Legislative Theatre

Using Performance to Make Politics

Augusto Boal, Adrian Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134673711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Augusto Boal's reputation is now moving beyond the realms of theatre and drama therapy, bringing him to the attention of a wider public. Legislative Theatre is the latest and most remarkable stage in his work. 'Legislative Theatre' is an attempt to use Boal's method of 'Forum Theatre' within a political system to create a truer form of democracy. It is an extraordinary experiment in the potential of theatre to affect social change.
At the heart of his method of Forum Theatre is the dual meaning of the verb 'to act': to perform and to take action. Forum Theatre invites members of the audience to take the stage and decide the outcome, becoming an integral part of the performance. As a politician in his native Rio de Janeiro, Boal used Forum Theatre to motivate the local populace in generating relevant legislation. In Legislative Theatre Boal creates new, theatrical, and truly revolutionary ways of involving everyone in the democratic process.
This book includes:
* a full explanation of the genesis and principles of Legislative Theatre
* a description of the process in operation in Rio
* Boal's essays, speeches and lectures on popular theatre, Paolo Freire, cultural activism, the point of playwrighting, and much else besides.

The Legislative Theatre Book

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	DOING IS THE BEST WAY OF SAYING
	José Martí, poet

Prologue

Monologue and dialogue

The scene takes place in a psychiatric hospital, in England. My friend Tim Wheeler was the Joker – the title we use for a cultural animator in the Theatre of the Oppressed. He was about to start a series of workshops with a new group made up of patients from the hospital as well as some of their nurses and doctors. He wanted to start with a short description of the origins of the Greek theatre, whose traditions we are heir to. And he explained that, in the beginning, the people sang and danced, all together in the street, in the open air: this was the time of the famous Dithyrambic Songs – it was not yet theatre. One day, along came a man called Thespis, and he created the Protagonist. The latter stood apart from the chorus and spoke alone. Some of the time the chorus would speak, in unison, and at other times the Protagonist would speak, on his own.

‘When Thespis invented the Protagonist, he invented the monologue’, said Tim, the Joker. ‘Prior to this, everyone sang and danced – they were the chorus. With Thespis, the monologue came into being: one person talking on his own. When a person is speaking on their own in the theatre, or anywhere else for that matter, we call it monologue. Does everyone understand?’

Everyone had understood this clear, simple explanation. The Joker continued the first lesson, encouraged by the response: ‘Then Aeschylus comes along, the first Greek tragedian, and he invents the Deuteragonist, the second actor. And when he added this second actor, he invented dialogue. So then, what is dialogue?’

Silence. Tim wanted to encourage participation from the group in this new workshop – interactivity – and he asked the question again, in greater detail: ‘When one person is speaking on their own, that is a monologue, they are doing a monologue. So what is a dialogue?’

More silence. The Joker resorted to visual aids: ‘A monologue is when one person, a single person, is talking on his or her own … ’, and he held up the index finger of his right hand. ‘One person only! So dialogue is … ? So what is a dialogue … ? A dialogue is when … ?’ And this time he held up two fingers.

‘I know, I know!’ answered one of the patients eagerly.

‘So, tell us. What is dialogue?’

‘It's when there are two people talking on their own … ’

This very simple story has stayed with me, imprinted on my mind. I always ask myself whether the patient had misunderstood or whether with his own particular brand of lucidity, he actually put his finger on a greater truth?

In reality, does dialogue exist, ever? Or is the contrary the case – that what we think is dialogue never actually goes beyond parallel or overlapping monologues? Monologues between countries, social classes, races, multiple monologues in the home or in school, conjugal monologues, sexual monologues, all the possible forms of interpersonal monologue – how often do they attain the supreme status of genuine dialogue? Could it be that we merely speak and cease speaking, intermittently, rather than speaking and listening? We know the word we speak, but we do not know what will be heard. What we say is never what is heard.

This theme has preoccupied me ever since – the idea of dialogue … or its absence. The Theatre of the Oppressed, in all its various modalities, is a constant search for dialogical forms, forms of theatre through which it is possible to converse, both about and as part of social activity, pedagogy, psychotherapy, politics.

This book relates, in quasi-report form, the most recent experiment of the Theatre of the Oppressed: the Legislative Theatre. The book, like the experiment itself, which is still under way, is unfinished. To finish the book, I need my readers to read it, to analyse, to interact … and to write to us with suggestions, critiques, arguments, ideas – all contributions are welcome. And necessary. Without this participation, it will not be possible to make a first full edition of this book, which appears here in a deliberately embryonic form. As a Beta version!

The Theatre of the Oppressed started its development during the cruellest phase of the Brazilian dictatorship; its first manifestation was the Newspaper Theatre. It continued through various dictatorial Latin American regimes, during which time some of its other forms emerged – Forum Theatre, Invisible Theatre, Image Theatre (1971–1976).

In Europe, from 1976 to 1986, the introspective techniques developed, under the generic title Rainbow of Desire (Routledge, 1994), incorporating ways of theatricalising subjectivity.

Now we are back in Brazil: none of our major social and political problems has been solved. It is up to us to try new ways of tackling them. I am a man of the theatre: now that I am directly involved in politics, I use the means at my disposal – the stage! The Legislative Theatre is a new system, a more complex form, since it includes all the previous forms of Theatre of the Oppressed plus others which have a specifically parliamentary application.

I hope that this experiment may be of service, over and above its application to our own mandate – beyond our party, beyond our city, far beyond. I hope it will be useful.

We have already done some experiments in other Brazilian cities (Santo André) and in other countries (Germany and France). These are only in their beginnings.

1 History

The Theatre of the Oppressed return to its roots – Brazil and Politics

For the first time in the history of the theatre, and the history of politics, an entire theatre company enters the Legislature. How did this miracle come about? Coincidence as a category of luck. We must persevere. Our desire, our goal: to go further!

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IN 1982, less than a year after coming to power, the French government invited 200 intellectuals from all over the world to a large seminar at the Sorbonne to discuss the nature of the relations between culture and the modern world. Was socialism being instituted in France and, if so, how was this happening?

They were not asking our advice; they wanted us to debate the subject. Among the invitees were various Nobel prize winners, a number of famous artists of the cinema, along with more humble folk, including Darci Ribeiro and myself.

Darci had just been elected Vice Governor of Rio de Janeiro. He was fascinated by the idea of creating Integrated Centres for Popular Education (CIEPS), a project which was, at that time, only at the planning stage. The idea was simple: to enrol as pupils the maximum possible number of children (every child, if it could be done), to keep them in school for as long as possible (the whole day, including breakfast, lunch and supper, if this was achievable), lending them support in every area of their lives: medicine, dentistry, sport and -thank God – cultural animation, including theatre.

That was where I came in, or might have come in, since I had told Darci about the work the Centre of the Theatre of the Oppressed (CTO) was doing – and is still doing, 19 years after its inception – in Paris, working right across France and in various other countries.

The CTO is engaged in the application and development of the methods of the Theatre of the Oppressed, which is founded on the conviction that theatre is the human language par excellence. The being becomes human when it discovers theatre. The difference between humans and other animals resides in the fact that we are capable of being theatre. Some of us ‘make’ theatre – all of us ‘are’ theatre.

What kind of theatre? The theatre which is, in its most archaic sense, our capacity to observe ourselves in action. We are able to see ourselves seeing! This possibility of our being simultaneously Protagonist and principal spectator of our actions, affords us the further possibility of thinking virtualities, of imagining possibilities, of combining memory and imagination – two indissociable psychic processes – to reinvent the past and to invent the future. Therein resides the immense power with which theatre is endowed. This is the theatre which fascinates me, and the method which I have developed and elaborated over the past 25 years, the Theatre of the Oppressed, tries to systematise these potentialities and render them accessible to and useable by anyone and everyone.

I founded the Paris CTO in 1978, when I was living there and lecturing in the self-same University of the Sorbonne at which we were to participate in the seminar three years later. Since then, this centre has organised numerous courses, seminars, interventions, shows and festivals with community groups. Darci wanted me to do the same thing in the CIEPS, throughout Rio de Janeiro. He extended an invitation to us, to myself and Cecilia Thumim, my wife, and urged us to move back to Brazil.

It was a dream. I had always wanted to go back and live in Brazil, but without abandoning the work I had been doing abroad through so many years of forced exile: five in Buenos Aires (then along came Videla …), two in Lisbon (till the Revolution of Carnations withered away …) and, finally, in Paris, which is still my second home. I felt welcome in Paris, and the minimum material conditions obtained for me to be able to work in a systematic way.

Had we been able to, we would have said ‘yes’ and returned to Brazil in time to be present at Darci's official investiture as Vice Governor. However, so many times in the past circumstances had obliged us to pack our bags in a hurry, leaving even essentials behind, that my family and I preferred to do things at a more measured pace.

When we did arrive back in Brazil, with only the bare necessities, it was in the middle of 1986, the end of the mandate, and the next elections were about to take place: Darci was standing for Governor. He kept his promise: he contracted us for six months, so that we could try and see if it would be possible to set up a project in Rio similar to the one which was working so well in France. At that point we did not want a longer contract, since this was only an experiment. In the event of a positive outcome, then of course we would want a long-term contract.

It worked like a dream: we assembled 35 cultural animators from the CIEPS, people who, for the most part, had never done theatre – some had never even been to a play – and did an intensive workshop, demonstrating our exercises, games and techniques of Image Theatre, Forum Theatre and Invisible Theatre. Rosa Luiza Marquez, a professor at the University of San Juan in Puerto Rico, who had worked at the CTO in Paris, came over from the Caribbean to take part in this adventure.

By the end of six weeks we already had a repertoire of five short shows around the issues of most concern to the cultural animators (and their families and neighbours in all the areas we were working in): unemployment, health, housing, sexual violence, incest, the oppression of women, of young people, mental health, drugs etc.

With this repertoire, we initiated a series of presentations in the CIEPS. As the venues for these performances were usually standard municipal school buildings, we soon learnt to construct a ‘functional theatre’ in the dining rooms, using whatever was to hand: two rows of audience sat on the ground, with the next two rows on seats, one row on tables and, finally, one row perched on chairs on top of tables – when there was a real crowd, another row of audience stood on tables at the back. We arranged a white tarpaulin on the ground, with a sheet by way of cyclorama.

Between 200 and 300 people came to each show; sometimes there were over 400 – students, teachers, students' parents, friends of the teachers, cleaners and kitchen staff, people who lived near the schools. The performance used to open with a brief explanation by the ‘Jokers’ of the show (myself and Cecilia – Rosa Luisa accompanied us on percussion) – of the uses of theatre and the function of the Theatre of the Oppressed; afterwards, we would do exercises with actors and audience not only as a ‘warm-up’ but also to establish a degree of theatrical communion – and then we would present the five short scenes which had been created during the workshop. This was the first part of the show.

In the second part we would ask the audience which two or three subjects had most interested them, and this led to the ‘foruming’ of the relevant two or three scenes: i.e., the theatrical debate which constitutes Forum Theatre, with the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• How to read this book*
• The Legislative Theatre Book
• Prologue: Monologue and dialogue
• 1 History The Theatre of the Oppressed return to its roots — Brazil and Politics
• 2 The proposition Theatre as politics and transitive democracy as theatre
• 3 The context How and where is this experiment being carried out?
• 4 The structure
• 5 A compact course on playwriting and theatre arts The tools of our task, the instruments of our work
• 6 The show and the community
• 7 Laws promulgated during the mandate And one which wasn't
• The ‘No-one Here is an Ass!' Book
• Prologue ‘No-one here is an ass!'
• 1 Paulo Freire, my last father
• 2 Clementina's turn
• 3 Saudades1 for the chicken thieves of yesteryear
• 4 Elizete The woman and the mirror
• 5 The Devil as muse of inspiration
• 6 Resignation Virtuous crime or criminal virtue?
• 7 Memory and the torture chamber
• 8 One hideous crime hides the hideousness of another
• 9 The Devil and the canny man
• 10 ‘Human rights' are human
• 11 Romeo and Juliet A story of hatred and betrayal
• 12 The suicide of the wind
• 13 The laws of the market, the law of the lion
• 14 The show of the dream and the dream as show
• 15 Family A playscript used during the mandate as a basis for Forum Sessions
• Categories of Popular Theatre
• Prologue
• 1 The first category of popular theatre By the people and for the people By the people and for the people
• 2 The second category of popular theatre From the popular perspective but aimed at another audience
• 3 The third category of popular theatre From an anti-people perspective and aimed at the people — populist theatre!
• 4 The fourth category of popular theatre Newspaper Theatre
• Afterword: The Metamorphoses of the Devil
• The individual and the twenty-first century