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. (00 55 21) 2232 5826 / 2215 0503 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. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s 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