We All Are Theater: An Interview with Augusto Boal

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Augusto Boal at the University of Nebraska at Omaha during his residency there March 18-26, 1996, and the Second Annual Pedagogy of the Oppressed Conference, March 21-23. Boal conducted workshops and “jokered” two Forum Theatre performances, one with conference participants and another with Omaha residents concerned with a recent incident of police violence. He is interviewed by Douglas L. Paterson, teacher at UNO and founder of the Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed, Omaha, and Mark Weinberg, teacher at the University of Wisconsin Center, Rock County, and author of Challenging the Hierarchy: Collective Theater in the United States. The article opens with an introduction to Boal by Paterson, originally published on the World Wide Web in Webster’s World of Cultural Democracy. —Eds.

Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal developed The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) during the 1950s and 1960s. In an effort to transform theater from the “monologue” of traditional performance into a “dialogue” between audience and stage, Boal experimented with many kinds of interactive theater. His explorations were based on the assumption that dialogue is the common, healthy dynamic between all humans, that all human beings desire and are capable of dialogue, and that when a dialogue becomes a monologue, oppression ensues. Theater then becomes an extraordinary tool for transforming monologue into dialogue. “While some people make theater,” says Boal, “we all are theater.”

From his work Boal evolved various forms of theater workshops and performances that aimed to meet the needs of all people for interaction, dialogue, critical thinking, action and fun. While the performance modes of Forum Theatre, Image Theatre, Cop-In-The-Head and the vast array of the Rainbow of Desire are designed to bring the audience into active relationship with the performed event, the workshops are virtually a training ground for action, not only in these performance forms, but for action in life.

The “typical” Theatre of the Oppressed workshop comprises three kinds of activity. The first is background information on TO and the various exercises provided by the workshop facilitator (or “difficultator,” as Boal prefers to describe it). Such information begins the workshop, but is also interspersed throughout the games and exercises. Moreover, the group is brought together periodically to discuss responses to games and to ask questions of the various processes.

The second kind of activity is the games. These are invariably highly physical interactions designed to challenge us to truly listen to what we are hearing, feel what we are touching, and see what we are looking at. The “arsenal” of the Theatre of the Oppressed is extensive, with more than 200 games and exercises listed in Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors alone. Several years ago, Boal’s Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Paris (CTO-Paris) proceeded methodically through all the TO activities; the inventory took two years to cover. Ultimately, these games serve to heighten our senses and demechanize the body, to get us out of habitual behavior, as a prelude to moving beyond habitual thinking and interacting. We also become actively engaged with other participants, developing relationships and trust, and having a very good time.

Finally, the third area of activity involves the structured exercises. Although there is a kind of gray area at times when one might call an activity a game or an exercise, the exercises are formulated so as to infuse a given structure with genuine content.

These activities are designed to highlight a particular area of TO practice such as Image Theatre, Forum Theatre, Rainbow of Desire, etc. Thus we are invited not only to imagine new possibilities and solutions, but to actively participate in them, Forum style. Group problem solving, highly interactive imagining, physical involvement, trust and fun combine to create vigorous interpersonal dynamics. As a result, we learn that we are, if not the source of our difficulties, at least the reason for their maintenance. More importantly, we are clearly the source of our mutual liberations.

—Douglas L. Paterson

Douglas Paterson and Mark Weinberg: Your approach to theater, it seems, offers one of the most profound critiques of, at least, the Western approach to drama. You write that it divides a people into those few who do and those many who watch, and that this becomes a model for the ruling structure where there are few in power who do, and many who watch the action of history. And that through a process of catharsis, people watch something, are concerned for the well-being and stability of the state, and then are persuaded through some kind of purging not to do anything; to accept things as they are and not to take action. We have been intrigued by how, at least in the United States, people in established critical circles have not come after you. Has there been, do you think, much of a critique—a real critique—of TO and your work anywhere?

Augusto Boal: Well look, it is the critique by silence. [TO is] absolutely ignored by the press. The press [have] criticized by silence. They say: That’s not theater; if the spectator also uses theater then theater no longer exists for them [the critics]. Never comes a notice in the press to say we are going to have a festival…not one critique appears. They rarely—when they know it is TO—they rarely come. So there is a criticism by silence, by not acknowledging the existence of something which is there. They are publishing books on TO all over the world. But all these books are by practitioners, people who do it and then they tell their experience—which I find is wonderful—but not a single book tried to analyze what’s happening with TO in the world.

P&W: I think one of the really important things that needs to happen to expand the practice is a rigorous, critical examination of the process. As you’re saying, it needs that, as part of the dialogue. So, as a way of beginning that, we’ve put together some questions that we’d like to pose to you. The first question is about making stereotypes on the stage. Perhaps in the structures of Forum Theatre, maybe Cop-in-the-Head and Rainbow of Desire as well, it’s easy to use stereotypes. We are invited in TO to represent our antagonist, our oppressor, or those who aligned with us, in either/or ways—the good guys and the bad guys. Is there a way to really negotiate in discussion between stereotypes and what is probably a more complex reality? How do we get away from using stereotypes as a way of thinking about issues?

AB: I think that in the Forum Theatre or in the techniques of Rainbow of Desire we can start by stereotype, but the theatrical discussion will go as far as the participants are capable of going. There is not a recipe to make people see more deeply than the stereotype. But there is a method [in] which you can start with a stereotype and then you go deeper. The presentation of the model, inevitably it is a stereotype. For instance, yesterday we were doing that presentation there at the church, and then the presentation of the scene—it was a stereotype. People…are playing dominos or cards or drinking beer, and someone comes and says, “You have to mobilize yourself, get out of here and let’s do a manifest and participate.” Particularly, I was impressed by the boy who said, “Why should I? The more I read about, the more I know about how things are happening in this country, the more I think there is no solution.” And then I felt some people that are inactive, they’re not inactive because they are like that. It’s because you have so much information—by the media, by the press, by the television, by friends—that it’s horrible what’s happening. But that’s the way it is. There’s some sort of fatality that makes people accept it; people who are not fatalists, they become fatalists. I was very much impressed. That’s not a stereotype. A stereotype is to show someone [who says], “Oh no. I don’t care about that.” The person who says, “I don’t care about that,” in reality cares about that, but is discouraged—is afraid. So I believe that stereotype is a part of the picture, but depending on the people gathered to discuss the theme, the problem, we can go beyond stereotype…We develop techniques, but the important thing is who is going to use that technique and how strong is the desire to find something by the people? If you have a strong desire, if you have not given up and you still believe, things can be changed.

P&W: In other words, it is from the stereotype that the spectactors and audience learn about the situation. They really have to discover what it is about, what they’ve done that might be a stereotype. It’s up to them to discover that, rather than for you—as Joker or academic or critic to point that out from the start. That needs to be discovered by the group.

AB: By the theatrical process. And sometimes what happens happens because there’s a stereotyped model, or it’s a stereotyped story, but sometimes it’s a stereotyped character. I always remember, when they talk about stereotypes, a discovery from the work I did in Chile. It was with someone who was fighting against Pinochet, [who] was known to be almost a hero among the workers in the fight against Pinochet, who had been tortured to hell. But when he made the play about his own family, he discovered that in his own family he was behaving like Pinochet towards his wife and towards his children—especially the daughters. So he discovered he had a stereotyped behavior of “father.” He was not being a father that was fighting Pinochet that had such a wife and such daughters and sons. He was not behaving like himself. Every time…someone [came] who wanted to date one of his daughters, his reaction was not of the person who’s fighting tyranny. His behavior was tyrannical behavior. “You had to be back at this hour, you had to do this, you had to do that.” He reproduced in his home a stereotyped behavior of fathers having to protect their daughters, and having to impose upon their wives a certain form of behavior of work and all that.

P&W: If I am making an image or if I’m involved in Forum Theatre, someone could say that it’s too easy for me to separate my own personal experience from the social context to which it belongs. I make my image of oppression only from my point of view. And the criticism might be made, then, that I can believe my image somehow is true in the larger sense because it’s true for me. Does the spectator audience reconnect the individual to the social?

AB: It depends also on what is the structure. For instance, you have the structure of the worker that is going to talk to the boss because he needs more pay or better conditions of work. So all the other workers that belong to the same factory, the same [work] place, they are going to identify [with] the situation and there is [no] doubt for them that they are oppressed. And then they are going to fight against the boss because the boss wants more profits and gives less conditions of good work, of comfortable work, of human work. But in those cases it is very clear to someone you are going to strike. It’s very easy.

But the complication begins when the relation between one and the other one cannot fall in well-established categories. For instance, in all relations—men and women, emotional relations— sometimes both feel oppressed by the other. And then I can present a play in which I feel I am oppressed by the woman, and then by doing the play in forum, I can discover that maybe I am [the] oppressor more than I am oppressed. Not only in forum. The other day, we did the screen image [1] and one of the boys at the end, he was really very moved. He said, “Look, I was showing how I was oppressed and I was surprised that everyone took the position of the other one. And then finally, I understood that maybe I am [the] oppressor of the other one, and that’s why the other one oppressed me.” Sometimes the situation is not socially very clear, very concrete and [yet is] very stereotyped, very ritualized. And it is also the question of feeling, the question of emotion—it is very difficult to say who is oppressing who, because the other one can be oppressed too. So that’s why those techniques were developed in which you don’t really try to find the oppressor or the oppressed, but you try to understand the situation between one person and another.

P&W: Is it possible that the techniques of TO limit possibilities, so that the theatrical representations of realities and ideal outcomes become similar from situation to situation? The techniques of image or rainbow might be leading us to a narrow range of possibilities that are, in effect, constructed in advance by the very techniques themselves. We end up universalizing the particular when it may be the techniques that make for a predictable outcome and process.

AB: I believe that when you have a forum, for instance, there are many, many alternatives that are predictable, and [that] are stereotypes. Replacements [2] are also stereotyped. For instance, the idea [that] you go alone there or you go with other people. [It’s] predictable that after one moment or another, some spectactor will say, “Oh, I’m not going alone there. I’m going to take other people with me.” That’s predictable and it happens very often. But the fact that it’s predictable does not mean that it’s not true, that it does not reveal that most of the time we try to solve our own problems alone. And then, if it’s predictable, [it’s] still good that someone is going to say that we can go together, not go alone.

At the same time, what I believe is the most important effect of Forum Theatre is not the solutions that it can find at the end, but the process of thinking. Because what I believe is that in the normal theater, there is a paralysis: the spectator paralyzes his power of action and he is suffering the empathy of the character and, for some time, he’s only answering. He is only doing what the actor does, only feeling what the actor feels, the character feels. And what is important for me is not exactly the solution that we found, [but] the process of criticizing, observing and trying to find solutions. Even if we don’t find any solution at the end of Forum Theatre, I say, “OK, it’s good. We did not find that solution, but we looked for it.” And sometimes I think if you find a predictable solution at the end, it’s not as good as [when] you don’t find any, but you have been thinking about it. What changes is the attitude of the spectator, of not being only consumer, but someone who questions.

I like very much the game I have been using lately about the leader—the designated—leader in which you have to find out who is the leader, and in reality there is no leader. And then the people find out I gave a wrong instruction, and I was deceiving them. I like very much that because I want them to have confidence in me, but not blind confidence. And so this game says, “Whatever I say, don’t take it absolutely. Analyze, think if what I’m saying is good or not, if you agree or not.” And then I think that TO as a whole should always be that. Always think, “Is that true? Do you agree?” It’s to provoke thoughts and to provoke actions and to provoke invention. Whatever we invent, whatever thoughts we have, whatever actions we take, the most important [thing] is to have this as a [starting point]—to be dynamized and not to be like the character of yesterday who said, “The more I read about that, the more I see that I am powerless. I don’t want to do anything. I’m going to do dominos.” And TO says the opposite. You can do lots of other things. What? Let’s try to find out. We don’t bring the message. We bring the methods, not the message.

P&W: What is your response to the theater that we have on Broadway and in our universities and in our regional theaters here in the United States and certainly down in Rio—the performance of standard plays? You’re not against that, I know, but is it your sense that we need a whole companion area of theater that is community-based interactive?

AB: That’s what I think. I think that, for instance, in France people are used to having teachers of theater in schools but they teach only Moliere, Racine, Marivaux, Corneille. They reproduce inside the school the same plays that they see outside of the school. And I think that it should be the opposite. The school should learn the language of the theater, not finished production, but the language. And TO is the language of the theater and not necessarily the final product. And I think that it’s good for everyone. For instance, the Schauspielhaus in Germany, sometimes they produce theater like they produce sausage. Every year they have to do a German classic, they have to do a boulevard, they have to do I don’t know what. And then every year it’s the same. It’s repetitive. If they could also have a place in which they would do Forum, I am sure that it would revitalize the theater that they do. I am sure that if we are going to do Hamlet with Rainbow of Desire techniques,[3] I think it’s going to revitalize also their acting in Shakespeare, when they do Shakespeare in the normal way. It makes acting more vital. So what I think we should not do is to exclude the learning of the language and go to the final production. That’s what’s being done now.

I have been told that Omaha is one of the more violent cities in the country. Dialogue between the people here would only help to understand why it is so violent and [why you can not] stop violence, because you cannot stop violence, but [you can] make it less than what exists. I’m quite sure that social TO can be important, not only statically showing another form of doing theater, but using this other form of doing theater to make life more bearable. For instance like in Brazil now, sometimes it’s unbearable…

P&W: We’ve talked this week about hope in the face of violence. In Brazil, in the United States, around the world, the free market is becoming the only moral order. In the face of all this is your theater, which implies a kind of future, a kind of hope. Do you have hope?

AB: Yes. I think there are some words that…should always be connected, because if not, it can become only religious words and not socially workable words. One is hope. Because what hope should we have if not the hope of our desire? And what desire should we have if not the desire to change our society toward something that can be better for all of us. So sometimes, I hear people talking about hope. I see very much in Brazil, miserable people [told], “You have to hope.” And I say, why should they hope if they know that if they don’t fight, if they don’t have the desire to fight, nothing is going to happen? To have the hope, blind hope that one day something is going to happen. To have the blind hope that someday God’s going to help you. The blind hope I think is even worse than no hope.

But [when] I do believe in hope is when you have a strong desire. If I believe that here, the people here, they have the strong desire to end or to make less the extraordinary racial violence that exists, then people have the right to have hope. I think that to have hope is a right that we have if we have desire. If we don’t have desire, we don’t have the right to have hope.

And which desire can you have? Desire here in Omaha. The desire to be richer than Mr. Warren Buffet. That’s a desire, infantile desire. You cannot have that; that’s not a legitimate desire. But desire that no one in Omaha should die because it’s too cold, or should die because they are hungry, or die because there are gangs that shoot one another. This desire is legitimate. And we would develop that desire and then we have the right to have hope. Hope is a right, it’s not something you should have by all means. If your desire is active, then you have the right to have hope. But to stay at home and say, “I hope that this is going to happen”—to have hope that you are going to win in the lottery—that’s not legitimate, that hope. To have the hope that the government is going to do all good things for the people, that’s not legitimate.

Notes

1. A technique used to help participants see how their image of another person influences conflict. For more information about Boal’s techniques, see Playing Boal (bibliography). [return]

2. When a spectactor comes on stage to replace the protagonist during a Forum Theatre performance. [return]

3. Boal has been invited to Stratford, England, to work with the Royal Shakespeare Company on Hamlet. [return]

This interview originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Summer 1996.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002