The Oppressed Theatre Series: [Translation] Foreword to the Second Edition of Playbooks for Actors and Non-Actors

Originally published on: https://www.douban.com/group/topic/29842847/

Augusto Boal: Games for Actors and Non-actors

Preface to the Second Edition

Royal Shakespeare Company, Prison and Landless Peasants Theatre

In the past few short years, I have had three very interesting new experiences, each very far and very close to the other two.

The first was in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1997 when Cicely Berry and Adrian Noble invited me to lead a workshop with the Royal Shakespeare Company to see the use of the "rainbow of desire" Vipassana technique to portray Shakespeare's characters - that is The possibility of referring to those characters in Hamlet.

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We cannot live in isolation from each other, imprisoning ourselves. When we know ourselves in a different environment, we benefit greatly: the other has love and hate, fear and courage - just like me, like you, even though he/she, you and I There are cultural differences. Precisely because of this, we can learn from each other: we are different and yet so the same.

When Sanjoy Ganguly invited me to work with his peasant actors in Jana Sanskriti, Calcutta, I imagined that they wanted me to teach them new techniques for rehearsing forum theatre, to help them improve their acting skills, things they were already doing well . They say: "Forum theatre is about social, political and concrete issues, and we already know how to do it. Now we want to learn the "rainbow of desire" because we also want to discover our inner selves, our intimate feelings. We have fears, depressions , hopes and desires - that's what we want to understand better!"

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In collaboration with Paul Heritage and his "People's Palace Project", we started a project for a prison theater - more precisely, in the 37 prisons in the state of São Paulo.

This throws us a new problem: we are working with a group of disjointed, committed partners, even though we are very supportive of their desire to create a new future for themselves. We also worked with prison guards - one of whom had a baton with the word "human rights" - and we also disagreed with them: prisoners were sentenced to jail, not humiliation and deeper torture; and guards tended to retaliate against prisoners for their Harsh work environment: a combination of low pay and high risk.

Everything that is not allowed outside the prison is normal in the prison, as long as the prisoner has the money to pay for it: drug abuse, robbery, sexual violence, prostitution, gang fights, torture and even murder.

Brazil's prisons are like a repository of resources that no one has ever used - like a hospital where all the sick and weak are thrown here, no doctors, nurses, or even medicine: how can we expect the weak in such a scene Can it be cured? Our prisons are hate factories.

In the first phase of this plan, we found something obvious: the people in the horn are imprisoned in space, but not in time - instead, we are free in space and limited in time. What can they do with their time? Theater of the Oppressed creates "free spaces" where people can release their memories, emotions, imaginations, reflections on the past, present, and where they can preview their future instead of doing it.

How to create this free space within the high wall?

(Not finished...)