The Aesthetics of the Oppressed Augusto Boal

145 Pages·2006·1.89 MB·English

by  Augusto Boal

The Aesthetics
of the Oppressed
‘We must all do theatre – to find out who we are, and to discover who
we could become.’
Augusto Boal – legendary Brazilian theatre director and creator of
Theatre of the Oppressed – is back, with a stunning new collection
of essays and stories.
Boal’s vision of the transformative power of theatre reaches new
heights with this latest polemic against globalisation and the sedative
effects of Hollywood and television.
‘To resist, it is not enough to say No – it is necessary to desire!’
The Aesthetics of the Oppressed describes the basis of a practical
theatre project which enables individuals to reclaim themselves as
subjects. Its central message is that we can discover Art by discovering
our own creativity, and by discovering our creativity we discover
ourselves.
In this latest despatch, Boal communicates his inspirational vision
– articulating and expanding upon the practical and theoretical foun-
dations of the work which over the last thirty years has become a
vibrant international theatre movement.
Augusto Boal is a theatre director, dramatist, theorist, writer and
teacher. He was a Member of Parliament for Rio de Janeiro from 1993
to 1996. He is the author of The Theatre of the Oppressed,Games for
Actors and Non-Actors,The Rainbow of Desire,Legislative Theatreand
Hamlet and the Baker’s Son: my life in theatre and politics.
Adrian Jacksonis Artistic Director of Cardboard Citizens. This is his
fifth translated book by Augusto Boal. He has made and taught Theatre
of the Oppressed practice widely in many countries; recent theatre
work includes a co-production of Pericleswith the Royal Shakespeare
Company and a national tour of Visibleby Sarah Woods.
For information about the activities of Augusto Boal and the centres of
Theatre of the Oppressed, please contact:
Centro do Teatro do Oprimido
Avenida Mem de Sá, 31
Arcos da Lapa – Centro
Rio de Janeiro – RJ – Brazil
Tel. [phone]
Email: [email protected]
The Aesthetics of the
Oppressed
Augusto Boal
Translated by Adrian Jackson
First published 2006
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2006 Augusto Boal
© 2006 Translation: Routledge
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006.
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collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN10: 0–415–37176–7 (Hbk)
ISBN10: 0–415–37177–5 (Pbk)
ISBN10: 0–203–96983–9 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–37176–6 (Hbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–415–37177–3 (Pbk)
ISBN13: 978–0–203–96983–0 (ebk)
Contents
The dance teacher 1
The tree of the theatre of the oppressed 4
The aesthetics of the oppressed 9
A THEORETICAL FOUNDATION 11
1 ANALOGICAL AND COMPLEMENTARY SETS 11
2 WORDS AS MEANS OF TRANSPORT 13
3 THE EVIL THAT WORDS DO 15
4 FROM AESTHETIC PROCESS TO ARTISTIC PRODUCT 17
5 LOVE AND ART 19
6 ART AND KNOWLEDGE 20
7 AESTHETICS AND NEURONS 21
8 THE INVASION OF OUR BRAINS 23
9 METAPHOR AS TRANSLATION OR
TRANS-SUBSTANTIATION 26
10 CROWNS OF NEURON CIRCUITS 27
11 AESTHETIC NEURONS 29
12 VOLUME, TERRITORY AND THE INSIGNIA OF POWER 30
13 THE THREE LEVELS OF PERCEPTION 34
14 THE NECESSITY FOR THE AESTHETICS OF THE OPPRESSED 36
v
CONTENTS
15 THE SUBJUNCTIVE METHOD 39
16 THE METAPHOR: HUMANS AND HOMINIDS 40
THE PRACTICAL REALISATION: THE PROMETHEUS
PROJECT 44
1 THE WORD 44
2 THE IMAGE 46
3 THE SOUND 48
4 THE ETHICS 50
THEATRE AS A MARTIAL ART 57
THE INSUBMISSIVE PROTAGONIST 62
THE SKINNY APES AND PRIMITIVE DEMOCRACY 75
ART IN POLITICS AND THE POLITICS OF ART 81
A LADY IN NEW YORK 86
GLOBALISATION, CULTURE AND ART 95
THE SUICIDE OF THE ARTIST 95
THE GLOBALISATION OF THE MUMMIES 97
THE THREE PATHS OF CULTURE 100
vi
CONTENTS
THEATRE IN PRISONS 103
KING CLAUDIUS’S CROWN: OPPRESSED AND OPPRESSORS 103
THE FREEDOM OF PROMETHEUS AND THE SOUND OF
SILENCE 108
ETHICS AND MORALITY 110
A PRIMER, NOT A CATECHISM 119
SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY – 2001 130
THE BIRTHDAY SPEECH 130
vii

The dance teacher
When you live theatre, you live in emotion. After luminous Barcelona,
illuminated Paris and snowy London, at the beginning of March 2002, I
went to work in a hamlet of 10,000 souls, Hebden Bridge, in the middle of
England.
In my time as a legislator, I had already done Theatre of the Oppressed
with blind people in Rio de Janeiro, with deaf people in France, and with
people with a variety of disabilities in other cities around the world. In
Hebden Bridge I worked with deaf people, blind people, sufferers from
cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome, multiple sclerosis and deep depression –
all together within a single group; twenty people with different conditions
and several ‘carers’, who are not nurses, but may perform that function at
times and much more besides.
Why had they come from afar to work with me? I had met Susan Quick
in a workshop I led in Derry, in Northern Ireland, ten years back. She liked
my way of doing theatre so much that she went on to teach it in various war-
torn African countries, where she worked for seven years. Returning to
reside in her homeland, after having faced so many dangers abroad, what
with bombs and grenades, she was driving her car peacefully back from an
excursion, coming along a hillside in darkest winter when fog and night had
turned to ice, only to spin off the road thirty metres from her door, and
come careering off a ridge. She was left partly paralysed.
This did not stop her from doing theatre and she went on to lead
workshops for others like herself, who had some kind of physical or mental
disability. I hardly need to say that my workshop with her group was one of
the most difficult pieces of work of my life; never had my attention, or my
care for the group, been more concentrated on each and every one of
my pupils.
Of them, two seemed to me to demand particularly tender handling: Sig,
a very slender woman less than forty years of age and less than forty kilos
body weight, needed her carer to amplify her voice, so weak was her body,
so enfeebled her lungs; seated in a wheelchair, twice a session she flopped
down onto a mattress to rest. She had lost her parents in Johannesburg,
when her house was blown up, during the apartheid era. Sig lived with
relatives, and an assistant paid by the state.
Alan journeyed for two hours on the train, twice a day, from Liverpool
and back; a sufferer from cerebral palsy, he was unable to coordinate his
arms and legs, or to speak words or even syllables – thanks to the miracle of
electronics, he communicated with us by means of a computer, Dynavox,
1