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Theatre for the Less Oppressed than I: Reconsidering Augusto Boal's Concept of Spect-actor1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2015

YONGHEE LEE
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Abstract

Grounded on personal experience in Augusto Boal's workshop, this article explores his essential and radical concept of the spect-actor and its limitation. When he conceptualized the term, Boal seemed to ignore diversities and differences of subject in the grid of power relations such as class, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference and race. Furthermore, a silence that most of the workshop participants maintained needs to be examined critically, instead of unquestioningly, regarding their ‘democratic’ choices. In order to effectively discuss the limitations of the spect-actor concept, as well as the silence that was ignored in the workshop space, I speculate on similar relationships that occurr both in theatre workshop and classroom settings. Drawing the conclusion that both educators and theatre practitioners require self-reflexive attitudes, I expect a greater contribution of Theatre of the Oppressed to globalized societies.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , July 2015 , pp. 156 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2015 

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References

NOTES

2 Freire, Paulo quoted in bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), p. 46.Google Scholar

3 Participation in Boal's workshop initiated my doctoral dissertation in 2005. I attended his workshops twice in both 2002 and 2004. In 2003 at a PTO conference he did not run the workshops, thus I did not participate. Once again reminiscing about that impressive experience, I cannot ignore the important issue of the complexity of participants’ subjectivity. Thus I developed this article from post-structural perspectives.

4 Joker is a term Boal created for his TO. A Joker is like a facilitator, although Boal himself said it is more like a difficultator, or a master of ceremonies who mediates both spectators and actors. According to Frances Babbage in her book, Augusto Boal (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) the Joker is a ‘wild-card figure who could meditate between characters and audiences, comment critically on the narrative and, at certain points, intervene directly in the action’ (p. 14).

5 Ellsworth, Elizabeth, ‘Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering? Working through the Repressive Myths of Critical Pedagogy’, Harvard Educational Review, 59, 3 (August 1989), pp. 297–324, here p. 315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Hernan Flores, ‘From Freire to Boal’, Education Links, 61–2 (Summer 2000), pp. 41–2.

7 McCoy, Ken, ‘Liberating the Latin American Audience: The Conscientizacao of Enrique Buenaventura and Augusto Boal’, Theatre Insight, 14 (Summer 1995), pp. 10–16, here p. 11.Google Scholar

8 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, p. 46.

9 Ibid., p. 47.

10 Boal believes that theatre originally belongs to the people, as opposed to the selected oppressive class. So here the human vocation means the human nature of doing theatre.

11 Boal, Augusto, The Rainbow of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 14–15.Google Scholar

12 Boal, Augusto, Theatre of the Oppressed (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), p. 121.Google Scholar

13 Mansfield categorizes Foucault's works as the polar opposite of anti-subjectivity because ‘Foucault's ideas encourage a rigorously skeptical attitude towards subjectivity… [B]ecause it will always see any statement that claims to speak the truth about our subjectivity as an imposition, a technique of power and social administration’. Mansfield, Nick, Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Haraway (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 64.Google Scholar

14 Ibid., p. 51.

15 Ibid., p. 36.

16 Ibid., p. 10.

17 Ibid., p. 13.

18 Boal, The Rainbow of Desire, p. 35.

19 Ibid., pp. 29–30.

20 Ibid., p. 30.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid., p. 35. Emphasis in original.

23 Mansfield, Subjectivity, p. 55.

24 Ibid., p. 59.

25 By ‘the times before ancient Greece’ Boal means the religious ceremony in prehistoric eras. Regarding this argument, some critics faulted Boal's abstract, incorrect idea about this period. Here I am not concerned whether Boal's argument was incorrect or not. My concern is that it demonstrates how he conceived TO.

26 Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, p. 154.

27 Ibid., p. 155.

28 Ibid., p. 122. Emphasis in original.

29 Flores, ‘From Freire to Boal’, p. 41.

30 Ellsworth, ‘Why Doesn't This Feel Empowering?’, p. 309.

31 Ibid., p. 316.

32 Kelly Britt Howe, ‘Adapting Boal's Legislative Theatre: Producing Democracies, Casting Citizens as Policy Experts’, PhD dissertation, the University of Texas at Austin, 2010, p. 17.

33 Ibid.

34 McCoy, ‘Liberating the Latin American Audience’, p. 15.

35 Cohen-Cruz, Jan, ‘Boal at NYU: A Workshop and Its Aftermath’, TDR, 34 (Fall 1990), pp. 43–9, here p. 48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Ball, Steve, ‘The Influence of Boal on Theatre in Education in Britain’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 3, 1 (1995), pp. 79–85, here p. 84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Boal prefers the Difficultator to the Joker.

38 McCoy, ‘Liberating the Latin American Audience’, p. 15.

39 Augusto Boal died in 2009. We can no longer see his brilliant and revolutionary ideas and practices, but I hope that his followers will re-examine the limitations that TO possesses and make it more powerful and useful for many oppressed people in the world.

40 Fisher, Berenice, ‘Feminist Acts: Women, Pedagogy, and Theatre of the Oppressed’, in Schutzman, Mady and Cohen-Cruz, Jan, eds., Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 185–97, here p. 190. Emphasis in original.Google Scholar

41 Ibid.

42 This sentence came from an anonymous reviewer who gave me excellent insight and helpful feedback on this article.

43 Green, Sharon, ‘Boal and Beyond: Strategies for Creating Community Dialogue’, Theater, 31, 3 (2001), pp. 47–54, here p. 52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 Ibid., p. 53.

45 Since I have not experienced RD in person, I am not going to further explain RD techniques in this article.

46 Ibid., p. 50.

47 Ibid., p. 52.

48 I am aware that Boal's first language was not English; there was something that caused misunderstanding of Boal's intention like I used to be misunderstood due to the language barrier.

49 Mansfield, Subjectivity, p. 121.

50 Ibid., p. 119.

51 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak quoted in Mansfield, Subjectivity, p. 126.

52 Frantz Fanon quoted in Mansfield, Subjectivity, p. 124.

53 Ibid.

54 hooks, Teaching to Transgress, p. 46.

55 Green, ‘Boal and Beyond’, p. 53.

56 Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, p. 155.