ABSTRACT
The greatness of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed project stems from its ability to mobilize contradictions and thus do justice to the “original dialectical relationship, the relationship between theory and practice.” Born as a work of Latin American popular theatre during a moment of counter-revolutionary expansion, Theatre of the Oppressed bolstered its theoretical vision with its political critique of European dramaturgy, with a special interest in its processes of modernization. In the case of the comparison with the work of Brecht, the summary presented by Boal describes Epic Theatre only from the perspective of the dramaturgical technique. The formulation of the project contains, in any case, a basic contradiction between the valorization of the act of assuming the “leading role” and the work of a collective essay on social transformation. The dialectic between theory and practice continued to fuel Boal’s project at the time of the publication of Stop! C´est Magique in 1979.
