TCLA: Bill of Rights: Features: 7: Theater of the Oppressed

“The conviction that there is an actor in each of us is the driving force behind a form of drama that seeks to awaken consciences and change lives.”
- Augusto Boal

For the past three years, IDEA's summer research seminar has experimented with different methods of presenting the findings of students' investigations. Inspired by the work of Brazilian playwright and drama theorist Augusto Boal, this year's student participants and their teacher fellows interwove their conventional speeches and powerpoint presentations with one of humanity's oldest art forms—performance theater.

Boal's Theater of the Oppressed serves a special purpose in the social dialectic because it not only allows practitioners to educate themselves about certain issues in the process of addressing them, but also because it provides a public platform whereby they can share what they've learned with others. Local authority on resistance theater, Ariane Dalla Déa explains that "the idea was to educate the population of Brazil—the lower classes—through theater." First performed in São Paulo, Brazil in the 1960s, the Theater of the Oppressed can be quite useful to K-12 educators in a socially and economically diverse city like Los Angeles. She continues: "Theater of the Oppressed makes people think… It is an excellent way to convey a message, to make people think about their position in society—what it is that they're doing, what is going on."

Such was the case this summer as student researchers approached the stage in UCLA's Faculty Center for their final presentations. The students, urban youth from high schools across Los Angeles, metamorphasized themselves into those members of society who were responsible for the state of their education, both directly and indirectly. In a mock press conference, Hector Ruelas—a six-foot tall Mexican-American high school senior with a cleanly shaved head—played the part of George W. Bush and fielded questions from student reporters. Unable to coherently answer any of their pointed and well thought-out questions, Mr. Bush could only repeat canned responses like the need for "homeland security" and "the war on terrorism." Ultimately, it was these students who had no choice but to take the stage away from the tongue-tied President and teach him what they had learned in their five weeks at UCLA and what needed to be done to start bringing the level of California's educational system up from its embarrassing rankings at the bottom of the scale in national reports.

In another Theater of the Oppressed-inspired skit, Moises Castillo plays the role of a dictatorial high school teacher who puts a dunce hat on Cinthya Felix for speaking Spanish in the classroom and chastises the other students for not having textbooks, paper, and pencils. As we witnessed this ludicrous scene where teacher blames the victim for the school failing to provide basic learning resources, we could only ask ourselves as members of the audience why and how this could be happening in the richest state in the union.

According to Ms. Dalla Déa, what differentiates Theater of the Oppressed from other forms of resistance theater is that it really does involve everyone. It is not just those on the stage who play a vital role, but it is also the members of the audience too. Boal calls these new players spect-actors. "When you are sitting watching a piece," Ariane explains, "you are watching but you are also acting. There is no actor without the spectator… The boundary between stage and audience is non-existent and there is a close relationship between audience and actor, which is used to resolve an issue.”

Not long after having returned from forced exile in Europe for most of Brazil's oppressive military dictatorship, Boal was elected as a city council member in 1992 for the poor neighborhoods of his native Rio de Janeiro. He would use theater workshops to poll the residents of the favelas—the slums or shantytowns—to not only get an idea of what problems were of critical importance to them but also to provide his constituency with a more natural outlet whereby they could partake in the larger process of solving their own problems. With the solutions recommended by the community members, Boal and his staff would approach the mayor's office directly, stage a public event, or draft a bill for the legislature. Basically an outgrowth of an earlier form of Theater of the Oppressed called Forum Theater, Boal dubbed this particular form Legislative Theater.

Student researchers in this summer's seminar may have not have adhered to the theoretical tenets of Boal's Theater of the Oppressed (if he were lucky enough to be present at UCLA himself on August 2) as much as he would have liked them to. However, when this years group of student researchers constructed a classroom for us with just words and gestures, those of us who were present felt as if we were in that classroom with them. Magically, we began to see through their eyes what they see and experience in their schools every day.

When the teacher screamed at them for speaking in Spanish, he was also screaming at us. When a cockroach scrambled across a dilapidated desk, we felt that it was our desk too. When the students could not open up their books as the teacher directed them because the school never provided these materials in the first place, we felt simultaneously ashamed and angry. When all of these things happened in front of us, we couldn't help but to understand what this theater was representing. At that moment we were no longer in UCLA's exclusive Faculty Center; we were in one of the many public high school classrooms across the city of Los Angeles. It was difficult to keep from crying out at the injustice, the lack of regard for these students and the future that we all share together. It is in this way that Augusto Boal's legacy as a dramatist, activist, and educator continues to reverberate across the globe inspiring the disenfranchised to speak up and act up because in the end, we are all in it together. If the world is a stage, then we are all spect-actors.

Boal, Augusto. Teatro del oprimido y otras poéticas políticas. Ediciones de la Flor: Buenos Aires: 1974.

Boal, Augusto. "Theatre of the Oppressed" The UNESCO Courier (November 1997): 32-36.

Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory/New York (TOPLAB)
http://www.toplab.org
New York City based web sites contains informational articles about the T.O.P. with links to groups around the world, bibliography, and photos.

Originally from São Paulo, Brazil where her father worked with Augusto Boal in the Arena Theatre, Ariane Dalla Déa is currently working on her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at UC Irvine. The topic of her dissertation is the Theater of the Oppressed. She also works closely with the Theatre of the Oppressed Collective in Los Angeles based at USC.

Claude Henry Potts is responsible for the web design of all issues of Teaching to Change LA. He is also a librarian and specialist in Latin American culture.