Sophie Howarth on the agitational influence of Augusto Boal

The Brazilian theatre director, educator and politician Augusto Boal died earlier this month. He was a huge inspiration to me and his influence can be felt in many of our courses here at The School of Life.

I had the fortune to be part of a workshop around The Art of Legislation Boal led at the GLA in London in 1998. Later I learned about his ideas from Adrian Jackson, who translated Boal’s work into English and adopts his unique brand of playful agitation though his own work as artistic director of Cardboard Citizens. Earlier this year, I made a personal resolution to try and attend another of Boal’s workshops wherever in the world that might take me, as I yearned for more of the confidence to make useful trouble he inspired. Sadly that opportunity has now passed.

Boal was the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, a form of everyday theatre used in radical education and increasingly in drama therapy. The name is a variation on Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the now infamous 1968 education manifesto by philosopher Paolo Friere.  Friere is without doubt one of the great visionaries of revolutionary social education, but his books are as earnest as they are urgent. Boal, by contrast, made the very serious project of tacking social injustice seem full of humour, joy and hope. Games were in his blood and at the heart of his methodology.

Boal believed everyone could make theatre, and that it was a unique way for each of us to identify strategies for personal and social change. In his Invisible Theatre actors would, seeminly spontaneously, put on a prepared scene in a public place - a restaurant or crowded square - that would quickly engage the surrounding public. In Forum Theatre, 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. It all makes Brecht look tame.

The impact Boal made on the everyday lives of many previously disenfranchised Brazilians did not endear him to the military regime of the 1960s and 1970s, and his life was an eventful one involving imprisonment and exile.  But after the fall of Brazil’s dictatorship, Boal returned to Rio de Janeiro and used his innovative theatrical approach to engage overlooked communities as a city councillor. He started over a dozen theatere companies and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008.

Sophie Howarth is Director of The School of Life.

 

 

Comments

[Pom Pom]

Fascinating. Thank you. I am an eighth grade language arts teacher, always looking for ways to invite students into real world thinking. You've inspired me. You've given me a new interest. Your tribute is lovely and kind . . . and inviting.

[j]

That's so sad to hear. He certainly represented a change of paradigm in multiple arenas.