; second, as a “lecture” in which the Joker acts as an interpreter. In this “lecture” step, the style is also modified, and the Joker in each scene has to solve the problems that arise. To avoid falling into complete anarchy, the explanations had to become very accentuated, and this caused the Theater of the Oppressed to only address very specific themes. Almost all of Boal’s examples of theater in his books deal with themes of oppression in everyday situations.
With these two steps, one could conquer the means of theatrical production. Although the history of the Theater of the Oppressed seems to fit perfectly into this rather clear and simple mechanistic Marxist scheme, the real story is somewhat more complex and must be further situated. Boal was not only responding to cathartic theater or epic theater. His thought cannot be disassociated from the transformation within Brazilian theater, which had gone through a process that began with the importation of European classics, then the representation of local realist scenarios, and finally the “nationalization” of those classics. Boal participated in the third stage, in which European classics were performed on Brazilian stages and rewritten into Brazilian themes.
In Boal’s account, this approach is related to the growth of the “Centros Populares de Cultura” in Brazil in the early 1960s. The function of these centers was to share local artistic knowledge. Before the experimentation that would lead to the Theater of the Oppressed, Brazilian audiences were already invited to discuss the play at the end of the performance. However, this did not eliminate the fact that the audience was still reacting to the play rather than participating in it. The real transformation in Boal’s theater began when he developed the process where audience members could stop a performance and suggest different actions for the character suffering oppression, and the actor playing that character would carry out the audience’s suggestions. This transformation was inspired by a situation in which a woman from the audience, who got on stage indignant because the actor could not understand her suggestion. She replaced the actor, showed him what she wanted to say. For Boal, this was the birth of the “spect-actor” (similar to Freire’s pupil-teacher) and his theater was transformed. He began to invite audience members with suggestions for change to come on stage to demonstrate his ideas. In doing so, he discovered that through this participation audience members became empowered not only to imagine change, but to practice it. They are empowered to collectively reflect on the suggestion and are thus empowered to generate social action. Theater became a practical vehicle for grassroots activism.
Boal vs. Rancière
As we mentioned earlier, Boal’s elaboration of Brecht takes place within an immanent critique of Marxism in its Leninist variant, as well as the role of the party as vanguard and beacon of the masses. In a similar context, there is another immanent critique of Leninist rigidity: Jacques Rancière’s and French communism, which also derived an aesthetic-pedagogic theory that can be compared to Boal’s. By doing so, we can further illuminate the merits of Boal.
Rancière attempted to break new ground in democratizing education and culture. Like Freire and Boal, Rancière began with a critique of contemporary education in his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster,24 moving on to a critique of politicized aesthetics in The Emancipated Spectator.25 In the The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Rancière tells the story of the French pedagogue and politician Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840), the creator of the “Jacotot Method.” This method was developed after the French Revolution, and sought an educational process where equality in education was pursued not only in study but also in practice. To accomplish his aims, Jacotot established horizontal learning links between teachers and students. It was based on three principles:
(1). All people have equal intelligence. The differences among them do not stem from ability, but from differences in dedication to learning.
(2). All people have received from God the power to instruct themselves.
(3). Everything is in everything.
This third principle is the most ambiguous, but it contains the core of his method.
Jacotot taught languages by beginning with a few sentences, and instructing his pupils to pay attention first to the words, then to the letters, and finally to the meaning of the sentences. A single paragraph became sufficient for the pupils to learn an entire language.
Like Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, the Jacotot method was born out of educational practice. In this case, the place was Leuven and the task was to teach French to students whose language he did not understand. Jacotot had the idea of sending his students to study a bilingual edition of Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus. By studying the text and its translation, and without explanations from the teacher, the students learned the functioning of the French sentences, and to explain or ask questions about what they had not understood in the novel. Through these experiences Jacotot proposes a didactics based on the ability to learn by oneself (the first and second points), as opposed to the classical method based on the transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the student. The fact that students were able to learn an entire language using just a few paragraphs demonstrated Jacotot’s third point: that everything is contained in everything. Other successes of Jacotot teaching what he did not know include teaching people to play the piano without knowing how to play it himself, and giving painting lessons as a mediocre artist.
Rancière’s book also deals with the duality between the dull and impairing teacher and the emancipated teacher. Rancière calls the former the explainer, who covers everything with a veil of ignorance, and gives himself the role of lifting this veil. Rancière believes that only by concealing the student’s knowledge, through what he calls “forced brutalization,” can the explainer make the student dependent on him or her. On the other hand, the emancipatory teacher only teaches the students that he has nothing to teach them, thus emancipating the students from their dependence on the explainers. The admission of ignorance does not erase the need for the teacher, since the teacher must reinforce the pupil’s will to learn by himself. As Rancière says, to emancipate an ignorant person, one must be, and one must only be, emancipated oneself, that is to say, conscious of the true power of the human mind.24 We can all be emancipated teachers if we know the Jacotot method. Jacotot’s method was not a method to instruct the people; it was a benefit to be announced to the poor; they could do everything that any man could do. It was enough to announce it. Thus, for Rancière, emancipation is nothing but a political act of affirmation and of awakening the equal intelligence of all men. He writes: “all men have the same intelligence.”24 It is enough to announce the Jacotot method to the world, as its creator did.
Another important concept in this method is the circle of power. A circle of powerlessness binds the student to the explainer of the old method. This circle can only have an effect if it is made public. To break it, then, an alternative circle must be initiated, the circle of emancipation. This, for Rancière, requires a return to the original “universal teaching,” that is, learning something without it being explained. Rancière believes that “universal teaching has existed since the beginning of the world, alongside all explanatory methods. This teaching, by itself, has been, in fact, that which has formed all the great men.”24
Although there are quite clear similarities with the Pedagogy of the Oppressed in its motivation and objectives, the major difference between Jacotot-Rancière and Freire is that the former announced a universal method, and expected everyone to adopt it, while Freire developed a much more careful and elaborate pedagogy. In the Jacotot method teachers are only needed to give confidence to the students, but we can all learn on our own if we motivate ourselves. Freire, having worked with people facing much greater levels of oppression than Jacotot, believed that the process would take much longer. However, both criticize the same thing: the vertical model of education. Both also seek the same thing: a horizontal relationship between student and teacher that recognizes the capabilities of the student. However, Jacotot and Rancière believe that it is the teachers who force ignorance, while Freire puts the focus of the process on social oppression, and that it is linked to the economic, racial, and gender condition of the students.
This is reflected in their solutions: Jacotot and Rancière believe that it is enough to announce the method to begin emancipation, while Freire knows that materials must be developed, teachers must be trained, and that a long road must be traveled before pupils’ awareness is raised. This is what Freire dedicated his life to, taking his method and his knowledge to places as distant as Fiji and Grenada. And then, from the point of view of educational emancipation, Freire introduced an even more distant goal: the world must be changed. Perhaps their different viewpoints can be explained by the fact that Freire was a revolutionary in a dictatorial Brazil, while Jacotot considered that the (French) revolution had already been made and it only remained to consolidate its consequences.
From the Ignorant Teacher to the Emancipated Spectator
Rancière’s thoughts on pedagogy continue with The Emancipated Spectator, which was initiated at the fifth Summer Art Academy in Frankfurt in 2004, when Rancière began a reflection on the role of the spectator in contemporary art.25 These talks, which later became a book, have two sources. They are a continuation not only of his book The Fate of Images,26 but an immanent reflection on his earlier theories of education and emancipation. The parallels between Rancière’s new views and the synthesis of Freire’s and Brecht’s theories that Boal applied to theater are abundant.
According to Rancière, artists and thinkers alike have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal representation. In his essay, he begins by asking what political art or the politics of art is. He then examines what the tradition of critical art and the desire to insert art into life has achieved. He also assesses the way in which the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities, made by the likes of Guy Debord and the Situationists, has been dominated by capitalism and is now nothing more than an affirmation of the omnipotence of capitalism itself.27
For Rancière, the figure of the spectator is paradoxical, similar to that of the pupil. And although the theater condemns the spectator to be a mere ignorant and passive voyeur of the images, there’s no theater or art without them. The spectator can be pleased with images that they do not understand the production of, and that hide a reality that they do not get to see, or which allow them to forget their lives in these moments. The passive spectator is doubly alienated, dispossessed of the theater and of their own reality. However, by making theater as part of a living community, the spectator can be partially reclaimed. They are no longer a consumer of images, passively receiving what the artist has planned for them, or what the aesthetic experts think they are receiving. Their emancipation begins with the understanding that vision actively transforms and interprets its objects. The emancipated viewer breaks with the artist-educator and assigns their own meaning to the work. What they see, feel, and understand from the representation is not necessarily what the artist thinks they should.
Rancière rejects the “logic of direct and uniform transmission” from one mind to another. Rather, he insists on the creativity of the spectator. Here we can directly see the influence of the Jacotot method and theories about the ignorant teacher. Rancière identifies the “emancipatory practice” of art and the artist is equivalent to the emancipated teacher who “does not teach his pupils his knowledge, but orders them to venture into the forest of things and signs, to say what they have seen and what they think of what they have seen, to verify it and have it verified.”25 Then, the emancipated spectator, like these pupils, will possess the ability to translate and interpret, to make new associations and dissociations from the spectacle they see.
Thus, for Rancière, emancipation does not arise from the critique of the consumer society common among leftist aestheticians such as the Situationists or even the Frankfurt School. Rancière argues that this approach is paternalistic and elitist. On the contrary, in order to emancipate oneself, one must blur the boundaries between looking and doing, the roles of specialist and amateur, student and teacher. For the proletarian this means seizing the aesthetic experiences and the pleasure of being a spectator. Here again, like in Boal’s work, we can see the critique of the tradition of avant-garde theater that Brecht initiated. Rancière’s critique resides in the point of view of what he believes to be the average spectator. He claims that Brecht’s theater does not emancipate people because it does not give them the pleasure of deciding for themselves what to take from the play, the political message is clear. We will return later to some of the problems with this.
For Rancière, aesthetics can only be political to the extent that it allows individuals to separate prescribed functions within the social relations of production: “an emancipated proletarian is a disidentified worker.” To explore this concept, he uses the example of a nineteenth-century carpenter who wrote in his diary how much he enjoyed looking out of the window he was building. For Rancière this demonstrates a disconnection of the senses, an undoing of the correspondence between a now distracted gaze and the body of the skilled worker. This worker’s aesthetic experience disrupts the way his body is supposed to conform to its function, purpose, and social destiny. He is making the window as a proletarian, but he is using the aesthetic experience of the window to free himself from its chains.
For Rancière, emancipation comes when individuals break the fit between their capabilities and their occupation. This taking, or appropriation by a worker of a unique aesthetic experience, separate from their work, represents disidentification with their expected mode of being. Rancière makes a new critique of the passive and ignorant spectator: workers who become spectators disrupt the given distribution of the sensible to which they conform. This aesthetic rupture designates a break with what Rancière calls “the regime of representation or the mimetic regime.” Representation or mimesis signifies an inherent and unequivocal concordance between different kinds of meaning.28
Critical thought has tended to connect the power to produce ethical or political effects with the character of the autonomous work of art itself. Rancière argues that the idea of their connection has remained the model for political art. In order to break with this primarily mimetic regime of representation on which political art has depended, an aesthetic rupture must be made, and this will occur whether it is the reproduction of commodities, consumer spectacles, or the photographic representation of atrocities. Aesthetics merely names the rupture of this continuity between representations and their supposed social and political effects. Rancière suggests that artists should investigate the power of aesthetics itself – the rupture of artistic cause and political effect – to produce political effects, criticizing relational aestheticians, who attempted to facilitate political polarization through encounters and interactions between people.
According to Rancière, political or critical art had traditionally taken for granted a direct relationship between political goals (or effects) and artistic means or causes. Traditional art, including much ‘revolutionary art’ is limited by the ambition of raising the political consciousness of an apparently passive spectator mobilizing them politically. This is an assumption that cannot be sustained, as decades of failed aesthetic experiments demonstrate. Rancière cites, among others, Brecht’s theory and practice, mentioned above. He also cites the photographic exhibition Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 1969-1971 by American Martha Rosler, which juxtaposes photographs of luxurious homes with images of the Vietnam War. These politically committed works attempt to reveal to the viewer a hidden reality of imperialist violence.
Like Boal, Rancière is critical of the alienation or distancing that Brecht developed for making political art. He doubts the pretensions to political efficacy of strategies aimed at expressing repressed desire or making class domination palpable. He sees no reason why the “clash of heterogeneous elements” and the sense of strangeness evoked by photomontage should help the viewer understand the nature of domination or determine his or her political decision to change the world. He is critical of political art that presupposes a smooth transition between modes of artistic production (collage, photomontage) and the subjective determination to act politically. But this is not how subjectivities are created. The emancipated spectator argues that the artistic procedures of the avant-garde did not produce politicized and revolutionary ideologies and practices, but were sustained by them.
However, in some respects Rancière’s critique misses its target. He forgets that Brecht was a fellow traveler of the Communist Party and it was from within that infrastructure that he made art, not the other way around. His theater was explicitly meant to work in the context of politicizing mass movements, and not as an a priori and universal method. It had a specific function of providing content which politicizing workers could discuss and use. After 1945, his plays were not staged for the audiences that he had in mind, but instead for middle-class people, who upon experiencing cognitive estrangement would probably not be compelled to mass action. Ironically Brecht had already realized this in his 1936 commentary on Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting, where he discussed the particularity of estrangement to the context of Weimar German workers’ cultural life and how estrangement in other contexts, such as aristocratic Chinese theater, was not necessarily revolutionary or progressive. Rancière forgets the larger context of Brecht’s work by privileging this middle class audience.
Rancière goes on to say that what was always the covert weakness of the political efficacy of twentieth-century political art procedures is exposed by the erosion of the ideologies and practices of revolutionary politics and workers’ movements. So the critique of the spectacle as concealment of reality, made by Guy Debord and the Situationists, is a response to this weakness and further develops suspicions and disappointment with the political capacity and efficacy of the image.29 Rancière believes that the techniques of Detournement, where images are hijacked to get a message across, are not that effective. Both capitalists and revolutionaries are capable of using the image, but capitalists have far more means to do it well. Works like Brecht’s, Rosler’s, or the situationist shock-images don’t have the means to compete, and might even lead to passivity. An interesting parallel today would be the constant information about climate change that only makes us despair, instead of moving us to action.
Rancière wants a new practice of political art that reworks the framework of our perceptions, reshapes the dynamism of our affections, and generates new forms of political subjectivity. He criticizes art that wants to emancipate its spectator because it presupposes ignorance and passivity. For him, such art defends an aesthetic in which the artist does not transmit superior knowledge to an ignorant and passive spectator. Rancière’s emancipated spectator actively interprets and translates the image offered to him. Rather than a transmission of knowledge, the image emerges as an alien entity that artist and spectator verify together. Political art, for Rancière, is not the practice of revealing the hidden reality of domination and exploitation behind the appearances and images of consumerism nor of demonstrating once again the omnipotence of the commodity.
Boal in Dialogue with Rancière
Although Rancière agrees with Boal in many respects, their practice separates them. In his treatises, Rancière tries to indicate a path, but in the end he remains a philosopher who gives art lectures, a master of theory, or a critic. Conversely, Boal was a theater director, a creator of art involved in poesis who tried to change society. Furthermore, Rancière’s method is diametrically opposed to Boal’s, Rancière could criticize Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed for not breaking enough between reality and representation, while Boal would try to represent reality faithfully only by turning it into play. We saw earlier that Boal is critical of the agit-prop, since it does not give the spectator the opportunity to speak. This is probably the same theater that Rancière criticizes, but by opening up the capacity of the audience to actively intervene, Boal overcomes this criticism and manages to create new subjectivities, as seen in Godrano or in his stage as a vereador, which is dealt with below.
To contrast Boal with Rancière, one must understand the difference in their starting points. Both Freire and Jacotot/Rancière admit that the learner already knows a lot. However, the latter reduce the learning process to its essence, without going so far as to consider what kind of means students have. While Jacotot teaches middle-class students, Freire ventures to Brazilian peasants of the Northeast. And while Rancière’s emancipated spectator still has the money to go to the play, Boal looks for his spect-actor in the villages of Sicily and the barrios of Rio.
Rancière’s politicized aesthetics is a theoretical elaboration of what Boal is trying to achieve, but it is in a clearly middle-class and Eurocentric context, marked by the critiques of the Situationists and the Frankfurt School. And in a way, this academic critique also prevents a deep and satisfying engagement with the actual practices of collaborative and relational art. Rancière’s critique does not provide a way forward. Rather, it exhausts the ambitions of political art. Even if Rancière is right about the limitations of Brecht and Rosler, and that the Situationist critics do not provide a way out of the problem, Rancière cannot provide us with a way forward either. He continues to lecture to people with the same education and socio-economic status as himself.
Rancière’s contribution should not be minimized, as his defense of the autonomy of the spectator is important. But he is still a passive spectator, who is unable to intervene in the play, to shout “Stop!” to other people when necessary, who must transform himself by a method that is not entirely clear, and learn to look through windows that he is constructing. Here we see the crucial role of the Joker in Boal, who is able to be an intermediary between audience and actors, to create the spect-author. Rancière rewards aesthetic rupture, while Freire and Boal reward being aware of the work, knowing that it is a game but that it is not just a game; it is an opening to democracy.
Forum Theater in the institutions: Legislative Theater
Boal was not the first to have the idea to experiment with theater in politics. In 1982, while in exile in Paris, he met Darcy Ribero. Ribero was then the vice-governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro, and wanted to create a model of comprehensive education for children, who would remain in school and would be given support to develop multiple activities, including theater. To this end, he invited Boal to return to Rio de Janeiro.
In 1986, Boal began a six-month experimental contract in the Rio de Janeiro school system. During six weeks within the school, they managed to create a series of five short plays, dealing with problems such as oppression, unemployment, public health, gender violence, and other current issues for the youth residents of Rio de Janeiro. Afterwards, they invited neighbors and community members to the plays, presenting one play in the first half, leaving space open for audience members to choose the themes to develop in the second half. Boal claimed that the neighbors never tired of watching the actors play out situations relevant to their lives, and they proposed solutions to the problems of their neighborhood while deepening their knowledge of the arts. Boal came out of this project very inspired to continue expanding this neighborhood theater. As Boal told it, he wanted to invent a type of theater that could use the energies of the spectators to solve the problems they faced. However, Ribero lost his re-election and with that the project ended.
In 1992 Boal contacted the Workers’ Party (PT), which offered him help if he agreed to run for vereador (councilor) in the next elections.30 He accepted, and was elected councilor at the end of the year. He held power for a single four year term, losing his re-election 1996. During this period he took advantage of this space to experiment with how to use theater from an institutional platform to solve the problems of the inhabitants of Rio de Janeiro. Boal himself would summarize the discoveries and lessons of this period in the book Legislative Theater.31 This was a public Forum Theater, which worked at the neighborhood level to identify the key problems of the city. Its aim was to open a dialogue between the citizenry and institutions so that a flow of power between the two groups could emerge. Boal calls this type of legislative process a “transitive democracy,” which lies between direct democracy (practiced in ancient Greece) and representative democracy. It is similar to forum theater; however, the subject of the production is based on a legislative bill to be passed. Spect-actors can come on stage and express their opinions, thus contributing to the creation of new laws.
After the discussions, Boal would introduce legislation in the House of Aldermen. The open discussions were an attempt to escape from the demagogic -and authoritarian- paradigm that defined the contact that the oppressed of Rio de Janeiro had with politicians. Here we can see the parallels with Freire’s criticisms of banking education: it is not enough to think about what the oppressed need, it is not enough to fill their neighborhoods with legislation nominally meant to help them, but it is necessary to contact them and use the knowledge they already have of their circumstances to develop laws and projects according to what they need. A great qualitative leap is made between the voter, taxpayer, and law-abiding citizen versus the citizen who demands equality through participation. The latter opens the door to the creation of new rights, new spaces, and the possibility of new political subjects.
Boal gives an example of a very complicated intervention in the meeting and negotiation with the Sindicato dos Urbanitarios (Urban Workers Union). It consisted of a meeting with twenty-six union leaders, twenty-five of whom were men, who had been elected to office to renew the union. According to Boal, “the males were ashamed to do physical exercise and were hostile to the idea of man-to-man bodily contact,” which complicated the play.7 To get them involved in the project, Boal made them recall what their election campaign looked like, and what got them to their current position of power. Then, he made them describe the union as it is now so the reform project could begin. These are the techniques of the Image Theater: the group is involved through the power of the image, and they are made to do theater without realizing it. This is the first teaching of Boal’s laboratory. As it is a project of Participative Democracy, the best way to qualify participation is to involve the citizen in the whole process of political decision making.
Following this, Boal made them imagine the path they would need to follow to escape the dysfunctional union structure they had. This generated intense discussions, which led to a strategy for reforming the union that could be supported by the existing institutions. This education in public administration through theater should be understood as central in making joint action, not limited to a political decision taken from a councilor’s office. The decision is co-produced by all participants, and in the same way, political education is given to the participants in the same process. The use of the two dimensions, presented here as the co-productive and pedagogical character of Legislative Theater, meant believing in the power of an active and involved citizenry to eliminate its own problems. If the Theater of the Oppressed allows the oppressed to use the means of theatrical production, the Legislative Theater allows the oppressed to use the means of production of citizenship. With this, Boal develops a radical change of perception, where the citizenry eliminates its fear of its own problems and proposes solutions for them.
Legislative theater created forty laws during Boal’s time in government, of which thirteen were passed. The full list of laws can be found in the book Legislative Theater, and includes issues such as aid to the disabled, the declaration of a day of solidarity with East Timor, and strengthening the rights of gay couples.7 According to Boal, the most important law that legislative theater helped pass was an amendment of the City Constitution to allow for the enactment of Law 1245/95. This law created an obligation for the City to protect witnesses. It provided the means for that protection; among them, the city must provide housing away from the danger zone, a new job, a new provisional and fictitious identity during the period of danger. It must make arrangements with other cities to relocate threatened witnesses; it must conceal the witness’ real address, and so on. Boal points out that this law was the first of its kind in Brazil, and that it was subsequently used by the Chambers of other cities. It was being considered as a law at the national level at the time of writing.
Boal was not re-elected in 1996, due, among other reasons, to an adverse media campaign. Among his disciples, this is the greatest proof that his theater was disruptive and uncomfortable to the ruling classes. According to them, if in just four years Boal’s Legislative Theater managed to upset the media, which launched a smear campaign; the mayor, who vetoed all the projects he could; the city councilors, who tried to revoke Boal’s mandate; and the Workers’ Party itself, which did not give him due support in the campaign, it was clear that the established political system felt attacked by Boal’s experiment. Although this does not completely absolve Boal’s loss in the reelection, it shows that legislative theater managed to maintain a subversive and liberatory role during these years.7 Boal continued his Legislative Theater with various groups, including one in Brasília which managed to pass four laws after Boal had left the group. It has also been used internationally, such as in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Does the Theater of the Oppressed Fulfill its Promises?
One revealing story that Boal told came after a theater performance in the countryside. A peasant named Virgilio asked the actors to participate in an armed insurrection. When they refused, Virgilio turned them down, walking away from the performance. For Boal, this anecdote became key to developing his Theater of the Oppressed, as it showed a fundamental problem of Marxist theater: the actors did not take the same risks as the audience and instead told people how to act.10 Ironically, had they been an actual vanguard, they would have gone into battle first, while all they wanted to play was the role of general staff.
The aim of the Theater of the Oppressed in Boal’s model is tied to its political function. The traditional roles of emotion must be eliminated, just as traditional aesthetic criteria must be abandoned. Following Stanislavski, there is no room for forced, acted emotional expression. Attention must be paid to what people transmit unconsciously and which ends up bursting out on occasion, like the peasant in Godrano. For Boal, the crucial aspect of action is a character’s will, not his or her being or essence. The spectators should not ask themselves “who is this?”, but “what does he want?”, understanding what moves the character. This will must be something specific and concrete, both in Theater of the Oppressed and in Legislative Theater. The object is the concrete expression of a particular desire or idea.
For Boal, this method is the right way to express concrete social dynamics. From the beginning, the essence of theater is a conflict of wills. It was relatively easy to take these conflicts from the stage to the street and back, or to mix the stage with the street. But for Boal, these wills come from social conditions, unlike for Machiavelli and Aristotle. This conflict occurs both internally, between the will and counter-will of a character, and externally, between characters, or between members of society. Actors must try to seduce the audience to participate in the drama and become aware of their subjectivities. One should not try to be original because they need to reflect the problems of society. The best cases for drama involve a “Chinese crisis,” the name coming from the oft-repeated fact that the Chinese character for crisis expresses both opportunity and threat. For example, a conflict may focus on a contradiction between will and external duty, such as pressure to do something unethical. In these cases, a heroic stance is encouraged, in which the protagonist stands alone in defense of principle and refuses to compromise. When this is done, theater should aim to preserve and build on existing gains or successes.
Incidents suitable for Theater must have a conflict of wills, and should not be a simple (self)realization of the protagonist. For example, Godrano’s theater took advantage of the freedom granted by the Sindaco to open up new opportunities, and produced a crisis in the square by bringing social forces to the fore. This is one of the differences between political theory and theater, according to Boal, since politics tends towards conciliation and concealment. In theater, the different wills that express concrete social forces within a situation that expresses a social structure must be revealed.32
Although Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed did not succeed in transforming the entire citizenry, it proved itself a valuable tool for the struggle. It is a laboratory where methods were tested and evidence was collected on how they work, where new subjectivities are created and groups of people are emancipated.
The two main lessons from both the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the Theater of the Oppressed are, that first, to get citizens to participate in society, you must adopt pedagogical models that can reveal and use the intrinsic knowledge that the most marginalized have about their social problems. We must co-produce knowledge about the problems rather than imposing our theories about what they are and how to solve them. This will produce citizens who feel part of the state and the community, rather than relating to the state in a subordinate way.
Second, the monopolies of knowledge must be broken. It is not enough to produce new political subjects in the disadvantaged neighborhoods. It is also necessary to break with the existing political subjects that produce marginality. It is necessary to produce a malaise in the current system, which manages to reform the institutions, breaking not only privileges of the ruling classes but also the control of what is considered adequate knowledge. If the latter is not achieved, the former will be lost as soon as we stop injecting energy into our projects. In this, Boal’s critique resembles Rancière’s critique of Brecht’s revolutionary aesthetic, which was a theater that came from Communist politics but according to them did not help the movement grow. And when Communist politics were weakened, the revolutionary aesthetic was also weakened. After Boal lost his re-election, many new subjectivities disappeared, having failed to reach the point where they were self-sustaining. In fact, Boal claims that an advisor, who is fully on board with the project and supports the group during debates, is an indispensable requirement for the Legislative Theater to function. If they are not present, the theater is likely not to persevere. However, one shouldn’t be too pessimistic, as many of the seeds that Boal planted, whether in Sicily or Rio, have not faded so quickly from memory.
The Theater of the Oppressed must be taken as a tool for more radical change in society if it is to endure, but it needs to be used in conjunction with many more emancipatory tactics. Rancière’s critique of Brecht complements Boal’s, but in the end Boal was not just a philosopher but a political activist in countries where the environment was unfavorable. Brecht never managed to take theater to the streets in the way he hoped, his theater relied on an existent mass movement, even if he was treated as a threat to the current order. And Rancière never tried to make theater. Only Boal successfully produced new subjectivities outside of art, and in his work we can ourselves learn how to emancipate people.
- Opinião was linked to the recently illegalized Centro Popular de Cultura da União Nacional dos Estudantes (Popular Culture Centre of the National Union of Students). The singer-actors combined songs with narrations referring to the country’s social problem, and premiered in December 1964 in the theater of the Copacabana Shopping Center, headquarters of the Teatro de Arena in Rio de Janeiro. It would be considered one of the most important shows in the history of Brazilian popular music.
- Tiradentes (Portuguese for “toothpick-maker”)) is the nickname by which Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (1746-92) is known. Tiradentes was a Brazilian dentist, military man, miner, merchant and political activist, and is considered a national hero of his country for having taken sole responsibility for the Mining Conspiracy, the first large-scale attempt at Brazilian independence from the Kingdom of Portugal, in the late 18th century. Despite his low rank, he took the blame for all and was executed in Rio de Janeiro.
- “Arise, the people stand up at the hour of decision.”
- Better known as AI-5, this infamous decree in Brazil’s history came into effect at the end of 1968, and represented a shift towards a harsh military regime, despite the protests of some parliamentary deputies about militarism and torture. Political rights were limited and the military government was given the power to intervene in municipalities and states. The first measure taken with this decree was the closing of the National Congress, until October 21, 1969.
- Brazil’s Amnesty Law of 1979 pardoned anyone involved in political crimes or human rights violations between September 2, 1961 and August 15, 1979. It was both a way to bring exiled activists back into the country and also to protect officials who may have violated human rights prior to 1979 from prosecution.
- Boal (2009).
- Ibid.
- Moore (1960).
- Agitprop stands for agitation propaganda or agitation and propaganda. It is known to be a political strategy, disseminated through art and literature that attempts to use agitation and propaganda to influence public opinion. Agitprop theater is often improvised and “guerrilla”, occurring spontaneously in the streets, but not necessarily involving pedestrians. It is often used by leftist groups: the Industrial Workers of the World used it often.
- Boal (2007).
- A figure similar to the mayor but also exercised in a legislative capacity as a councilor due to the small size of the town.
- See for example Marx (1971).
- Aristotle (1992).
- One could raise questions about the historical accuracy of this. Even if it is true of very early theater such as William Shakespeare, bourgeois plays were just as often about plebians and nobodies, see for example the works of Thornton Wilder or Anton Chekov. In many of these plays, the character closely represents common people, much more than a troubled member of the elite. Boal also seems to miss, or glide over medieval theater associated with feudalism, which was often moralistic like Greek theater, but could be expressly egalitarian and based around figures of the Everyman beset by circumstance or foul spirits.
- In this respect, Brecht is not really unique. Bourgeois theater can also have similar stereotypes which drove the plot, even if the character of this driving was usually either idealist or based in Christian and/or popular morality. There are strands of this in Tolstoy’s novels, which were an influence on Brecht.
- McLaverty-Robinson (30 de agosto de 2016).
- Suvin (1967).
- The Thirty Years’ War was a war fought in Central Europe (mainly the Holy Roman Empire) involving most of the major European powers. Although initially a politico-religious conflict between supporters of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation within the Holy Roman Empire itself, it would become a general war throughout Europe, for reasons not necessarily related to religion. It was a devastating war, in which mercenaries were used extensively, and whole places were ravaged by armies in need of supplies. Continuing bouts of famine and disease decimated the civilian population of the German states and, to a lesser extent, of the Netherlands and Italy.
- A clear parallel between Mother Courage and Arthur Miller’s plays such as Death of a Salesman can be drawn.
- Lenin (1981).
- Here one could discuss the influence that Mao and his theories on the articulation between the party and the masses had on Paulo Freire. Mao tried to overcome limitations of the orthodox model of the vanguard party in some respects, postulating that the party must transform itself at the same time as it transforms the people. Freire wishes for an analogous influence between teachers and students in his work.
- Freire (1970).
- On the ways in which Mao questions the role of the vanguard party, see for example Alessandro Russo’s work, Cultural Revolution and Revolutionary Culture or Alain Badiou’s The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?.
- Rancière (2008).
- Rancière (2010).
- Rancière (2011).
- Situationism is the denomination of thought and practice in politics and the arts inspired by the Situationist International (1957-72). Its founding document, Rapport sur la construction de situations, was written by Guy Debord in 1957, and in it the demand for revolution and social change is raised, and in turn considers the possibility of overcoming all artistic forms through a unitary use of all media in order to change everyday life. Their initial project was to overcome art, and to this end they criticized and ridiculed contemporary art in order to demonstrate the falsity and superficiality of bourgeois culture. The term Situationist is rejected by the Situationists as a way of referring to this group.
- Interestingly, Suvin (1967) suggests that Brecht prefigures some of these ideas with his estrangement effect, and uses it to break the mirror of theater.
- Debord (2005).
- The Workers’ Party (PT; in Portuguese Partido dos Trabalhadores) is one of the most important Brazilian political parties. It governed Brazil between 2003 and 2016, during the presidencies of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. It was born from the trade unionism of workers in São Paulo in the late 1970s.
- Boal (1998).
- Peria (20th November 2019).