Theatre of the Oppressed

The actors perform a scene, in which they try to find a solution for a problem people may face in everyday life – gender and racial inequality, drug addiction, domestic violence, political instability etc. A spectator becomes a spect-actor: the audience may interrupt the performance and intervene by replacing actors and replaying a scene, trying a better solution. Augusto Boal believed such a theatre to promote liberation and engage people in social and political change. Acting in the world simultaneously with observing yourself in action demolishes a despotism of the traditional theatre as well as social…

Theatre of the oppressed is a term that was coined in the nineteen-sixties by the brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal. The Theatre of the Oppressed was developed in 20th century Brazil, which was a time of economic crisis, uncertainty and disorder. It was an attempt for Boal to create a socially responsive, academically stimulating and relevance orientated theatre in an atmosphere of terminating conditions and social injustice, in order to efficiently examine the work of Boal, it is…

developing. Normally when I am the director of a project I try to make sure that everything is constant, unique, and together, yet with the rapidness of this project I had to through these ideas out the window. We had to create something. This really made me realize that everything we have done for this class could be used to benefit our piece. I realized that the inconstancy of art is what's beautiful about it, we could change and work together to make something beautiful and inconstant. With…

Using theatre to help the homeless Homelessness is a huge problem in the United Kingdom, homelessness doesn 't just involve people sleeping on the streets it also encompasses families living in temporary accommodation or in substandard housing. My idea is to devise a piece of theatre using workshops with some people who have gone through or are going through homelessness, once a piece has been devised then a short tour will take the production around schools and areas with higher than normal…

Baraka seemed to me to come off quite aggressivly in his piece “The Revolutionary Theatre.” Such aggression I think might not of been absolutely necessary. It is easy for me to say that it is absolutely necessary now, but the 60’s when Baraka was saying these things it was not quite as radical. This piece was interesting to read for a number of reasons, but particularly because it provided a window into the life of an oppressed African-American in the 60’s. In all honesty, I grew up in…

writer and politician Augusto Boal was the founder of “Theatre of the Oppressed.” Boal strongly believed that each human is a theatre within themselves, each person is an actor, and also a spectator. Through watching our own course of actions, we are able to amend them to have a different impact and a change to the world we live in. Theatre of the Opressed is for, by and about the people, and Boal wanted the audience (spect-actors) to analyse the struggles, problems and oppression “Theatre of…

Throughout this class, I have matured as a person, a student, and theatre artist. Also, the class as a whole has become better at participating in hard and complex conversations and activities, that we were tiptoeing around before. I’ve seen both of these progressing simultaneously and often due to the same activities and conversations. The activity that caused the most change for myself and from what I saw the class was the “Oppressed or oppressor” game. As we were faced with random pictures…

One detail that stuck out to him was that the Virgin Mary was quite different than the well-known Biblical version of her. In this piece, she refused to accept that Jesus was making himself into a sacrificial lamb for all those who have sinned. Additionally, she opposed everyone that contributed to putting Jesus on the cross to be crucified (Fo and Rame 129). Later on, he saw fragments from another story from the 1300s which caused a debate over Mary at the time, questioning whether or not she…

the bourgeois rose up due to their individual prowess and practicality, leading to the rise of the exceptional individual protagonist in theater. Machiavelli's plays propound the value of intellect separated from morality, through which characters get what they want. He talks about Machiavelli and Poetics of Virtu. The feudal abstraction where the ruling class dictating the content of the plays that were put up the state and the wealthy financed this productions hence will not permit content…

themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others… negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry” (p. 72). These ideas have echoes in the arts. Like Anna Deavere Smith, many theatre practitioners have eschewed the idea of an actor reciting to a passive audience, but have involved their viewers in a dialogue. Democratic education also emphasizes concepts such as the freedom for students to bring their own knowledge,…