ABSTRACT
Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is often referred to as a body of theatrical techniques. And yet this does not do justice to the lifework of Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal, its founder and innovator of over 40 years. The techniques, potent as they may be in revolutionizing participants’ experience of social relationships, point to a much greater “body”—a complex, interdisciplinary, multivocal body of philosophical knowledge that encompasses, among other things, the work of Paulo Freire and Bertolt Brecht, carnival and circus, the Brazilian theatrical avant-garde of the mid-twentieth century, the influences of political theorists such as Hegel and of aesthetic theorists such as Aristotle. Boal’s work has spread to seven continents and is practiced by innumerable Jokers, or facilitators.1 In this way, TO’s modularity allows people around the globe who share the TO vocabulary and repertoire an opportunity to meet and dialogue across vast differences. But as with all such translations of theory into practice, of thought into action-especially those like TO that are named and marketed as reproducible systems-there are tendencies to delimit the underlying generative power of the work itself. We tend to take a how-to approach, forgetting that the “how” needs to be as mutable as the ideas that inform it; we tend to replicate what “worked” in one context into another, forgetting that TO is predicated on a vigilant receptivity to difference across time, circumstance, geography, culture, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender; we tend to restrict our critical dialogue to an analysis of what is explicit, forgetting the more invisible, implicit, foundational keystones of which the visible is a mere sign.
