Analyzing Theatre of the Oppressed: The Influence of Boal’s Ideology on Contemporary Brazil
French playwright Yasmina Reza once said, “Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society.” This quote applies to Brazil. As a nation on the rise, Brazil faces new challenges that can be directly related to art and theatre. An example of this parallel lies in Augusto Boal’s concept of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO). With his methods, he created plays with realistic conflicts that the audience members could then work to resolve. By doing so, he helped to prompt legislative action and social change which resonates within Brazil today. TO broke down the socioeconomic barriers associated with theatre and also incorporated the proletariat into the narrative.
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Augusto Boal was born on March 16th, 1931. A Rio de Janeiro native, he traveled to the United States briefly during the early 1950s to study chemical engineering at Columbia University. During his time at Columbia, Boal directed several plays. After completing his studies in New York in 1956, he returned to Brazil to stage productions in Sao Paulo’s Arena Theater. At this time, he began to develop Theatre of the Oppressed. Instead of having audience members provide their feedback at the conclusion of a play, Boal encouraged them to make changes during the play. By doing so, he invited the audience to blend the line between spectator and performer. This formed a key concept of Theatre of the Oppressed -- the pivotal role the “spect-actor” (Plastow, 2009). Boal encouraged people to take a participatory role within the plays he produced, and also invited them to address the conflicts within their own lives and within society as a …show more content…
Boal’s critics often questioned the sociopolitical efficacy of Theatre of the Oppressed, and he made major notions to address this. “I want to make politics but I don’t want to change my profession,” Boal wrote in 1992 campaign material. “I am a man of the theater! For me, this was always possible and now it is necessary: theater is political and politics is theater. (Boal, 1991).” In the fall of 1992, Boal became elected as a Vereador of Rio, which shares equivalence in power to a City Council seat. During this time, he worked with nineteen different interest groups to create laws to help underserved communities. In 1993, he held an international Theater of the Oppressed festival in 1993, which helped spread his ideas through Latin America and the rest of the
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It is difficult to imagine a play which is completely successful in portraying drama as Bertolt Brecht envisioned it to be. For many years before and since Brecht proposed his theory of “Epic Theatre”, writers, directors and actors have been focused on the vitality of entertaining the audience, and creating characters with which the spectator can empathize. ‘Epic Theatre’ believes that the actor-spectator relationship should be one of distinct separation, and that the spectator should learn from the actor rather than relate to him. Two contemporary plays that have been written in the last thirty years which examine and work with Brechtian ideals are ‘Fanshen’ by David Hare, and ‘The Laramie Project’ by Moises Kaufman. The question to be examined is whether either of these two plays are entirely successful in achieving what was later called, ‘The Alienation Effect”.
Bertolt Brecht was a German playwright, theatre critic, and director. He created and developed epic theatre with the belief that theatre is not solely for entertainment but also tools for politics and social activism. Previous theatre performances offered a form of escapism. The audience would become emotionally invested in the performance. In contrast to the suspension of disbelief, Brecht never wanted the audience to fall into the performance. He wanted the audience to make judgments on the argument dealt in the play. The aim of epic theatre is to detach the audience from any emotional connection in order for them to critically review the story. The ultimate goal of this theatre is creating awareness of social surroundings and encouraging the audience to take initiative on changing the society.
Brecht argues that the ultimate purpose of play is to induce pleasure and to entertain, and that--because of this purpose--play needs no justification. Plays should not be simply copied from or seen through older performances, but need to develop on their own to better relate to a new audience. Through the use of alienation which aims to make the familiar unfamiliar, play and theatre can be seen under a new perspective, and the actor can feel more free to perform under a new guise.
It is human nature to tell stories and to appreciate and participate in theatre traditions in every society. Every culture expresses theatre and may have their own traditions that have helped pave the way for how they are today. The involvement of African-Americans has increased tremendously in theatre since the nineteenth century and continues to increase as time goes on. African-Americans have overcome many obstacles with getting their rights and the participation and involvement of Theatre was something also worth fighting for. American history has played an important role with the participation of African-Americans in theatre. Slavery occurrence in America made it difficult for blacks in America to be taken seriously and to take on the characters of more serious roles. With many obstacles in the way African-Americans fought for their rights and also for the freedom that they deserved in America. As the participation of African-Americans involvement within the theatre increase so do the movements in which help make this possible. It is the determination of these leaders, groups, and Theaters that helped increase the participation and created the success that African-Americans received throughout history in American Theatre.
To watch City of God is to be forced to enter, from a safe distance, the ruthless and merciless hoods of Rio de Janeiro. The captivating and poignant film guides viewers through the realistic aspects of slum life experienced by young, underprivileged youth in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, some aspects that not even most middle class Brazilians get to see. In a city where police are fraudulent, opportunities are scarce and crime is widespread, many youths believe there is no alternative to gang activity. In City of God, director Fernando Meirelles puts to the forefront of Brazilian cinema the real issues that favelas in Brazil face like poverty, extreme violence and stereotypical gender roles in a male dominated society. City of God encapsulates the hope of Rio’s impoverished blacks for social and economic ascension.
During the late 1970s and the early 1980s Argentina’s political climate was dominated by a dictatorship which was more ruthless than previous regimes Argentina had experienced . While art, specifically theatre, at the time was not particularly stifled by censorship from the state, the state terror invoked in artists a sort of self-censorship which crippled theatre and other areas of art more than official censorship would have. However, as time has progressed, contemporary playwrights have shaken such hindrances and created works which help the country to talk about its violent and shrouded past. The people of Argentina had already experienced a series of political coup d'etats by the 1970s.
However, protest theatre is a type of drama which presents itself in various situations of political conflict and social oppression. In addition, Protest theatre can be used as an umbrella or broad word to refer to drama used to stand against apartheid. This paper aims at finding common themes expressed in the play written by Maishe Maponya ‘‘The hungry earth’’ and
“The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation,” says Stella Adler. Theater is unique and intriguing because it blends literary and visual arts to tell a story. Before Theater 10, I viewed theater on the surface level: cheesy plot lines with dramatic scenarios for entertainment purposes. Throughout the course, I have learned what it means to appreciate theater, such as understanding Brechtian and Chinese theatre; however, I believe understanding theater’s ability to convey crucial historical and social messages, such as in the production of RENT, is more relevant and important for theater appreciation.
Applied Theatre work includes Theatre-in-Education, Community and Team-building, Conflict Resolution, and Political theatre, to name just a few of its uses. However, Christopher Balme states that “Grotowski define acting as a communicative process with spectators and not just as a production problem of the actor” (Balme, 2008: 25). Applied Theatre practices may adopt the following “theatrical transactions that involve participants in different participative relationships” such as Theatre for a community, Theatre with a community and Theatre by a community Prentki & Preston (2009: 10). Whereas, applied theatre one of its most major powers is that it gives voice to the voiceless and it is a theatre for, by, and with the people. However, Applied Theatre practitioners are devising educational and entertaining performances bringing personal stories to life and build
“Theatre makes us think about power and the way our society works and it does this with a clear purpose, to make a change.”
Theatre as we know it now was born more than two thousand years ago and has gone through many streams until it reached the current modernity. Among these streams is the avant-garde theatre. This theatre achieved a break in the traditional theatre and became the forefront of a new experimental theatre. Therefore it is necessary to ask how this theatre started, what impact it had on society and if this type of theatre is still common in our modern era.
Theatre will always survive in our changing society. It provides us with a mirror of the society within which we live, and where conflicts we experience are acted out on stage before us. It provides us with characters with which we identify with. The audience observes the emotions and actions as they happen and share the experience with the characters in real time.