The New York Times – May 9, 2009

Augusto Boal, Stage Director Who Gave a Voice to Audiences, Is Dead at 78
By BRUCE WEBER

Augusto Boal, a Brazilian director and drama theorist who created interactive, politically expressive theater forms under the rubric of the Theater of the Oppressed, died last Saturday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 78.

The cause was respiratory failure, said Elisa Nunes, a spokeswoman for Hospital Samaritano in Rio, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Boal had been suffering from leukemia.

As both a theorist and a director, Mr. Boal (pronounced Bo-AHL) was especially intrigued by the relationship between the spectator and the actor, and his career was a steady march toward a greater partnership between the two. In his philosophy, life and theater are related enterprises; ordinary citizens are actors who are simply unaware of the play, and everyone can make theater, even the untrained. In his work the audience often became an active participant in the performance itself.

Theater of the Oppressed, which Mr. Boal created in the early 1970s and which has become an international theater movement with adherents in more than 40 countries, is politically as well as artistically motivated. Its productions take aim at injustice, especially in communities, often poor or otherwise disenfranchised, that are traditionally voiceless. Over the years Mr. Boal developed it in various forms.

The movement, Brechtian in its social engagement, takes its name from “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” a 1968 education manifesto by the philosopher Paulo Freire. It grew from Mr. Boal’s work at the Arena Theater in São Paolo between 1955 and 1971. In the 1960s he created what he called Newspaper Theater; he and his colleagues would venture into factories and churches, encourage discussion of issues covered in the newspaper and help the residents dramatize them.

Variations on the theme followed. One was Invisible Theater, in which actors would, with seeming spontaneity, put on a prepared scene in a public place — a restaurant or a crowded square — that would inevitably engage the surrounding citizens. Another was Forum Theater, in which a play about a social problem turned out to be the beginning of a negotiation; audience members were encouraged to suggest different modes of resolution for the play and even to climb onstage to help enact them.

Considered a rabble-rouser by the Brazilian military junta, Mr. Boal was jailed for several months in 1971 and subsequently exiled. He lived in Argentina, Portugal and France as his Theater of the Oppressed evolved, returning to Brazil after democratic rule was restored in 1985.

Continue reading →