ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the connections between the thoughts and actions of the two great Brazilian activists and intellectuals: Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal. In the political-pedagogical field, Paulo Freire theorized and practiced a transformation of the educational relationship by overcoming the teacher–student dichotomy and re-thinking the learning process as a common path created from interaction. From Freire’s perspective, traditional content is replaced by topics for discussion, and dialogue facilitates a critical process of social consciousness. In Boal’s experimental action, spaces open up in which the spectators metaphorically break the “fourth wall”–in theatrical terms the symbolic barrier between stage and audience–to participate and intervene directly in the action. In order to explain the genesis and articulation of Theatre of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal used the metaphor of the tree, whose roots are politics, history, philosophy, and ethics. Boal, like Freire, created a pedagogy of praxis and used poetry as an instrument of praxis.
