The Theatre of the Oppressed in Practice Today

An Introduction to the Work and Principles of Augusto Boal

Ali Campbell

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350031401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

How has the work and legacy of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed been interpreted and practised around the world? What does it look like in different working contexts? This book provides an accessible introduction to the political and artistic principles Boal's techniques are founded on, tracking exemplary practice from around the globe. Using detailed contemporary case histories, theatre artist, scholar and activist Ali Campbell demonstrates how the underlying principles of Boal's practice are today enacted in the work of - among others - an urban network (Theatre of the Oppressed NYC); a rural and developmental theatre organisation (Jana Sanskriti, West Bengal); Boal's original company CTO Rio (Brazil); and a theatre-based group led by learning-disabled adults in the UK (The Lawnmowers Independent Theatre Company). The book concludes with a series of conversations between Campbell and international exponents of the work, envisioning futures for the Theatre of the Oppressed in the shifting political, educational and artistic contexts of the twenty-first century.

PART ONE

Principles in Practice

Prologue

Frame Zero

(The National Theatre of Uganda, Kampala, March 1990)

Outside the National Theatre, standing in partial shade at the edge of the square, every day I pass a woman as I go inside.

I’m usually in a hurry. Our AIDS education project has had the resources only to support a group working together for five days, and tomorrow we will be presenting our Forum piece, Akatale, to an audience of HIV workers, community nurses, academics, NGO representatives and of course artists working in Development Theatre. I have one day left. Where has the time gone?

The woman is standing near a group of large overflowing bins, infrequently emptied. I think they belong to the theatre but everybody passing seems to chuck stuff in there. Around the bins a group of ghoulish Maribou storks patrol, each as tall as the woman herself, scavenging what even the poorest street people of Kampala have already rejected as inedible or beyond the Ugandan genius for recycling. Maribou storks are the stuff of nightmares: seen from behind they might almost be ancient crones in dusty feathered cloaks, until in passing you see their great beaks sorting through the rotting detritus of downtown Kampala.

The woman is selling plastic bags. Every day she collects them, washes them and flattens them out. Every day she stands in exactly the same spot, not bothering to call out as some of the more enterprising hawkers do but just standing, with a single bag unfolded to show how clean it is and perhaps displaying the logo of some fancy shop nearby. The others are draped across her skinny arm.

The woman’s head is neatly wrapped in a rag. She is wearing a clean but threadbare t-shirt (again, with a logo) and a bright wrap around her skinny hips. Her legs are stick thin and her skin is greyish. She looks sick. The products the bags once held are not for her. Her feet are gnarled, in disintegrating flip-flops. I have no idea what age she is but I know from experience that if I guess from how old she looks, I will always be guessing her to be older than she is.

Some days I buy a bag and we smile at each other. Not today. I’m late.

Gandhi urges a simple daily reflection to those of us who need to reset the moral compass on our endeavours. It is very simple.

How – he asks – will my actions today affect the

poorest; the least powerful person?

It is over twenty-five years since I created that project in Kampala, but that woman is present to me still. As I write, as I set out what I have learned through my work in the Theatre of the Oppressed over that time, I am resolved to keep her always in my mind.

Present.

Frontispiece Augusto Boal in storytelling mode: Queen Mary, University of London; 1999.

Introduction: About Augusto Boal and the Aims of This Book

Augusto Boal (1931–2009) was one of the most influential theatre directors, activists and theorists of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, exploring through a long and prolific career in Brazil and internationally the possibilities of a workable Marxist theatre aesthetic in the Brechtian tradition, by way of the revolutionary theories of his distinguished contemporary Paulo Freire. The result has often been described as a system, open to reinterpretation and adaptation to a wide range of contexts and a bewildering plurality of content.

Herein lies the challenge to the scholar-artist seeking to extrapolate a set of guiding principles from the body of Boal’s work, rather than to delineate fixed rules whereby the abundant manifestations of the Theatre of the Oppressed (TotO) might be assessed and its ethos – of empowerment through the enactment of ‘rehearsal for the revolution’ – interrogated through the ever-shifting prism of the work itself.

Since Boal’s death the complex issue of his legacy and its impact has been contested, sometimes acrimoniously, as individuals, groups and companies have sought to maintain a commonality of purpose and a consistency of delivery across their widely differing practices and contexts. Is the Theatre of the Oppressed a system, a movement, a toolbox of techniques or – as Boal often called it – a method? Is it governed by shared beliefs so open to adaptation and multiple interpretation that we are ultimately only bequeathed a relativistic sense of its values, lacking a coherent, core integrity? Or is it possible – as Augusto himself once told me – that there are laws operating wherever the Theatre of the Oppressed is authentically practised, that are as subtle yet ultimately as irresistible as those that govern gravity?

There are already many clear and comprehensive accounts of Boal’s work itself, from the excellent overview afforded by Frances Babbage to case studies and critiques by James Thompson and Helen Nicholson. Together with this comprehensive body of scholarship we have Boal’s own evolving (and sometimes self-contradictory) reflections, most recently in the Aesthetics of the Oppressed. But it has long been clear (since Boal began to withdraw from active international participation in training, theoretical dissemination and collective reflection upon his work) that this question of whether there is a clear, identifiable, underlying set of principles must be addressed. How does a scholar/artist such as the present writer identify and articulate these principles in practice, in such a way as to do justice to the open-endedness and flexibility that gives the techniques such an abundant, generative quality, whilst addressing the need for clarity around legacy, consistency and indeed quality control that has resurfaced regularly since Boal’s death?

These are the questions this book will seek to explore. I have had to devise new ways, structures and techniques to bring the story of my own journey in the TotO to an exemplification of that exploration.

In this first section I will introduce one of these bespoke techniques, Frame Throwing, to recreate through thick description, to unpack and to interrogate examples from my own practice of Forum, including my teaching and adaptation of it, with the aim of identifying its underlying principles in practice as they arise. Frame Throwing will reappear throughout the book as a way of anchoring, in the deep ecology of practice, discussions that might otherwise stray into the abstract. As a practitioner I seek to complement existing discourse with living examples, unpacked in such a way as to evidence the key questions around the Theatre of the Oppressed in general and Forum in particular. These detailed recreations of the work are the heart of this book, beginning with that first touchstone project, devised over a three-month residency at Makere University in Kampala, Uganda in 1990, in collaboration with the National Theatre of Uganda and funded by a Winston Churchill Fellowship.

With Boal’s encouragement, I had gone to Uganda in January 1990 while my first intensive experience of the TotO techniques and pedagogy was still very fresh. I had been trained in the theory and practice of Forum and Image Theatre only a few months before. Boal’s only words on the fifth day of that course in Nottingham had been: ‘Don’t worry Ali. You are a very good Joker. When you ask people to go over there, they go; to sit, they sit; to make an Image – they do it. So go to Uganda. Tell me what you learn there. Try to film it!’

His words are with me still, as are the vivid moments of truth that the work opened up to me and that I now share for what I hope will be their present helpfulness in illuminating some of the complexities of Boal’s work and his sometimes bewildering claims upon it, as we all move forward without him.

I write as a critical friend and with great love.

For the reasons above (some academic, some formal, some personal) my first set of frames in Chapter One is therefore an exercise in beginning in media res, continuing as I have begun with the deep-drilled example of Akatale: an AIDS education project in Kampala, Uganda.

How, in depth and detail, does a Forum Theatre session work?

In the Theatre of the Oppressed we are always at the beginning! And for this reason I defer to Chapter Two for a more detailed description and analysis of Boal’s pedagogy as I experienced it first hand in 1989, focusing on how storytelling was a key plank of his teaching method, as it is of mine.

How do we learn the most effective ways to create TotO in a training situation … and how not to make it?

Chapter Three is an essay in ‘difficultation’: one of Augusto’s more delightful coinages. I go into the most challenging questions I myself and many colleagues face when it comes to the ways we share our practical experience and thereby our understanding of TotO.

What is the legacy of TotO and how does our diaspora of a movement intend to maintain quality control?

Chapters Four and Five will go more fully into my own discoveries in the rolling out, adapting and customization of Forum and Image Theatre. I delve into three seminal iterations of Forum with groups and companies I have worked with internationally: the ATOBA artists’ alliance against AIDS in Malawi; GRAEAE Theatre Company (the leading Disabled-led performance organization in the UK); and lastly the children and actors UK-wide with whom I co-devised and toured the primary school Theatre in Education (TIE) project Poor Ted, seen by over a quarter of a million children between 1995 and 2005. With these two chapters, this book’s key findings and questions culminate in an (incomplete!) audit of TotO’s working principles as they have emerged through our practice. We claim neither to be exhaustive, nor prescripti ve: only honest and helpful.

Where do we go from here?

My aim as a writer, evidencing key questions about Forum out of a lifetime of practice, is to foreground and to celebrate what can only be learned through the risk, the journey and the imperfect mode of research that is iterative, collaborative practice.

These aren’t the sort of questions we can ‘answer’, but I believe in walking with them, in exploring them and in doing my best to address and to evidence them with hard-won examples of my own work and that of others I have been in direct contact with over my long journey. That directness of contact is offered not only as validating shared, collaborative experience but as rendering it – through mindful acts of choice and distillation – as expertise, arising from practice with others, risked alongside others, supported by others, debated with others and held as testimony by others. I only find my way in relationship with those others and all of them matter to me. Their voices fill Parts Two and Three of this book and its structure mirrors the unfinished conversation of our collaborations together. This book is theirs and belongs to all of us. If I have missed anyone out it is due solely to lack of the genuine collaborative contact that has been necessary for me to work with the voices of others in this way. If my inevitable exclusions offend, I apologize.

Finally, I want to offer this book in a spirit of helpfulness to all the many students, early-career practitioners and everyone over the years who has asked me for more working examples of how Augusto’s inspiration has rippled out internationally in such a dizzying array of incarnations. This book is part critique, part memoir and most importantly a quest, through the language of performance practice itself, to identify and extrapolate key, abiding and non-prescriptive principles, as a service to the future of the Theatre of the Oppressed. It is therefore both personal and political. In content and in form I have constantly sought to align the judgements of the head with the assertions of the heart: to bring rigorous structure into reflexive dialogue with the storytelling – the telling of Truth to Power – which Augusto himself brought to the theatre where his politics were enacted. I haven’t set out with a pre-decided auto-ethnographic approach in essaying all of this, but in the due crafting of the current work, it has quietly chosen me.

My ultimate and perhaps most cherished aim is to claim a central position for Oracy as a core element of the pedagogy and the dissemination of the Theatre of the Oppressed, as it was at the heart of Boal’s own workshops, when he would sit and unfurl one of his incomparable anecdotes. Nobody who heard those stories has ever forgotten them: there is a power in them to be tapped into and it still resides in his personal legacy: a love and a practice of Oracy. There was far more in his making of space for story than just an illustrative relating of the past. Augusto famously us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Part One Principles in Practice
• Part Two Companies and Conversations
• Part Three Conversations
• Glossary
• Suggested Reading
• Index
• Copyright