ABSTRACT
Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), proclaims Augusto Boal, “is not new nor is it something that I have invented” (1978: 113). His premise that theatre is “our capacity to observe ourselves in action” links art to constructs of self as well as the social context in which those constructs are enacted. This capacity, he reasons, “affords us the further possibility 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” (Boal 1998: 7).
