Theater of the Oppressed Series: "The Theater of the Oppressed" Original Preface

Original source: https://www.douban.com/group/topic/29396285/

Chapter Name: Original Order

Page: page 19

2012-05-04 22:33:24

This book attempts to reveal that all theater is necessarily political, because all human activities are political, and theater is one of them.

Those who want to take the theatre out of the political category are trying to lead us to a state of fallacy - and that's a political attitude.

In this book, I also exemplify the theater as a weapon, a powerful weapon. It is for this reason that we must fight for it, and it is for this reason that the ruling classes are devoted to being able to control the theatre for a long time and to use it as a tool for exercising domination. In this process of domination, they changed the original meaning of "theater", but still, theater can still be one of the weapons of liberation. Therefore, we must create an appropriate theater model, and reform is imperative.

What this book is trying to show is some fundamental reforms and how people responded to those reforms. The original meaning of "theatre" refers to people singing and singing freely in the open air; theater performance is an activity created by people for the needs of the public, so it can be called a Dionysian song and dance festival. A festival that you can freely participate in. Afterwards, aristocracy came along and artificial boundaries were born: so only certain people could perform on stage, while the rest could only sit under the stage and silently accept the performance on stage—these people It is the audience, the common people. And in order for such a spectacle to effectively reflect the ideology of the dominant class, aristocracy creates yet another divide: some actors will play the protagonist (aristocratic aristocracy), while the rest will be the chorus—more or less symbolic with the crowd. The operation of this type of theater mode is clearly shown to us in Aristotle's system of tragic suppression.

After that, the rise of the bourgeois class changed the original protagonists - they were no longer objects embracing moral values and superstructures, but became multi-faceted subjects, individuals with particularity, and equals from the masses A differentiated member has become a new aristocratic class - this is Machiavelli's Poetics of Virtue.

Brecht's response to this bourgeois class poetics is to dismiss as objects the character who Hegel regarded as absolute subjects; he is an object under the influence of various social forces, not in the value of the superstructure. the object of. Social existence determines thought, but not vice versa.

The only thing lacking to get the job done is the transformation that is taking place in Latin America—the dismantling of the barriers built by the ruling classes. First, the walls between the actors and the audience were destroyed: all had to perform, all had to be protagonists of social change, which is what I described in my article "Experiments with the Peruvian Folk Theater"; then , the distinction between protagonist and chorus is broken: everyone must be the protagonist and a member of the chorus at the same time - this is the claim of the "harlequin" system. Thus, we developed a "poetics of the oppressed", the final result of which was earned through theatrical performances.

Augusto Boal

July 1974, Buenos Aires