Analyzing Theatre of the Oppressed: The Influence of Boal’s Ideology on Contemporary Brazil
French playwright Yasmina Reza once said, “Theatre is a mirror, a sharp reflection of society.” This quote applies to Brazil. As a nation on the rise, Brazil faces new challenges that can be directly related to art and theatre. An example of this parallel lies in Augusto Boal’s concept of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO). With his methods, he created plays with realistic conflicts that the audience members could then work to resolve. By doing so, he helped to prompt legislative action and social change which resonates within Brazil today. TO broke down the socioeconomic barriers associated with theatre and also incorporated the proletariat into the narrative.
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Augusto Boal was born on March 16th, 1931. A Rio de Janeiro native, he traveled to the United States briefly during the early 1950s to study chemical engineering at Columbia University. During his time at Columbia, Boal directed several plays. After completing his studies in New York in 1956, he returned to Brazil to stage productions in Sao Paulo’s Arena Theater. At this time, he began to develop Theatre of the Oppressed. Instead of having audience members provide their feedback at the conclusion of a play, Boal encouraged them to make changes during the play. By doing so, he invited the audience to blend the line between spectator and performer. This formed a key concept of Theatre of the Oppressed -- the pivotal role the “spect-actor” (Plastow, 2009). Boal encouraged people to take a participatory role within the plays he produced, and also invited them to address the conflicts within their own lives and within society as a …show more content…
Boal’s critics often questioned the sociopolitical efficacy of Theatre of the Oppressed, and he made major notions to address this. “I want to make politics but I don’t want to change my profession,” Boal wrote in 1992 campaign material. “I am a man of the theater! For me, this was always possible and now it is necessary: theater is political and politics is theater. (Boal, 1991).” In the fall of 1992, Boal became elected as a Vereador of Rio, which shares equivalence in power to a City Council seat. During this time, he worked with nineteen different interest groups to create laws to help underserved communities. In 1993, he held an international Theater of the Oppressed festival in 1993, which helped spread his ideas through Latin America and the rest of the
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As an academic theater person and as a writer, Dolan demonstrates how to bring sentimentality into academic writing. She is full of passion and brings her own theatrical experience and memories to draw up her personal ‘‘archive of spectatorship’’ (10). It can be risky to weave the subjective and instinctive narrative with the typically objective and critical discourse of academic inquiry, but Dolan questions, ‘‘how can we use sentimentality as something positive instead of abandoning it?’’ (23). She challenges theater scholars to embrace passionate engagement with the faith, hope, and charity that she finds productive of social justice and human solidarity. Therefore, after explaining the main concepts, Dolan describes some specific cases that support the "utopian performatives," including the solo performances of feminist artists Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, and Peggy Shaw; multicharacter solo performances by Lily Tomlin, Danny Hoch, and Anna Deavere Smith; the slam poetry event Def Poetry Jam; The Laramie Project; Blanket, a performance by postmodern choreographer Ann Carlson; Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman; and Deborah Warner 's production of Medea starring Fiona Shaw. These cases demonstrate how live performance and its utopic sentiment can inspire and motivate people to change the sociality, because performance provides a forum for being human together towards “feelings of possibility, hope, and political agency (p.59),” and commonality in particular
...rom the public discourse reaffirms the cultures silent oppression of a people. In other words, if progress is to be made, it remains to be seen whether Brazil can truly overcome the psychological impacts that the concept of racial democracy has caused.
Theatre is an art form that has been shared across cultures for hundreds of years. This art form is extremely versatile in the types of plays, such as comedic, tragedy, and many other genres. Although theatre is thought of a form of entertainment, playwrights have seized the opportunity to inject political opinions into the play to inform the audience about present issues in their lives. Issues that playwrights have incorporated into plays have included stories that people may not be ready to hear but it encourages the audience to look inside themselves and assess their moral standing on certain issues. One subject that has been incorporated into many plays throughout the last century is women’s issues. These plays have challenged the way women
Early political plays worked in creating an emotional engagement with their audience. This was achieved by many political theatre movement to stage their performances in unconventional stages. The ‘stages’ were from streets to rallies, often portable and flexible to endure the circumstances. Political theatre impacted specific audiences that shared, “a radical re-visioning of the relationship between the individual and the society in which they live (Deeney & Gale 327).” Specifically, this genre of theatre engaged the audience by issues of government as well as influences of party politics. In this paper, I will talk about three movements that impacted the early twentieth century. Suffragette theatre involved women’s rights in plays that were
Boal went beyond the stage and organised performances with the Arena troupe in the streets, factories, unions, churches where they could reach the people living in the slums of Rio. It is theatre
During the late 1970s and the early 1980s Argentina’s political climate was dominated by a dictatorship which was more ruthless than previous regimes Argentina had experienced . While art, specifically theatre, at the time was not particularly stifled by censorship from the state, the state terror invoked in artists a sort of self-censorship which crippled theatre and other areas of art more than official censorship would have. However, as time has progressed, contemporary playwrights have shaken such hindrances and created works which help the country to talk about its violent and shrouded past. The people of Argentina had already experienced a series of political coup d'etats by the 1970s.
Over the years, the essence of theatre has not only been to entertain, but to also allow the build up of a culture in a quickly growing uncultured generation. Regardless of the existence of so many other forms of entertainment, theatre has always established a commanding niche in most people’s hearts, and is undoubtedly the most realistic form of entertainment (Bruce 12). The acting bit of theatre performances makes things real and in their immediate contexts, allowing the audience to draw conclusions based on what they see. In a majority of cases, also, the play’s setting is such that there is description of definite subjects without which the play cannot make meaning. The above research takes into account A Number by Caryl Churchill. A great deal of issues and aspects can be learnt from the above play with diverse moral lessons, as well. It has long been proved that expression via acting is more direct than when the audience accesses literature in other means. This direct approach gives a broader meaning to a variety of issues in the play, which were not understood, say in videos. Additionally, the play A Number is full of theatrical ideologies with clear depiction and expression of every event. Theatricality and empowerment set this play different from other plays because of clarity in events’ sequence. The author also strives to express the idea of cloning in society as one main means of families’ downfall. This further comes with what literature calls the ‘fate of tragic heroes’, an indication of what is at stake when a person does things out of the ordinary to please him or herself.
Theatre serves to reflect society. From Shakespeare to Sophocles, a playwright’s work illustrates the different mechanics within a culture, time period, or society. Theatre offers viewers the experience of taking a step back and looking in on themselves. In this way, theatre is a mirror of the world and the way it functions. In the time period from 1968 to 1983, the world was transitioning.
Applied Theatre work includes Theatre-in-Education, Community and Team-building, Conflict Resolution, and Political theatre, to name just a few of its uses. However, Christopher Balme states that “Grotowski define acting as a communicative process with spectators and not just as a production problem of the actor” (Balme, 2008: 25). Applied Theatre practices may adopt the following “theatrical transactions that involve participants in different participative relationships” such as Theatre for a community, Theatre with a community and Theatre by a community Prentki & Preston (2009: 10). Whereas, applied theatre one of its most major powers is that it gives voice to the voiceless and it is a theatre for, by, and with the people. However, Applied Theatre practitioners are devising educational and entertaining performances bringing personal stories to life and build
With only two feature films, Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho has gained a certain cult status, becoming a powerful voice in the alternative world cinema and a keen observer of today’s Brazil. If “Neighboring Sounds” (2012) had stricken me with its irreverent tones, the recent “Aquarius”, a character-driven drama, completely enthralled me for nearly two hours and a half. At the time the film was exhibited at Cannes Film Festival, the film’s cast organized a pacific demonstration where they showed discontentment about the impeachment of Brazil’s president Dilma Roussef and the disgraceful political situation lived in the country.
In the mid 20th century a German playwright named Brecht invented the idea of epic theatre which consist that a play shouldn’t cause the audience to connect emotionally with the characters or action done by them but should instead provoke a logical self-reflection and critical view of the action presented on stage. Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht was born the 10th February 1898 and died on the 14 August 1956. The famous playwright and theatre director introduced to the world epic theatre, he wanted his audience to have a critical perspective of his work for them to be able to recognize social injustice and exploitation so that it could eventually affect change in the world outside, by doing this he wanted the audience to ask questions on why
“To engender empathy and create a world using only words is the closest thing we have to magic” –Lin-Manuel Miranda. Although theatre is viewed by many as simply a form of fiction or entertainment, its stories are often derived from real people and cultures, and one thing theatre cannot escape is society. I argue that through structure and language, cultural representation in theatre evokes cultural awareness and empathy. Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 and Luis Alfaro’s Electricidad present stories representative of several different cultures, which give voice, and artistic opportunities, to a wide demographic of people who are statistically underrepresented in theatre.