Theatre of the Oppressed (TO)

Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is a community-based interactive theater that is used as a vehicle for social change. The concept was developed by Brazilian theater practitioner Augusto Boal in the 1960s in conjunction with his work with the country’s peasant and worker classes. Typically, TO has associations with left-wing politics and is intended to combine elements of social justice activism with theater. In particular, TO is fashioned around the inclusion of audience participation. For Boal, the key to TO was to transform passive spectators into active performers. Boal’s primary goal was to establish empathy between the plight of those being depicted on stage and the audience while enabling the audience to imagine positive change as a result.

TO was featured as a part of popular education programs run by socialist groups in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s. While productions began with a prewritten script, it was never intended to be acted to completion. Instead, audience members were encouraged to yell out suggestions to the actors on how to act in the situation being presented. The actors would then improvise the remainder of the scene using the audience's suggestions. A later form actually involved calling audience members onto the stage to engage in the performance themselves. Boal called these active audience members “spect-actors.” Boal theorized that by imagining themselves in the actors’ shoes, the audience transferred their hopes for social action onto the characters being presented, and, through the resolution of the conflicts on stage, the audience was able to feel satisfied that society was also capable of change. Though interactive theater has become a more traditional style of theater since the 1970s, Boal was one of the first to use this methodology.

Background

Boal was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and formally trained as a chemical engineer. As part of his education, he lived in New York City while he attended Columbia University in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Shortly after completing his degree, he was asked to work with the Arena Theatre in the Brazilian city of São Paulo. During his time, Boal began developing his idea of an interactive audience as a functional element of performances. In the 1960s, he initially used the improvisational form of TO that allowed the audience to shape the performance as it was ongoing. However, at one performance, a female audience member became enraged when the performers were unable to understand her suggestion. She took it upon herself to jump on stage and act out her ideas.

Boal was entranced by the idea and, in future performances, sought to increasingly include audience members into the actual physical performance rather than the more passive suggestion-oriented form of TO. Over time, he found that the spect-actors offered a transformative element. First, they brought their own experiences to the play. In so doing they created an unexpected element that forced the other actors to shape their performances differently from night to night. Second, these spect-actors often left the production feeling validated. Their suggestions had been understood and embraced, and they had been able to enact a form of release from the social problems affecting them, even if there were no real-world implications to their performances. However, these spect-actors—perhaps moved by the future envisioned on the stage—were more likely to engage in social action. Over time, Boal’s TO emerged as a vehicle for grassroots activism among the working class. These ideas were shaped in part by the social dynamics of Boal’s Brazil.

Initially, the Brazil that Boal returned to was largely democratic and in the midst of an economic boom. However, in 1964, Brazil experienced a coup d’état when President João Goulart was overthrown by the Brazilian Armed Forces. In the wake of the coup, Brazil was controlled by an authoritarian military regime supported by the United States.

This new military regime instituted a more restrictive constitution that, among other civil rights violations, greatly limited freedom of speech. Though the coup leaders insisted that they would restore democratic elections, the military regime lasted until 1985. Resistance leaders and members of the opposition parties were subjected to arrests and public torture. Boal’s work drew the attention of the military leadership, and he was kidnapped by government operatives in 1971. After his arrest, he was tortured and sent into exile.

Despite his forced exile, Boal continued to shape his radical theater ideas into a concrete plan of social activism. In 1973, he published Teatro del oprimido y otras poéticas políticas (The Theatre of the Oppressed), which became the treatise for his ideas. He established his own theater in Paris, France, to workshop his ideas in a real-world setting, eventually establishing several different Centers for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Europe. His ideas saw enough critical support to stage the first International Festival of the Theatre of the Oppressed in 1981.

With Brazil’s democratic processes finally restored in 1985, Boal returned to his homeland the following year, where he established his first Brazilian Theatre of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro. He also established several smaller community theaters. His second book, Jeux pour acteurs et non-acteurs (Games for Actors and Non-Actors), published in 1992, expanded upon his ideas for TO and offered a template for theaters seeking to use his methodologies.

Boal sought election for the first time as a city council member as an at-large candidate and won office in 1992. A third book, 1995’s The Rainbow of Desire, proposed a method for using TO as a means of psycho-therapeutic treatment. For the remainder of his life, Boal continued to stage workshops to teach his methodologies for TO. He died in 2009 at the age of seventy-eight.

Overview

TO can involve several games and techniques: image theater, forum theater, cop-in-the-head, rainbow of desire, legislative theater, and invisible theater. In image theater, participants are asked to shape one another as if they were clay in response to observations made by the group about society, culture, or themselves. Forum theater, by contrast, is intended as a problem-solving exercise. Using Boal’s original TO techniques, audience members shout suggestions to actors recreating certain real-world scenarios. The suggestions are intended to serve as potential means of conflict resolution. In cop-in-the-head, actors are asked to give voice to the internal voices that prevent them from acting as they might otherwise wish. Rainbow of desire tasks actors with discovering the types of tensions that sabotage relationships. As more pairs are added to the scene, eventually, it becomes a tableau, or “rainbow,” or the different experiences felt in a group in the same situation. Invisible theater is similar to flash mobs in that a group of actors performs scenes in public without the people around them being aware that what they are seeing has been staged. Finally, legislative theater was born from Boal’s experiences as a city council member. In this form, art meets real-world politics, with legislators having open forums to ask the public for suggestions for laws. Boal used this process to help draft thirteen laws during his tenure as an elected official.

Helping to organize these exercises are figures called facilitators or jokers. The term “joker” is a reference to the joker in a deck of cards, which are typically regarded as wild cards. The joker is tasked with guiding the games and exercises that are the backbone of TO.

TO has been adopted by a variety of disadvantaged communities around the world, such as in inner cities and prisons. In the United States, one such example is the Theatre of the Oppressed New York City (TONYC). This group partners with various community groups in the city to form small theater troupes composed of people seeking to express their frustrations with contemporary society. The program is designed to allow people struggling with the effects of economic, racial, cultural, gender, or sexual discrimination.

First, the members are brought together to discuss the issues affecting them. Specifically, they are asked to relate stories about previous circumstances when they felt that they had been denied opportunities based on their identities. For transgender children, this might include being denied the right to use a bathroom representing their gender identity, problems with discussing their gender identity with their families, or their inability to participate in activities with people who share their identified gender. This process is intended to serve as an opportunity to brainstorm ideas for the play while giving people a judgment-free arena to examine their feelings.

These troupes, with the assistance of one of TONYC’s jokers, are then tasked with creating a short play that echoes scenarios from their own lives. Troupe members may bring together several different events into a single play. Each cast member is then asked to develop their individual character based on the hypothetical situation. They may play either a protagonist or an antagonist. The story is fleshed out through a series of strategies and games. For instance, during the “interior monologue” (based upon Boal’s cop-in-the-head) game, each troupe member is asked to spontaneously act out some of the negative thoughts in their head. Using these and other TO exercises, a short play of ten or so minutes is created.

These scenes are presented in front of a live audience. After the scene has finished, a facilitator brings an audience member onto the stage to take the place of one of the troupe’s members. The scene is then reenacted with the participation of the audience member. The goal is to create empathy and trigger enough of an emotional response to activate the audience into positive actions.

Bibliography

Chamberlain, Franc, editor. "Working Without Boal: Digressions and Developments in the Theatre of the Oppressed." Contemporary Theatre Review, vol. 3, no. 1, 1995.

Duffy, Peter, and Elinor Vettraino, editors. Youth and Theatre of the Oppressed. Palgrave MacMillan, 2010.

Gewertz, Ken. "Augusto Boal’s ‘Theatre of the Oppressed.’" The Harvard Gazette, 11 Dec. 2003, news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2003/12/augusto-boals-theatre-of-the-oppressed. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.

Heritage, Paul. "The Courage to Be Happy: Augusto Boal, Legislative Theatre, and the 7th International Festival of the Theatre of the Oppressed." The Drama Review, vol. 38, no. 3, 1994, pp. 25–34.

Howe, Kelly, et al., editors. The Routledge Companion to the Theatre of the Oppressed. Routledge, 2019.

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"What Is Theatre of the Oppressed and How Can We Use It?" Narrative Arts, workingnarratives.org/article/theatre-of-the-oppressed. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.