Theatre of the Oppressed Theorised: Who, How, and What Comprises Forum Theatre's capacity to liberate?

Boal insinuates that the philosophical foundation of the Theatre of the Oppressed is related to the Hegelian and Aristotelian concept that being determines thought and that man can be changed.  Similarly, in the social cognitive view, environmental influences effect human functioning through symbolisation, where personal factors and environmental events operate as interacting determinants of one another.  The social cognitive theory embraces the human and human affairs as its subject, dealing strictly with the social world.

According to Boal, the automated mechanisation of the body is so hardened by habits that it utilises only 30% of its capacity, thus resulting in a severe suppression of emotions.  Such habitual constriction of sensations developed from an unconscious repetition of experiences in day-to-day life.  Our inability to dissociate ourselves from what has previously been acquired from society’s routine, is according to cognitive empiricists, the underlying form of behaviourism.  Empiricists claim that knowledge takes the form of associations between ideas.  The body’s senses are linked and innate; everything else is a development of this through association.  Associationism is the formation of thought resulting from how things elate in the world.   Boal gives an example of association, in which physical experiences affect the psychological: ‘beings with refrigerators, cars and houses…do not have the same social thoughts as those Latin American beings who, by and large, live in slums, suffer hunger, and have no vestige of protection against disease and unemployment.’  

The empiricists’ endorsement of the doctrine that everything in the mind is initially in the senses is explicitly consistent with the Boalian ideology.  In the workshop ‘Models’ and ‘Dynamisations’, Boal’s attempt to ‘de-specialise’ the actor’s body was apparent.  For example, the first and second dynamisation engaged in the emission of and reception to, simple physical events.  In order to gain awareness of associations Boal encouraged me to see, hear, sense and react to movements that are normally instinctive.

Boal believes that mental formation can be explained in material terms insofar as societal norms are represented in the body, mind and subsequent behaviour.  As an actor in the Boal workshop my duty extended beyond mere participation to a more complex activity of re-harmonisation and gaining consciousness of my instinctive physical associations with society.  Theatre of the Oppressed actors in reality are people, or more specifically prisoners, used to continuous discrimination and oppression.  Their slumped shoulders, aching backs and monotonous voices the clear result of the constrictions of a cramped and demoralising existence in a prison environment.  Society’s conventions are capable of entrapping a human being’s desires.   To learn new ways of living requires expending effort on the disruption of secure routines in order to develop new habits.  Boal’s workshop created an unfamiliar mediation system that was included to nullify the restrictions on my muscular, sensory, imaginative, memorising and emotional characteristics.   For example: the first model method paid particular attention to individual muscular movement. The fourth dynamisation established a recalling and re-experience of emotions through the body; the second model method developed awareness and memory through the visualisation of a concrete entity.  The third dynamisation activated muscular structures by mirroring various participants’ idiosyncratic, physical responses.  Finally, improvisation was recognisable for the entirety of the workshop.  The improvisation was at once expressionistic, symbolic and metaphorical.  This style is rudimentary to the process of demechanisation and discovery because the outcome is always unknown and non-habitual – an act of consciousness.

Boal’s theatrical philosophy is partly based on the stage space itself, and its infinite capacity of self-observation.  Boal defines theatre as the very first discovery for humankind; a ‘dichotomic’ aesthetic space where recognition of one’s self and one’s other emerges.  Human development is essentially dramatic, in that recreation, invention and role-play is used as a means of leaving social skills, assertiveness and accustamisation to the drama of everyday life.  The Boalian stage offers more than a platform for presentation, it is instead a symbolic foundation for cognitive discovery.  Through its exploration and reconstruction of human behaviour the space is symbolic and transforming and so worthy of further analysis.

The aesthetic space is multidimensional in that a subject’s (the actor’s) memory and sensibility are re-enacted upon it.  The aesthetic space occupies the past and the future, the known and the new.  No real distinction between the real and the theatrical are made, hence the actor and the character become one and so too does the experience of both concrete and rehearsed emotion.  In its cognitive nature, forum theatre calls for a remembrance and consciousness of a previous situation; the projected gestures and words magnify the subject telescopically.  The state of belonging completely and simultaneously to two autonomous worlds is essential to the link of fiction and reality in forum theatre.  The stage enables an actor to re-live a scene with re-emotion and like in the de-mechanisation of a body, shows things that might have previously escaped his or her gaze.  

The aesthetic space’s quality of plasticity (through interplaying the past and the present), ultimately paves the way for the oppressed’ discovery of intervention, of studying alternatives and of varying the action.  Seeing oneself inside and outside a situation through rehearsal reveals possibilities, which is imperative to a theory premised on the idea of change.  But before a change within personal or social behaviour can be established, the actor must initially learn how to change.  Cognition is the means that Boal favours to achieve this, where “We learn by our mistakes, we learn from example and…we learn from practice, practice, practice… Without consciousness there is no mental life, only mental processing.”

Significantly, in his workshop Boal asked participants to practise the habitual movements of their conditioned bodies, become conscious of their emotions ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and awaken to examples of physical awareness amongst their peers.  Learning by direct experience enables people to construct new conceptions through the observation of behaviour that is modelled on the stage.  Theatre of the Oppressed teaches an actor – a prisoner - how to learn his or her own capacity ‘to think’, ‘to be’, ‘to imagine’ and most importantly ‘to transform’.  

The act of forum theatre aims to be the act of transformation and if, as is suggested above, we must learn to think before we can transform, then I must engage my research with the fundamental system that comprises teaching, learning and thinking.  My next phase of research compares Boal’s transitive, dialogic and cognitive investigation of the human being with the terms proposed by a revolutionary educatory system.  

“For me to exist Paulo Freire must exist.”

Boal adapted his practice of the Theatre of the Oppressed from his proclaimed inspiration, the educator Paulo Freire.  Freire founded the transitive praxis that posits a learner as both subject and object as the solution to the anaesthetising authoritarian and oppositional approach to education.  Like Boal, Freire strove to create a pedagogic recovery of humanity and liberation in the Brazilian society that is so “thwarted by injustice, exploitation, oppression, and the violence of the oppressors.” 

In Freire’s justification for his proposed alternative to the existing form of education, he established who the ‘oppressed’ were and why the act of liberation amongst them is difficult even beyond the practical limitations that society burdens them with.  He suggests that the oppressed’ perception of themselves is impaired by a complete submersion into their inferior status that the guidelines of their oppressor bind them to.   For the purpose of this paper, the impairing guidelines in question are enforced by the schemes of the society and the criminal justice system, inside and outside closed institutions.  Day in, day out, offenders face poverty and violence and prisoners are denied freedom of choice, Gradually the institution’s opinion that these citizens (or prisoners) are troublesome, inferior beings, according to Freire becomes internalised within their consciousness.  The consequent feeling of self-deprecation and worthlessness discordant with prevailing values and practices aggravates the matter by convincing the prisoners to mistrust their own abilities and confirms their social inadequacy; such an insecure status of being can ill afford risk of failure.  The Pedagogy of the Oppressed aims to unveil the critical discovery that they too are conscious beings that contain the ability to exist outside of the oppressive realities and authoritarianism that penetrates within them.  Nurturing a sense of potential empowerment aims to combat the suffocating fear of freedom that their environment has inscribed within them.

Freire defines the oppressor’s system of a reinforcement of inhibition as the ‘Banking Education’.  Through a careful analysis of the teacher-student relationship Freire concludes that it never proposes a critical consideration of reality or authentic thinking but instead regulates its ‘students’ – ‘oppressed’ – ‘prisoners’ as mere objects that must comply:  “This is the banking concept of education; knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing.”

Freire’s solution to the dichotomies of oppression (teacher - student, citizen - prisoner, captive - free) challenges the one-way exchange between them and inspired Boal to rework the monologic structure of authoritarian theatre and its spectator - actor segregation.

Although both Boal and Freire’s methods are geared towards liberation and consist of numerous practices and complex reasoning, they all rely on the premise that the dialogue must in all accounts replace the monologue.  Freire responds to this necessity by posing problems.  In terms of cognition, interpersonal problem-solving skills are fundamentally concerned with offering adjunctive behaviour through the discovery of viable alternatives.  ‘Problem Posing Education’ is an enactive and cognitive praxis that continuously inquires into the oppressed’s’ relationship with the world. Rather than learning specific and invariable responses to a problem, the activity of generative learning encourages the actor to verify conceptions of appropriate behaviour.  Problem posing has a generative nature of learning and produces generative conceptions where the spectactor constructs conceptions of new behaviour patterns and circumstances with appropriate solutions arisen from rehearsal.  Cognitive behavioural structures develop through response consequences that depend on information conveyed through active learning.  “By examining the patterns of outcomes they have experienced, performers can arrive at conceptions.” 

Posing problems transforms the teacher – student relationship into a dialogic one; both are obliged to practise an act of cognition, relate to their consciousness and objectify reality.  The objective of replacing the ‘banking’ concept with an alternative co-investigation is to encourage students to rise to the challenge of acquiring their knowledge from actual concrete experiences.  The oppressed become jointly responsible for a process that is refreshingly formed with, not for them.  One of the greatest obstacles to socio-cultural change is created by the privileged groups whom benefit from existing social arrangements.  Their role can no longer remain distant from their own oppression, instead they must engage in a dialogue with it, in which they have been trusted to reason and express opinion.  Such participation acts as the first step to humanisation.

Osmosis is a term used by Boal to encapsulate his belief that all grave themes are inscribed within tiny situations.  Its literal and scientific definition is the separation of fluids from an element, by which something is acquired by absorption.  This metaphorical process of osmosis entails the small cells of social organisation being absorbed within but then separated from the political and moral structures of dominant national themes.  Freire shares the opinion that sub-areas and thematic diversifications all share universal characteristics of the societal whole:  “The non existence of themes within the sub-units is absolutely impossible.” 

The objective of Freire’s dialogic problem–posing operation is to investigate and stimulate awareness of a broad ‘epochal unit’ and externalise and decode thematics in order to develop new perceptions of the world.  Boal’s existence as ‘Joker’ in the workshop I attended was wholly founded on the formalities of the Freireian pedagogy.  His role as the investigator or ‘decoding coordinator’ was visible in his methods of physical de-mechanisation of the body.  The general themes of ‘love and ‘hate’ quickly transformed into more particular themes that exposed people’s real consciousness of the world.  For example, in the fifth Dynamisation our collective group response to the emotion ‘hate’ was the formation of a universally recognised image that portrayed crime and danger in Rio city centre.  This theme was equally precious to both myself, a visiting European, and also to the members of CTO who are permanent residents of Rio.

Boal’s techniques have always been interfaced with therapeutic dynamics in that they help a human being to relearn the sensations that they have lost the habit of recognising.  His physical exercises, aesthetic games, image techniques and special improvisations are fundamental to achieving the Theatre of the Oppressed’ cognitive goal of transforming habit from an unconscious practice into a conscious theatre of active thought.  Through their attention to personal discovery, the games’ are themselves a practice of therapeutic dialogue.  Initially, Boal was reluctant to consider therapeutic procedures as similar to his own approach.  He feared that therapeutic drama, that is a healing and curative system, implies that the oppressed must themselves adapt to the existing social hierarchies.  Boal wholly opposes a campaign directed solely at personal change because of his expectation that it promotes prescribing social behaviour to the oppressive regimes, but this stance does pose some contradiction.  Whilst the process of de-mechanisation, reflection, de-coding and cognitive participation does not blame the oppressed it does concentrate on an internal investigation.  The cure – liberation – is achieved only through the acceptance of their own responsibility.  The oppressed create their own world of images of oppression and are obliged to seek out themselves within the characters and situations.  Recounting personal experiences, arguably a therapeutic process, comes second to no other in the activities of the Theatre of the Oppressed.  How is it then, that Boal still recognises himself as a theatre artist and never therapist?

“If the actor can become a sick person, the sick person can in turn become a healthy actor.”

In his book, ‘Rainbow of Desire’ Boal began to accept that Theatre of the Oppressed was undeniably at least interlinked with therapeutic aspects of drama.  The internalised examination of individual oppression does ask the oppressed to change their own vision of themselves, but only as a means of changing society.  The healing effects of therapeutic techniques achieve self-responsibility, self-worth and societal-consciousness; moral adjustment is likely to remain unnecessary.  Boal remains able to deny his role as a therapist through the Theatre of the Oppressed’ dialogic reflection of the singular being.  His theatre uses the participation of other spectactors, to transform a potentially therapeutic and particularly human scrutiny, into a general and universal theme.  The oppressed must determine for themselves their own identity, the identity of the enemy and how to combat both.  Self-discovery by no means adapts to oppression but instead enables the confrontation of reality and a reactionary endorsement of action!

In conclusion, Boal avoids subscribing to the restrictions of therapy, which demands the monologic relationship of therapist and client, a clear work task and a designated time span to ‘heal’.  Theatre of the Oppressed is though, undeniably a highly personal and therefore somewhat therapeutic experience.  The personal investigation is achieved through cognitive methods that fight the senses’ evolution towards and acceptance of oppression.  Even within boundaries of severe oppression, where exterior transformation remains infeasible; by creating a dialogue Boal enables the prisoner to transform their internal selves.  Commendably, the Theatre of the Oppressed’ complex techniques liberate the mind in the most difficult conditions.  My only reservation is that if, as Boal suggests, thought does determine being, then even if a being is internally liberated, a prisoner in a prison environment would be hard pressed to prevent the reverse process – the return to the status quo.

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