Claude Potts: Could you tell us about the origins of Theater of the Oppressed?
Ariane Della Déa: Augusto Boal created the Theater of the Oppressed through his experimentation with Brazilian theater. It was a response to European and Italian theater which was performed by the upper classes. In the early 60s and late 50s Boal began experimenting with Brazilian thinking and from there came to understand the economic and social-political situation. He began presenting some of the struggles of the people in Brazil, especially from Northeastern Brazil. One time he presented the struggle of Brazilian people as a theater piece to people in which fake guns were used as props. The idea was to educate the population of Brazil. After the piece, people came to him and said, "That was a great idea! Where are your rifles?! Let’s go! You said that we were going to take over!" They thought he was serious about starting a revolution. That was when he realized that the theater was not only a form of portrayal, but also a tool. He then realized that he did not want to represent something that he couldn’t do himself. That is when he started the Forum Theater, in which the audience participates side by side with the actors on the stage.
After 1964, when the military took over in Brazil, the repression began and there was a lot of censorship. Boal, along with Paulo Freire and others, were imprisoned. Henry Miller, Langston Hughes, and other high profile foreign writers and actors put out a petition asking to free Boal. That is how Boal was able to get out alive. Others didn’t have the same luck, and many journalists died.
Before going to Paris, Boal first went to Argentina where he created the Invisible Theater. He created this type of theater in a restaurant because it didn’t require a stage or an audience. It all began when some actors came into the restaurant and one refused to pay. There were two other actors in the restaurant—one was a lawyer defending the action and another was a lay person supporting the action. It incited a debate and people who were eating in the restaurant began to take sides.
Boal then went to Chile and created the Forum Theater where people came on stage and took over the personas of the actors. In one situation a woman whose husband was cheating on her asked Boal to portray her story. One woman in the audience kept saying that she didn’t agree with the representation and so he called her up to show everyone what exactly she meant. This was the birth of the spect-actor where the spectator is the actor as well. With the spect-actor, the boundary between the stage and audience is non-existent and there is a close relationship between audience and actor, using it to resolve an issue.
The third form in Boal’s theatrics is called the Rainbow of Desire, created by Jacob Levy Moreno. Boal learned that oppression in Europe was not as overt as in Latin American, where the police were involved, but was instead more internalized. He created several games with sculpture. For instance, he would create a piece of sculpture for a feeling in a situation and then he would create another sculpture for the source of that feeling. How others viewed that feeling would become yet another sculpture. It became this flower from one feeling or situation that people perceive to another. It became psychoanalytic work, and that came to be called the Rainbow of Desire because it is many ways of dealing with your desire to change. That is the psychodrama portion of Theater of the Oppressed.
The last one was created when he returned to Brazil, which was the period known as the Great Phenomenon. Upon his return, he felt tremendous pressure from the public to participate politically. He was doing regular theater, but always experimenting with Brazilian-ness. He was elected to a city council and started using theater to decide what to change. He asked people what they wanted to change, so his theater group went out to the streets portraying the situations where there was needed change. One change involved getting the telephone booths lowered for the handicapped. He went out to ask people to decide what problems they wanted to change. They would go up on stage and portray that particular problem. People actually brought in the change they wanted to see and this became Legislative Theater. The people were the ones that were making the changes. It was the voice off the people inside of legislative, political action.
CP: Can you explain your involvement with the Theater of the Oppressed in Los Angeles and how it is enacted in different locations and situations?
ADD: Through my work on my Ph.D., I look at Theater of the Oppressed as a cultural forum. I look at it as a political reaction to oppression, and as a form of personal growth. I also look at how the transformation of time and culture, like a chameleon, adapts to it. A lot of people use Theater of the Oppressed as part of their own theater. Many are connected with the gay and lesbian community, informing people about prejudice and discrimination. This is an issue that goes on here in L.A and that is how Theater of the Oppressed operates-—there is an issue in the society and people will use the Theater of the Oppressed as a tool to get ideas about the kind of change people want to see. Discrimination is the main issue depicted through Theater of the Oppressed in the gay and lesbian community. A second use here in L.A is with youth in prisons. People work with prisoners to boost their confidence and self-image by telling them that the system didn’t work for them but that they can work for themselves by dramatically depicting what is going on. A lot of people use theater in K-12 education. There are a lot of exercises to bring out the confidence and respect in children—what you do in a bully situation and how do you react and work it out by informing teachers. Robin Lithgow of LAUSD is big on Theater of the Oppressed.
Solange Castro Belcher: You mentioned the role of the spect-actor—do you want to elaborate on that?
ADD: Boal says that there is no spectator or actor. Nobody is one or the other, but they are both at the same time. You are watching, but you are also acting because there is no actor without the spectator. This is crucial in the Theater of the Oppressed because the individual sitting in the audience will cross the invisible line between the untouchable stage and passive spectator and become an active person on stage informing the situation. For example, there was a situation regarding discrimination after September 11 where an Arab was being harassed and people were under the assumption that he was a terrorist. [In Theater of the Oppressed, ] the audience would be called to participate. Someone would go up on stage and ask to take his place and address the situation. The are many possible responses. If you have a resistant audience they might say that he should go back to his own country and others would say that he is not what they think he is. The solutions come from the people themselves. Theater of the Oppressed portrays what is happending with this individual within the collective society in general, how society is dealing with his/her issue, and how would they act in his/her place.
Interview with Ariane Della Déa
Ariane Della Déa is an expert in Theater of the Oppressed, an art form developed by Brazilian theorist, activist, and educator Augusto Boal. Solange Castro Belcher and Claude Potts interviewed her on September 5, 2002 at UCLA.