Posted by Miguel A. Balsa on March 30, 192003 at 19:04:58:
NOTES ON A. BOAL’S “THEATER OF THE OPPRESSED”
In the foreword for “The Theatre of the Oppressed,” Augusto Boal states that his book attempts above all to “show that all theatre is necessarily political, because all the activities of man are political and theater is one of them.” He adds that “those who try to separate theater from politics try to lead us into error--and this is a political attitude.” For Boal, the political nature of the theater is beyond question: claiming the contrary is a political stance which responds to a will to impose an ideology whose aim is precisely to exert control over participation in the political sphere.
According to this perspective, the history of theater can be read as a process of subsequent separations and delimitations in terms of who is and who is not entitled to act in the public realm: “In the begining the theater was the dithyrambic song: free people singing in the open air. The carnival. The feast. Later, the ruling classes took possession of the theater and built their dividing walls. First, they divided the people, separating actors from spectators: people who act and people who watch--the party is over! Secondly, among the actors, they separated the protagonists from the mass. The coercive indoctrination began!” In other words, the theater started out as a space of free and open participation, a space in which all could act. In Boal’s view it is precisely the ability to act where the foundations of politics/theater can be found.
According to Boal, the evolution of the political sphere has occurred in such a way that in traditional theater/politics some roles have been reduced to “remain seated, receptive, passive” while others “will go to the stage and only they will be able to act.” Subsequently, Boal’s goal is precisely to return to theater its original raison d’ętre and to recuperate what he considers to be theater’s true nature--that is, “to change the people--‘spectators’, passive beings in the theatrical phenomenon, into subjects, into actors, transformers of the dramatic action.” What interests Boal is the theaters’ transformative potential, not its traditional interpretation as mere repetition of written texts that transmit a certain system of values. Accordingly, he proposes that the spectators give up their traditional passive role in theater as a part of the political sphere, and that they assume their responsibility as agents in the process of political, cultural, and social transformation that must be brought into being (“Change is imperative,” he states) so that “the people reassume their protagonistic function in the theater and in society.”
Boal’s understanding of the history of theater as the history of the struggle between different social and political classes for the control of the “efficient weapon” which theater is and which can be used either for “domination” or for “liberation.” The former use corresponds to traditional forms of Western theater; these forms of theater are impostures, reductions of theater to a mere instrument for political and social control. Only the dimension of theater as a means for “liberation” is real theater--and the recuperation of this true, original nature is at the core of Boal’s endeavor: “Now the oppressed people are liberated themselves and, once more, are making the theater their own. The walls must be torn down. First, the spectator starts acting again: invisible theater, forum theater, image theater, etc. Secondly, it is necessary to eliminate the private property of the characters by the individual actors...”
Boal’s “Theater of The Oppressed” supports the necessity struggle of the “oppressed” to gain control of “the means of theatrical production” in order to achieve “liberation”, which in Boal’s scheme means the return of people--all people--to action in the public sphere, that is, the transformation of the spectator into actor: “The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself. Theater is action!”
This goal must be achieved through a series of subsequent phases: “Knowing the Body,” “Making the Body Expressive,” “The Theater as Language,” and “The Theater as Discourse.” All these practices are, as Boal writes, “forms of a rehearsal-theater, and not a spectacle theater.” They are never completely “finished” forms of theatre, in the sense that they are not mere representations of previously written texts whose beginning, development, and end are therefore predetermined and predictable. Theatrical action must not be understood as “the solitary author locked in his study, to whom divine inspiration dictated a finished text,” so that action is conceived “in a deterministic manner, as something inevitable, as Fate.”
For Boal, true theatrical performance is the outcome of the collective thought of men and women, and this collective thought not only is expressed and also created through the interaction of men and women “assembled in their local committees, societies of ‘friends of the barrio,’ groups of neighbors, schools, unions, peasant leagues, or whatever.”
Relationality is essential in Boal’s concept of theater; the Theatre of The Oppressed is basically a rehearsal of different alternatives to social and political situations (different forms of relation), and this goal is pursued through experimentation and practice of new and different relations between the spectator and the actor or, rather, between each actor-spectator and his or her peers. Each individual has the right to contribute his point of view, which must be shared and acted with others; solutions must be achieved through collective participation and discussion of different alternatives proposed by individuals. For Boal, only by acting, by establishing relations with other fellow human beings, does a person achieve his status as such.