An Evening with Augusto Boal, 5/25/09

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The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB)

--a member of The Institute for Popular Education at the Brecht Forum--

--founded in 1990--

451 West Street

New York, New York 10014

toplab@...

http://www.toplab.org

The Brecht Forum,

The Education Ministry of The Riverside Church,

Theatre of the Oppressed at The Riverside Church, and

The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB)

present

An Evening with Augusto Boal

in a Performance/Demonstration of Forum Theater (a Theater of the

Oppressed technique)

with assistance of members of his Intensive Master Workshop at the Brecht

Forum

Monday, May 25, 2009 at 7:00 pm

at the Assembly Hall of The Riverside Church

91 Claremont Avenue at West 120 Street (one block west of Broadway)

New York City

(Subway: IRT Broadway/Seventh Avenue local #1 to 116 Street; walk north on

Broadway to 120 Street, turn left, walk one block to Claremont. Bus: M-4,

M-5 or M-104 to 120 Street or 122 Street.)

Forum Theater, one of the techniques in the Theater of the Oppressed

reportory, is an innovative approach to public forums, and is rooted in

the Brazilian popular education and culture movements of the 1950s and

1960s. It is designed for use in schools, community centers, trade unions,

and political, solidarity and grassroots organizations. It is especially

useful as an organizing tool in social justice movements. Workshop

participants (the actors) are asked to tell a story, taken from daily

life, containing a political or social problem of difficult solution. A

skit presenting that problem is improvised and presented. The original

solution proposed by the protagonist must contain at least one social or

political error which leaves the problem unresolved. When the skit is

over, the audience discusses the proposed solution, and then the scene is

performed once more. But now, audience members are urged to intervene by

stopping the action, coming on stage to replace actors, and enacting their

own ideas. Thus, instead of remaining passive, the audience becomes active

" spect-actors " who now create alternative solutions and control the

dramatic action. The aim of the forum is not to find an ideal solution,

but to invent new ways of confronting oppression. In Brazil and other

parts of Latin America, as well as in India and Africa, Forum Theater has

been used with peasant and worker " audiences " as training in labor and

community organizing and participatory democracy.

Contribution--sliding scale: $10/$15/$25

(free for Brecht Forum subscribers and Riverside Church congregants)

Reserve online at http://brechtforum.org/boalperformance-2009?bc=

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" We must emphasize: What Brecht does not want is that the spectators

continue to leave their brains with their hats upon entering the

theater, as do bourgeois spectators. " --Augusto Boal

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Augusto Boal

Augusto Boal is a political activist and major innovator of post-Brechtian

theater. He served as Artistic Director of the Arena Theater in Sao o

from 1956 to 1971. In the 1970s, he came under attack by the Brazilian

government, resulting in his imprisonment, torture and subsequent exile.

Boal has lectured, conducted workshops, and mounted productions throughout

North and South America, Europe, India and Africa, and has written a

number of books, including Theater of the Oppressed; Games for Actors and

Non Actors; and The Rainbow of Desire. An activist in the Brazilian

Workers' Party (PT), he presently resides in Rio de Janeiro. In 1992, he

was elected to the City Council of Rio, a post he held for four years.

Once installed in office, he adapted his theater techniques for use in

city politics, with some hilarious--and sometimes rancorous--results.

Members of the Center for the Theater of the Oppressed became Boal's City

Council staff, and created seventeen companies of players practicing

" Legislative Theater " throughout the city. Currently, Boal continues to

work with the Center for the Theater of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro

and is involved in ongoing research concerning and formulation of a theory

of the aesthetics of the oppressed. Augusto Boal was a 2008 Nobel Peace

Prize nominee.

The Theater of the Oppressed

The Theater of the Oppressed, established in the early 1970s by Brazilian

director and Workers' Party (PT) activist Augusto Boal, is a form of

popular theater, of, by, and for people engaged in the struggle for

liberation. More specifically, it is a rehearsal theater designed for

people who want to learn ways of fighting back against oppression in their

daily lives. In the Theater of the Oppressed, oppression is defined, in

part, as a power dynamic based on monologue rather than dialogue; a

relation of domination and command that prohibits the oppressed from being

who they are and from exercising their basic human rights. Accordingly,

the Theater of the Oppressed is a participatory theater that fosters

democratic and cooperative forms of interaction among participants.

Theater is emphasized not as a spectacle but rather as a language designed

to: 1) analyze and discuss problems of oppression and power; and 2)

explore group solutions to these problems. This language is accessible to

all.

Bridging the separation between actor (the one who acts) and spectator

(the one who observes but is not permitted to intervene in the theatrical

situation), the Theater of the Oppressed is practiced by " spect-actors "

who have the opportunity to both act and observe, and who engage in

self-empowering processes of dialogue that help foster critical thinking.

The theatrical act is thus experienced as conscious intervention, as a

rehearsal for social action rooted in a collective analysis of shared

problems of oppression. This particular type of interactive theater is

rooted in the pedagogical and political principles specific to the popular

education method developed by Brazilian educator o Freire: 1) to see

the situation lived by the participants; 2) to analyze the root causes of

the situation; and 3) to act to change the situation following the

precepts of social justice.

*****

Other Upcoming TOPLAB Events:

March 21: Diabetic Drama workshop with Robbie McCauley

(info at http://brechtforum.org/events/diabetic-dramas-1?bc=)

March 28-29: The Rainbow of Desire

(info at http://brechtforum.org/events/rainbow-desire?bc=)

March 29: Closing party for Refuge and Resistance: Reflections on Gendered

Violence (an installation and performance piece conceived and executed by

Ocean Ana Rising)

(info at

http://brechtforum.org/events/ocean-anna-rising-presents-refuge-and-resistance?b\

c=)

April 18-19: Cop-in-the-Head

(info at http://brechtforum.org/events/cop-head-0?bc=)

April 25: Diabetic Drama workshop with Robbie McCauley

(info at http://brechtforum.org/events/diabetic-dramas-2?bc=)

May 23-25: Forum Theater workshop with Augusto Boal, n Boal and

TOPLAB facilitators

(info from toplab@...)

May 26-28: Rainbow of Desire into Forum Theater workshop with Augusto

Boal, n Boal and TOPLAB facilitators

(info from toplab@...)

========================================================================

" The Marxist poetics of Bertolt Brecht does not stand opposed to one or

another formal aspect of the Hegelian idealist poetics but rather denies

its very essence, asserting that the character *is not absolute subject*

but the object of economic or social forces to which he responds and in

virtue of which he acts...

" In Brecht's objection [to idealist poetics], as well as in any other

Marxist objection, what is at stake is who, or which term, precedes the

other: the subjective or the objective. For idealist poetics, social

thought conditions social being; for Marxist poetics, social being

conditions social thought. In Hegel's view, the spirit creates the

dramatic action; for Brecht, the character's social relations create the

dramatic action....

" Brecht was a Marxist; therefore, for him, a theatrical work cannot end

in repose, in equilibrium. It must, on the contrary, show the ways in

which society loses its equilibrium, which way society is moving, and

how to hasten that transition.

" Brecht contends that the popular artist must abandon the downtown

stages and go to the neighborhoods, because only there will he find

people who are truly interested in changing society: in the

neighborhoods he should show his images of social life to the workers

who are interested in changing that social life, since they are its

victims. A theater that attempts to change the changers of society

cannot lead to repose, cannot re-establish equilibrium. The bourgeois

police tries to re-establish equilibrium, to enforce repose: a Marxist

artist, on the other hand, must promote the movement toward national

liberation and toward the liberation of classes oppressed by

capital...[Hegel and Aristotle] desire a quiet somnolence at the end of

the spectacle; Brecht wants the theatrical spectacle to be the beginning

of action: the equilibrium should be sought by transforming society, and

not by purging the individual of his just demands and needs....

" I believe that all the truly revolutionary theatrical groups should

transfer to the people the means of production in the theater so that

the people themselves may utilize them. The theater is a weapon, and it

is the people who should wield it. "

--Augusto Boal, The Theater of the Oppressed

========================================================================

===

The Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory (TOPLAB)

toplab@...

http://www.toplab.org

" My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the

battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed. "

-- W. Bush, May 1, 2003

" ...I told the American people that the road ahead would be difficult, and

that we would prevail. Well, it has been difficult--and we are

prevailing. "

-- W. Bush, June 28, 2005

" Our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary....America is engaged in a new

struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can and we will

prevail. "

-- W. Bush, January 10, 2007

" Prevailing in Iraq is not going to be easy. "

-- W. Bush, March 19, 2007

+U.S. military fatalities through May 1, 2003: 140

+U.S. military fatalities through June 28, 2005: 1743

+U.S. military fatalities through January 11, 2007: 3017

+U.S. military fatalities through March 19, 2007: 3217

+U.S. military fatalities as of March 8, 2009: 4256 (this figure exceeds

the number of people killed in all of the incidents that occurred on

September 11, 2001)

+Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion, as of September 2004 (estimated by

The Lancet): 100,000+

+Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion, as of July 2006 (estimated by The

Lancet): 654,965

+Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion, as of March 8, 2009 (estimated

by Just Foreign Policy): 1,311,696*

*These figures are based on the number of deaths estimated in The Lancet

(the British medical journal) study through July 2006, and then updated

based " on how quickly deaths are mounting in Iraq " . To do that, Just

Foreign Policy multiplies The Lancet figure as of July 2006 by the ratio

of current deaths reported by Iraq Body Count (IBC), divided by IBC deaths

as of July 1, 2006. The IBC numbers, considerably lower than those cited

by The Lancet, Opinion Research Business (a British polling firm which

estimated 1.2 million Iraqi deaths as of September 2007), and even the

Iraq Ministry of Health, are based on the number of fatalities cited in

various news reports and have been criticized, with much justification,

for not giving an accurate assessment of the real Iraqi death count. The

much more rigorous and statistically-reliable study, conducted by teams

from s Hopkins University, Columbia University and Al-Mustansiriya

University, and published in The Lancet in September 2004, put the figure

at around 100,000 civilians dead. However, that data had been based on

" conservative assumptions " , according to research team leader Les ,

and the actual count at that time was credibly assumed to be significantly

higher. For example, The Lancet study's data greatly underestimated

fatalities in Fallujah due to the surveying problems encountered there at

that time. The second Lancet study, released on October 10, 2006,

indicated that 654,965 " excess " deaths of Iraqis have occurred since the

outbreak of the aggression and genocide committed by the United States

against the people of Iraq. The current figures provided by Just Foreign

Policy seem to be logically consistent with the increasing rates of death

from 2003 to 2004, and 2004 to 2006.

Sources: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/iraqdeaths.html

http://www.antiwar.com/casualties/

http://icasualties.org/oif/

http://www.iraqbodycount.org/

http://www.zmag.org/lancet.pdf

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1338749,00.html

http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/Iraq_war.html

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php4?article_id=6271

http://olm.blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/Week-of-Mon-20041025/008279.html

http://www.thelancet.com/webfiles/images/journal/lancet/s0140673606694919.pdf