The Oppressed Theatre Series: An Interview with Pois

Note: This series comes from notes, translations, diaries, translations, etc. scattered around my Douban. Due to concerns about the security of Douban, a centralized platform located within the wall, I turned it to a collection here. Most of these articles are written by me while studying. If there are any inaccuracies, please point out (although many soybean oil feedbacks are very useful), thank you~

-------------------Playing Boal----------------------

Authors: Cohen-Cruz Jan; Cohen-Cruz, Jan; Schutzman, Mady

Publisher: Routledge

Subtitles: Theatre, Therapy, Activism

Year of publication: 1993-12-20

http://book.douban.com/subject/4815664/

1 BOAL IN BRAZIL, FRANCE, THE USA

An interview with Augusto Boal

Michael Tussig and Richard Schechner

S: What is the situation in Brazil in 1989 now?

B: I came back to Brazil in 1986, when a deputy head of state knew about my work. He is doing a very political, very revolutionary thing. He put together a network of public schools—mostly from slums—that provided breakfast, lessons, lunch, and afternoon arts and sports, followed by baths (many had no water at home). And then there's dinner - some students take some dinner back home for their younger siblings who are under school age. The revolutionary aspect of this project is that if a child experiences a humane, decent life for a few years, she will never return to the inhuman life that most people in Brazil live. Children don't have to steal food anymore - they go to school and are cared for. Another reason it was revolutionary was their access to medical services and art. Social and cultural workers - "cultural animators" - organize dance, singing, poetry and theatre.

My wife, Cecilia, a psychoanalyst, and I went back to Brazil to work on this project. We worked with 35 cultural inspirations with no theatre experience, 3 from each school. They come from all over the state of Rio, not just downtown. They started writing about race and sexual assault, and all the oppression they experienced. Then they prepared five short plays with full stage equipment and music. We started touring each school, each stage for a few months - each school looked like it was prefabricated from the same mold. In half an hour we turned the school canteen into a small theater. Two rows of students sit on the ground, two rows sit on chairs, one row sits on a table, and another row puts chairs on the table. We performed those five skits for students, teachers, neighbors, and anyone around. We asked the audience which of these plays they would like to use as a forum theatre [see Boal 1985].

This went on for several months, at which point the Brazilian government started the "Cruzado Plan" - locking in wages and prices. No inflation at all for months - 300% inflation before. At the same time, the Brazilian government also stopped paying interest on international debts. People have money to buy food - that's good. Then President Jose Sarney began organizing elections. I said to myself, 'Okay, maybe I don't have to be too aggressive. Sarney is doing good things and I will support him. 』Thank God I didn't do that, but I'm almost ready.

Three days after winning the election, Sarney said, "Those are temporary measures, and now we're going back to the way we were. 』Annual inflation has reached 1000%. Sarney's mutiny consists in giving a solution but not implementing it. He just wants to win the election. Since then, no one believed him anymore. As for our projects - I've signed contracts with the mayor of Rio and the state government of Rio - they all lost. The new mayor and the government said they would not recognize my contract. In any civilized country you would go to court, but in Brazil these people just laugh! This is the end of the project. Many schools sometimes have classes, sometimes not; sometimes have lunch, sometimes not. Of course, no Forum Theater anymore.

As for government subsidies, there are only zero eggs. The law says that if big corporations fund arts activities, they can deduct taxes. These things that companies do - as everyone knows - is to give, say, 1,000 bucks (cruzados) but have the grantee sign that they received 10,000 bucks.

S: Can you go and expose this?

B: Some of the organizations we helped form are still running on their own. After the school program was discontinued, some cultural inspirations continued. But only a small part. They also invited me to their festival a few months ago. They are strong in many ways without government funding.

S: But "opposition" has always been the meaning of political theater. You're saying that political theatre only works when it is funded by the government.

B: It's not that our goal is not the government, but the situation - the things that slip from the government's power. Before Sarney's betrayal, the people who worked in those theaters were paid--they put all their energy into their respective projects.

S: It's like the Commonwealth Theater project here (in the US) in the 1930s, and the CETA project in the 1960s-70s, both government-funded but extra-system or anti-government content. But in fact, this is why these projects were stopped later.

B: Brazil begins regional and state elections in November 1988 - the original government has fallen. A new party, the Workers' Party won. We know we now have the power to change things and start a new "Cruzado Plan" that stops international debt payments.

S: Is the Workers' Party a Marxist?

B: The leader didn't say, "This is a Marxist party. ' But Luisa Erundina, mayor of São Paulo (Brazil's largest city), declares herself a Marxist. Nor are the Workers' parties religious - but there is a strong religious movement within the party. Followers of liberation theology also support the party, as do many people with ecological views. It's a left-wing party and nobody says, 'We're going to have a socialist revolution. 』If all the Mayors of the Workers' Party this year have brought their governments well, there is no doubt that next year's President of Brazil will be Lula, the President of the Workers' Party.

The Workers' Party has chosen the best candidate so far... (a few words omitted)

S: So what is your role here? If the Workers' Party wins, will you dissolve your center in Paris and go back to Brazil?

B: I still do my best to help them (Paris). I still have some things to do in Europe - but I will mostly do what Brazil needs me to do, especially in the theatre of the oppressed - in education, psychotherapy, drug addiction, and helping ex-offenders reintegrate into society.

T: Can you talk about the concept of "cultural inspiration" - how did it come about? What do they all do?

B: Around 1060 we started a movement in Brazil called "Centre of Popular Culture" - thousands of people all over the country. Students, unions - as long as they can get a venue they'll open a center. The idea of the center is that what some residents in the community don't know there are always others. Just let them come to the center to teach others. For example, sometimes there is a poetry club - a local person who is more familiar with poetry teaches; sometimes someone knows how to cook delicious and cheap food, and he/she is taught. I have worked with XX Center to teach screenwriters and directors. Everyone writes stories about themselves (here is a paraphrase, the original text is too long-winded). Occasionally, an audience member who finds himself/herself on the stage will shout, "No no, I didn't say that! ’ And then the discussion between the actors, the writers and the audience begins. Such centers of mass culture are so important that the first law of the new dictatorial military government in 1965 made them illegal.

T: So those who "know more" are the so-called "cultural inspiration"?

B: Yes.

S: But the problem is that these cultural inspirations, because they "know more", become professionals and no longer belong to the public side.

B: Indeed. And they also have administrative functions, to organize projects, and so on.

T: Were you greatly influenced by Antonio Gramsci?

B: No.

T: And the Forum Theater didn't appear at that time, right?

B: Yes. Maybe that's something I already had in my head - but not too much.

T: So the important thing is not to walk into a center and say, "Let's do Shakespeare or something," but to have people write their own plays.

B: Yes. . . (Skip) Some centers are more developed than others. For example, there is a little famous person in Rio who does things very fast. Like the Kennedy blockade of Cuba - of course they started writing scripts against the blockade. The next day they rehearsed for a day. At 6 p.m., people saw their play as they passed by the Rio Municipal Theater on their way home from get off work.

T: It was 1962, when there was no TV. So what do you think about today - if something big happens, do you write plays, or do you try to be in the media?

B: Look, I don't know about America, but in Brazil I can tell you one thing, "Invisible Theater"* can amaze many people. In 1986, I was invited by a TV station to do a program, every Sunday, 10-20 minutes. Documented the invisible theater we did: a black man standing in the market to sell himself as a slave because he felt he was working now for less than a slave in the 19th century. We also did something about nuclear power, where actors dressed in black were digging graves on the beach by the sea. Most of the people who went naked there asked, 'What are you doing? "If the nuclear power plant explodes we need five million graves, so start digging now!" ' Then everyone started to discuss. So sometimes some invisible theaters are really invisible, and some are almost.

The show was very popular and lasted for two months. But it never aired in other cities, they always told me it was a scheduling and technical issue. But in the end a young female choreographer pulled me aside and said, 'Don't say I told you,' she said, 'the owners of the TV station don't like the show because you shoot people on the street, and most of them are black. He doesn't like too many black people on his TV show. ' I said, 'Look, if I shoot in Sweden it's all blond, but what can I do, this is Rio. 』I can not accept this rule of the TV station.

S: But maybe there is no other reason? The essence of forum theatre and invisible theatre is contingency. In other words, they both valued Brecht and Marx - both at the time. However, media values and practices are clearly earlier: all you see (from the media) are results, unchangeable, even if they are delayed by a few seconds. So if you want to express the contingency of history, and the possibility that the general public can change history (even if it's just their local history, or personal mental journey), then you have to be on the side of live performance.

B: Except for sports. We know on TV who is going to score next. (- That is, TV can express the uncertainty and contingency of sports-translator)

S: But stop-action photography freezes everything, no matter what happens. The idea of photography is not to change the story, but to "see what's going on".

B: I received an invitation from a producer a few months ago. "We can use TV as a forum theatre. ' he told me, 'there is only one condition - we choose the audience. "In that case," I said, "it's not the Forum Theater." ' I proposed that we take to the streets and do Forum Theatre, but they wouldn't accept it because you never know what's going to happen. You're going to create the future, and they're going to reveal the past.

S: A past corrected, edited and recreated in their own way.

T: Can you tell us about how Forum Theater developed.

B: The real start was when I was doing what I call "simultaneous screenwriting with people's real experiences." One of the women told us what the protagonist of the show should do. We acted and acted again and again according to her suggestion, but still could not satisfy her. So I said, 'Come on stage, you come and show us, because we really can't interpret what you think. ' We really understand the huge difference between her own words and actions and our understanding.

T: What was that play about? when?

B: It was in 1973. I am working for the VXX government in Peru. A soldier with left-wing thinking...

T: Changes on the left, education on the left...

B: Yes, yes. He has a project called "Integrated Alphabetization". I was in charge of the theater at the time, and since then I have been doing forums (theaters).

T: In Lima?

B: In Cxx, a small place next to Lima, many people from Peru moved there, especially from a few very poor places, and of course Lima. We (the project) worked with them there for a month.

T: Was Paulo Freire also in that project?

B: Not yet.

T: Was the Brazilian anthropologist D Ribeiro also in Peru at that time?

B: Yes. He is the deputy mayor of Rio I mentioned earlier. We are very good injectors.

T: So you were writing the script in this poor neighborhood outside Lima. And then one of the actresses doesn't like that part of her, and she wants to change it, and you help her rewrite the script?

B: Not an actor, but an audience. We've done a lot of plays this way - at the moment of crisis, stop. "We already know what happened, but we don't yet know what should happen. ' Instead of teaching the audience, we asked them: 'Come on, tell us what do you think the play should be? '... But this time, we couldn't grasp it, so we simply asked her to come up.

T: How did you come up with the idea - play the trick to a climax and then get the audience involved?

B: This is from a time when we were doing a play in northeastern Brazil: it was designed to make the audience fight for freedom, to donate blood. Then, an audience member came up to us and said, 'Okay, since you think so too, let's fight the government with us. ! ' We had to say our guns were fake. "That's right," he said, "your guns are fake but your people are real - come on, we have guns. ' We had to say, 'We are real, but we are real artists, not real farmers. ' I'm sorry to say that. From that moment on, we didn't push the audience to do things we wouldn't do ourselves.

So the seed of "forum theater" is: not to solve problems, not to provoke viewers, but to let them express their own solutions. We've done a lot of "simultaneous screenwriting" over the years but we've all retained our own power. We said, 'Let's do what you want to do. ’, but it was actually “we” who did it, not “them”. So, subconsciously, I'm probably a little bit resistant too -

T: Like that TV writer wanted to control (the whole show)—

B: Yes, to control what is going to happen. Involuntarily I would say, 'You guys have your say, but I'll do it my way. 』

Sometimes when we do forum theater, the key is not to do a theatrical event - not to show something for a group of people - but to prepare for a specific community - a group that will actually act the next day.

T: A strike or something.

B: When we invade Vincennes (the largest royal fortress in France - translator) we will rehearse how to proceed. The "forum" is used to show what to do right away.

T: Have you ever seen a strange marching line with a military game (- presumably a type of military drill--translator) used for the offensive against Grenada or the bombing of Libya? Pretty hideous.

S: It should be said the other way around. It was the officers of the army who brought the theater into their military training.

T: I don't mean which comes first. At one level the goals of the two are parallel, at other levels they are quite different. Military drills are about finding the best solution in complex situations with computer technology, while "Forum Theater" has been "problematizing".

S: Another difference...

T: The purpose of "Forum Theater" is to change the nature of social relations and social organization cells, not to maintain and strengthen the accepted system like military drills. But one thing in common is that they all need to come up with different possibilities and perform them within a certain time limit. The most awesome thing is to change the rules.

S: Yes, how? I don't think Forum Theatre has changed the rules of theatre art.

T: I'm thinking about gender relations, race relations, and so on.

B: In the "forum", the roles are not fixed - not only the characters on the stage, but also the "actors", "screenwriters" and "directors". Therefore, the "forum" is also radical in terms of drama theory.

T: When I was teaching at the University of Michigan, everyone had a high enthusiasm to play games (gaming) - better, some progressive leftists came to lead theater games with reference to military games. The "forum" has the same purpose: education, Change the way people think. I think Forum Theatre is more anarchic and spontaneous because the rules change all the time.

B: The United States can do this kind of theater very well. In Europe we have many professional forum theatre organisations. In the Netherlands they do it in school. Also works for people with alcohol and drug addictions—

S: Yeah, I think it will be successful here too.

T: I have seen performances at the popular theater in Colombia at the intersection of several sugarcane towns, where I lived. It plays a (male) man coming home from get off work in a sugar factory, and his wife reaches out to him to ask for money to buy clothes for the party. And so, a war, violence and more violence, smashing furniture begins. The main purpose of the play - written by local priests, college students and sugarcane farmers - was to show exploitation. Audiences are active - they insert their point of view. But the Forum took the next step. Joker said, "I don't want to just have your interjections and jokes, though very witty and poignant - I want you to come up with new approaches, new plots. 』

S: You (later) moved to Paris. How did this affect you? Because the people of Paris are not too antagonistic to the government - unless you are Algerian or Turk or other non-French.

B: When I first started, I was preconceived. I thought, 'Yeah, this is Europe. 』I thought all the suffering in Latin America came from Europe and America. And I should have only been in Europe for a short time - back to Brazil soon - in 1978. There was a coup in Argentina in 1976, and this was the first place I just left Brazil. It's dangerous to stay there for a long time - they kill a lot of foreigners. So in 1978 I went to Portugal, where it was leaning to the right. I just lost two jobs - a theater director, and a teacher in a conservation area. Then my book "Theatre of the Oppressed" was published in Paris [in French]. I was invited to teach a one-year course at Sorbonne. I think I'll go back to Brazil when it's over because Brazil was going through an amnesty at the time.

European countries are very imperial - but I found out, very quickly, in other European countries like France, Germany, the same thing I found in Brazil. Some of the millions of poor people who gamble in Brazil are extremely wealthy. There are many people in France who are very poor. Hundreds of people have died from the cold in Paris in the past three to four years. We started working with poor people and teachers who followed Celeste Freinet's democratic-teaching movement. There are also anti-drug groups and anti-racism groups.

We also serve ordinary people who come to our center. These people are oppressed, but they clearly have their own time: filling themselves with their loneliness, inability to communicate, and emptiness. I work with them on these topics. Theater of the Oppressed has become more psychological, using techniques more related to psychotherapy. When I returned to Brazil in 1986, I started using those techniques there too - and it worked.

S: Are you serving the poor or just the middle class?

B: Both. Poor people in ordinary schools would never think of psychotherapy. But if I use it, they will find that they also have these personal "problems". They don't deal with it because of police, money and bosses - the problem is bigger.

S: Do you feel that you are very close to people like Jacob Moreno [the founder of psychodrama]?

B: This question is very interesting, I never thought of him. Once I read his "Theatre of Spontaneity" (1947) I didn't like it at all, I thought it was too superficial. Another time I did psychodrama as a patient - it didn't work for me. Now I'm starting to read Moreno, and all the other psychotherapists I've seen. To answer your question, it's both "yes" and "wrong." I don't really know much about Moreno, so I can't go into a long story. But, for example, in the "Barbara case" he discusses, an actress who can do things in theater that she can't do in real life - she's "purged." She reorganized herself by going through a process called catharsis. [see below]

I don't want a cathartic purification in the theater. Or should I say there are many "cathartic purifications", some of which I still like. If you eat something poisonous, you need to get rid of it. Cathartic purification is used medically to purify what has entered or produced by your body. Of course I like that meaning, you have to get rid of things that are harmful to you.

But I'm against Aristotle's cathartic purification, because what's being purified is the drive to change society - not, as they say in so many books, pity and fear. No, pity and fear are a relationship between the audience and the protagonist. Fear is because some people like you are destroyed; pity is because the protagonist is destined to fail, and failure is inevitable. So what Aristotle's purification did was to wipe out a drive to change society in both the protagonist and the audience.

But there is also a "cathartic purification" in my theater of the oppressed. Which one is it? It is not the catharsis of dynamic factors but the catharsis of stagnation. I need to drain the stuff that's clogging me. I believe the difference between Moreno's work and mine is that I like people "dynamicization" - letting people do it. I don't want to see people doing things in theater that they don't do in real life.

T: The Forum Theatre workshop we saw at NYU [19.8.9] is such a combination of emotion and critical thinking. When a person sees two, three, four, five different people coming up to the same plot, trying to change it, he/she immediately enters a world of diversity and possibility - we have to orient ourselves through a Not the Aristotelian way of thinking about the relationship (of man and the world).

S: When a black person plays a white person or a white person plays a black person, a man plays a woman and a woman plays a man, not only the actors are liberated, but we also see that our social reality is constructed within race and gender. Your theater dismantles our worldview in an unfancy way.

B: From the very first moment, the first moment of change, when an audience member shouted, "Stop! ’, the moment when he jumped out of the role of passive bystander and ran onto the stage. She may have desecrated the altar while the priest was at Mass, but she dynamize herself. When this audience member comes on stage to respond to the situation on stage in his own way, whether it works or not - he does become himself, not a behavioral template.

T: Yesterday, a woman complained after watching the Forum Theater, "This is not edgy at all, it's too bad! It's a soap opera. 』 Her objection stimulated me. When a "forum" begins, which is what you call a "transgression," everyone's attempts are commonplace. We re-situate the audience and actors in time, redefine the theatre. You also redefine a "social person", a social action, in a way that reflects the multifaceted nature of the plot and characters. . All the elements of the "avant-garde" are in there, bursting out within its action. That's why I think it's wrong to sit on the bench and complain that it's not modern enough. Modernism is when you look from the beginning to the end, because of the narrative threads it creates, to play with, to break through and to smash. Second, we have to admit how seductive and powerful narratives, soap operas, are - how much of our lives are guided by these things. Plus the reality is that the most popular entertainment style in the world is "telenovellas". I'm sitting there doing my "forum" - I want to shout, "Brecht! Piscator! It's modernist! 』Good practice: thinking about modernist critiques while watching the theatre.

S: Is the word "modern" you use to distinguish it from "post-modern"?

T: Yes, I guess.

S: Because of what I've seen postmodern cut out the soap operas. Soap operas are "modern" because they project an inevitable mentality of inevitability - no audience can intervene. A soap opera lifts the audience's emotions for its own sake: as soon as the audience cries, the producer's wallet swells. But what Bova did was do modern things in a postmodern way. He's not telling you which of the seven ways is best. He said that there are mid-terms, maybe seventy, and none of them are the best. So this is the transition from modern to postmodern.

T: Continuous destabilization.

S: But in a way that leads to freedom.

T: Let me ask another question. What is the role of your theatre in raising awareness? Is there a contradiction? How do you keep the theatre open to any audience and method, while at the same time introducing and raising awareness?

B: Some people use the word "awareness-raising" to say that you have to pull people's hair and insist they see "truth". I am against that. All "forum" participants learned in the process and became more aware of issues they hadn't thought about before, as one standard model was challenged and other possibilities opened up. We never say which way is "correct". I am against dogma. I am for people to be more aware of the possibilities of what other people are doing. What I like about Forum is a pedagogy of role transitions.

S: When Brecht was at his demonstrative peak, he wrote a comedy like The Threepenny Opera. As he became more certain of his political thinking, his work turned to sentimental tragedies such as "Mother's Courage." The mode of tragedy is fate, and the mode of comedy is possibility. You can't stir up tragic emotions if you leave an outlet. ...but comedy is "forum"...

B: We did the forum theatrical version of "The Jew's Wife". First of all we acted exactly according to Brecht's script - except when the wife was on the phone, everyone was there, not talking but doing what Brecht taught them to do. When the show was over I asked the audience, 'Would you do the same thing if you were in her situation? ' And then we started the reenactment. The audience takes the place of the housewife and begins a dialogue with the other characters. It's very interesting because every viewer brings their own similar questions. ...So this play, which was written to show the cruelty of reality, was also used for another purpose, to show how reality has been transformed.

S: Another use is what you call "culture theatre". please explain.

B: This is what I will do next. In Paris or New York, work with a different cultural community - one that is at war with each other, or one that is racist. I want to put a repertoire from one culture to be performed by a group of another culture. The latter will try to discover the play of the former with its own image. This is not what Peter Brook does - a troupe of people from different cultures. I want to work with a homogeneous community and let them discover themselves in the work of others.

S: What is the difference between the two and what would happen in that case? Someone in Kansas is going to play Moliere? Then they said, 'In this way we learn French culture in the seventeenth century. 』

B: Maybe they won't notice the difference when they do it. I intend to do this in a conflicted social situation. It's not as simple as "we Brazilians do an Italian comedy", but a group of black actors who live in a multicultural country with their own identities, do a Jewish play and find themselves in it - not to understand Jewish culture.

S: Isn't this contrary to today's anthropology, history and Marxism? Carrying forward a human identity is superior to, or important to, a social identity - do you think you can leave these things out?

T: It also conflicts with postmodernism, like a classical humanist position. This creates a great contrast because it asserts an equality that is obviously not objective. American Indians, for example, presuppose an identity historically defined by white colonialism—how to be an Indian. - and you fight it, you try to create a memory, to find out what the Indians were like before the white people came, etc. But despite all this effort, history carries the shadow and color of white definitions. Then a white guy came along and said, 'Hey, I want you guys to be white, and those white guys from the University of Arizona to pretend to be Indian Shamans, that's all. ' I think the Indians would say, quite rightly, 'We've got a lot of white people pretending to be Shamans - we don't want to do that anymore. ' I can say black people are very, very angry in New York, and if white people say to black people in Australia, 'Oh, we like you a lot, come let's go to a cabaret party with white people. 』

B: Yes, it is conceivable that they would say that. We can do whatever we want, because nothing has happened yet. But I've said it before - I don't want them to pretend.

S: You will use the "forum theater" technique - so the plot won't be what they did before?

B: I haven't thought about this - but you've given a good idea.

S: A few years ago, Joe Chaikin, a Jew, went to Israel to do a theater with the Arabs. I really don't know what happened after that.

B: Playing the repertoire of the Other is an allegorical job, but working like an allegory can release your emotions and thoughts. You discern other ways of thinking and feeling - and you can find that you have this "other way" yourself. But, I'm not talking about pretending - in Brazil we have too many fakes. A well-known white actor painted his face as Othello. And then you look at him, he's playing Shakespeare but he doesn't feel what it's like and what kind of jealousy it's like to be a black man in love with a white woman because he doesn't think she can have an equal relationship with him. If we dig into each show we'll find that there are elements of the other's culture that will give you -- your own culture that's already boring you -- something it can't give you. You find yourself in other people's cultures.

S: But will there be another kind of problem here? I mean the myth of primitivism in what you call a "tired culture". The "tired culture" is always Western, and people in the West are eager to "rejuvenate" themselves by absorbing what is active in the "primitive society".

B: No, it may be a folk vision. I don't like the kind of organization that tours the world all day long here and there. What I want to do is communication between communities that have strong feelings for each other. This is a complicated process. Regarding the question of Marxism, sometimes we look at something and ask, "Is this Marxism? ' So when Castro said that Marxism and Catholicism have a lot in common, we asked, 'Why? 'Well they all said you can't rob, kill, or play tricks on people; you have to work for the poor, etc.

S: Their epigrams may be the same, but the structure, process, and historical analysis are very different.

B: But there is still the same place. That's why in Latin America, the fight for freedom takes Marxists and priests - there will always be Marxist priests.

S: Yes, and liberation theology is in conflict with the Holy See. So, who is the church?

T: I empathize with the idea of Beauvoir's "Multicultural Theater". Like his other practices, his work always carries a sense of contradiction and conflict. It always makes it easy to play with the politics of exclusion based on unequal power relations. But this effort is important. To a certain extent it foreshadows the kind of equality it seeks, and to a certain extent it brings trouble.

B: We will wait and see in practice.

【references】

Boal, A. 1979. Theatre of the oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

Translated by: Durkheim

NOV 2013