Boal and Che: Side by Side on Stage

Zeca Ligiéro[1]

In 2000―during the First Meeting of Performance and Politics of Americas, which I had the opportunity of organising at the University of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO), together with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics of the New York University―I had the chance to meet Augusto Boal in person. I had known his work ever since the Sixties, when he was for all of us, as theatre people, a great exemplar of political theatre with his Arena Theatre (Teatro de Arena) of São Paulo and Opinion Theatre (Teatro Opinião) of Rio de Janeiro.

In the Eighties, I had the chance to work with some of the techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed (Teatro do Oprimido) in my work with community theatre.[2] I had followed his career, without coming too near his aesthetics and his perspective on theatre. But in 2000 Boal seemed to me a different person, far from the one I had imagined, although combative and strong in his speech, but no longer seeing theatre only as a weapon. His thought had changed, and his Theatre of the Oppressed seemed no longer a straight-jacket, rather something he would come to define as “Aesthetics of the Oppressed”: ways of thinking and feeling. He was calm, clear, and precise in his words, a pacifist, but still a fighter and with his critical sense more and more accurate.

He was a Brazilian theatre practitioner, whose work had been recognised by the great names of 20^th century theatre; although in Brazil, paradoxically, he was never accepted as a great theoretician or scholar. In 2004 I invited him to give a lecture at UNIRIO and he was moved by this invitation. What he said there was transcribed and then rewritten by him and later published as Theatre and Dance as a Communitarian Experience.[3] In December 2008 I arranged a meeting with Amir Haddad, a fellow director. By then I was already taking care of bringing his archive to UNIRIO, which I thought of opening this year [2010] with his presence.

Boal left us materials―which are now in the Library of UNIRIO―brought recently from his former residence in Ipanema. They were all piled up, some of them even still in boxes! We immersed ourselves in the fabulous past of this Brazilian, the most important one on the world scene. Activist, politician, author, actor, director, poet, Boal leaves an incredible legacy of a man deeply committed to art and the social changes of his time.

I found a play, written and published in March 1968, in a small note book published by TUSP: The Very Small Moon and the Long Journey.[4] In it Boal meditates on the delicate moment of Che Guevara’s death in Bolivia. He does not use the words “Che” or “Guevara,” perhaps to avoid writing the biography of a man. He just uses the term “combatant,” thus making him more representative of a position. It could also serve to cheat censorship, but the publication leaves no doubt about who is the character portrayed by inserting the traditional photo of the dead Che surrounded by military figures and curious people. Boal seems to understand that a cycle is closing down there―a change that would bring about the problem of armed struggle as a way to achieve power. At that time he seemed to support an effective resistance to dictatorship through force. Because of his struggle and the use of his art as a weapon, Boal came to be tortured, persecuted and exiled during a long period of his life; which no doubt contributed to the internationalization of his struggle. According to his assessment, he came to feel forever exiled.

In his The Very Small Moon and the Long Journey Boal meditates on the death of someone who has been a hero for many of us Latin Americans, including we leftwing Brazilians, who had been living under dictatorship since 1964. Before that time, we had a period with progressive governments, under Juscelino Kubischeck and João Goulart, who had allowed a great advancement in literature and art (bossa nova in the music, and the new cinema), as well as in industry: they were indeed real conquests for the Brazilian people. The action of the short play takes place in Bolivia, where the two military figures, who had arrested and tortured Che to death, open up a press conference. Boal gives details about the press manipulation that is so typical of rightwing authoritarian regimes in Latin America, and little by little, in a flashback he reveals a Che who is a dreamer, but quite aware of his struggle. Little by little theatre is restoring the truth of the facts that had been hidden by power. I transcribe the prologue of the play The Small Moon and the Long Journey described as “Augusto Boal’s collage”:

CORINGA – I must begin by saying that we came to the conclusion that the death of the combatant is painfully certain. His death has already been announced several times, but we never believed in that and we never came to worry. This time too, in the beginning, we did not worry, even when the first photos began coming out. For sure they were photos of someone who resembled him very much. The first one showed the combatant in the jungle, a dark photo. Few got worried. The second one showed his whole body, but it was a newspaper photo where his physical features were barely discernable. The third one showed his face. Many of us began thinking that it might be him. For the first time we were sure that the combatant had been killed. After that, the news coming was contradictory: a scar on the combatant’s hand. Then tissue from the lungs, fingerprints, everything, everything could have been forged, everything could be a lie. Except for the last evidence: his diary and, in it, his thought. A photograph can be retouched: even the face of a man can be disfigured; however, his style cannot be imitated. The news of his death is painfully certain.[5]

 

When I received the news of Boal’s death I also could not believe, even if I knew that he was sick, for he seemed so strong and so determined to live. He had come back so happy from his participation in Paris where he had read his text on the Theatre World Day and had been appointed as Theatre Ambassador by UNESCO. As an example of his devotion to the struggle for social change, Boal leaves his last text, where he announces, in the first paragraph, his idea of theatre that comes very near his friend Richard Schechner, the great theoretician of performance studies.[6] Boal defines his theatre this way:

All human societies are “spectacular” in their daily life and produce “spectacles” at special moments. They are “spectacular” as a form of social organization and produce “spectacles” like the one you have come to see.

Even if one is unaware of it, human relationships are structured in a theatrical way. The use of space, body language, choice of words and voice modulation, the confrontation of ideas and passions, everything that we demonstrate on the stage, we live in our lives. We are theatre![7]

In his struggle Boal places the audience as the great social actor, the one who has the free will to choose his own destiny, be it in Brazil, Korea, India or Canada. His theatre belongs to the one who is committed to the change which is so needed in our world. As he writes in his last article:

Twenty years ago, I staged Racine’s Phèdre in Rio de Janeiro. The stage setting was poor: cow skins on the ground, bamboos around. Before each presentation, I used to say to my actors: “The fiction we created day by day is over. When you cross those bamboos, none of you will have the right to lie. Theatre is the Hidden Truth.”

When we look beyond appearances, we see oppressors and oppressed people, in all societies, ethnic groups, genders, social classes and casts; we see an unfair and cruel world. We have to create another world because we know it is possible. But it is up to us to build this other world with our hands and by acting on the stage and in our own life.

Participate in the “spectacle” which is about to begin and once you are back home, with your friends act your own plays and look at what you were never able to see: that which is obvious. Theatre is not just an event; it is a way of life!

We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.”[8]

I used this text in the opening of the performance News About Past Things (Noticias de las cosas pasadas), created with students of the University José Caldas, of Bogota. Boal came to be a character, reporting on his works from the 1960s and 1970s, the period in which his work brought Brazilian aesthetics near the ones used in the rest of the Latin American continent. He himself was running away from military dictatorship and was seeking refuge in various Latin American countries, where he wrote and produced plays in Spanish before he could reach refuge in Portugal and France. And working for the first time with his texts Arena Conta Zumbi, Torquemada and The Very Small Moon and the Long Journey (A Lua muita pequena e a longa caminhada) I realized the universal appeal of his theatre. In the performance that I directed, the most polemical play was the one on the death of Che. People could think that I was defending Che’s armed struggle in a period when in Colombia there is a strong guerrilla movement (The FARC – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Would I be directing Boal’s play as a lamentation of Che’s loss or as a way to profess an armed struggle? I found an interview with Boal, given 30 years after he wrote the play, in which he approached Che’s syndrome. I did not hesitate in inserting Boal’s comments on Che’s actions. The interview could leave no doubt about the change that had come about in his thought. Furthermore, Che’s myth had already been so strongly rendered banal as a commodity by the media, that his model was no longer useful for political and cultural changes. Boal commented on Che’s syndrome this way:

Yes. Che Guevara sees that there is a problem in Africa, he knows what to do and goes there to solve the problem. He was not given any attention. He goes to Mexico and there he meets Fidel. Well, there is a problem in Cuba … and he goes there. It worked well, but he goes on…There is a problem in Bolivia, he knows what to do, goes there and explains to the Bolivians, and he is killed. The Che Guevara syndrome is for me “what” happens when someone has the discernment to know that what he thinks is right. But he should not be the only one to think that. Those who are interested in that should think the same too. Don’t you think so?[9]

[1] Zeca Ligiéro is PhD (NYU - New York University) and Coordinator of the Nucleus for the Study of Afro-Ameríndian Performances in UNIRIO (University of Rio de Janeiro).

[2] Zeca Ligiéro, Teatro a partir da Comunidade. Rio de Janeiro, Papel Virtual Editora, 2003.

[3] Zeca Ligièro; Narciso Teles & Victor Hugo Pereira, eatro e Dança como experiência comunitária. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UERJ., 2009.

[4] Augusto Boal, “Uma lua pequena e uma longa caminhada” in Revista da TUSP, no 1, 1968.

[5] Augusto Boal, Prologue to the play “A lua muito pequena e a longa caminhada” published in Caderno da TUSP – Teatro da Universidade de São Paulo, n.º 1, 1968.

[6] See, among others: Richard Schechner, Performance Theory. London: Routledge, 1988, and Performance Studies: An introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.

[7] Augusto Boal, . Speech when receiving the Honor of Ambassador of Theatre at the UNESCO, http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=44557&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

[8] Ibidem.

[9] Joan Abelan, Boal cuenta Boal. Barcelona: Institut del Teatre (Interview, Rio de Janeiro, September, 1998, p.182.

Notes on Boal’s the Dialectical Practice[1]

Sérgio de Carvalho[2]

Augusto Boal changed the condition of theatre. He did so through a unique theoretical reflection, which enabled him to initiate a popular trans-aesthetic theatre practice. The paradox is that his project includes, simultaneously, a denial of art and the creation of an independent aesthetic which sought to achieve an egalitarian artistic praxis. Therefore, within every hopeful affirmation of the possibilities of transforming human action, Boal has also inscribed a fundamental “no,” because he has been for a long time a dialectician. I have not yet found anyone more interested in mobility, uncertainty and ambiguity.

In his “imagined memories,” which bear the curious title of Hamlet and the Baker’s Son (Record, 2000), the way he evokes his familiar and professional course highlights the confirmation of the relative unity of time, more than the struggle between being and not being. “The tragedy of Hamlet is not to be or not to be: it is to be and not to be. Hamlet is both (…) and he is only unable to be himself: I am a specialist in that dichotomy,” says Boal.

Art, according to that vision, is a human production that has a meaning when producing the unknown, when inventing a place somewhere beyond called the “other.” In this perspective, Boal created aesthetic (and extra-aesthetic) conditions that allow for exercises of critical and political autonomy.

It was probably this spiritual trend that made him, when he was still young, change his career in chemistry for that of a theatre maker (a vague expression which does not accommodate his multiple activities). Boal did a bit of everything: he was a playwright, director, teacher and essayist. Always in excess, always brilliant. And his dialectical vision emphasised the temporality of things: he awarded a special attention to the flux of life. He could perceive in the parts the dynamics of the whole. He knew that each affirmation is suppression.

 

Laboratories and seminars

Boal chooses theatre in the 1950s, when he enters the University of Columbia, in the USA, to attend the course on dramaturgy by John Gassner, at the same time that he is studying chemistry. In his spare time he would follow workshops at the Actors’ Studio. In two years he lost interest in the metamorphoses of substances, which were more and more regulated by industrial research and subjected to the interests of commodification. He preferred the imprecision of the theatre, its precarious construction, also subject to the imposition of commodification, but always somewhat of an anachronism and handicraft when compared to cultural serialization.

In all the important works he did, Boal imprinted the scientific legacy that took him to the study of chemistry. It is not by chance that he used the form of “labs” to transmit his knowledge to the cast of Arena Theatre (Teatro de Arena), a theatre group directed by José Renato that he joined in 1956.

As soon as he began as stage director, Boal cherished the I PROPOSE―process by which theatre practitioners skip the automatization of the product. He created a system of preparatory exercises involving a psychophysical approach to the role, based on Stanislavski. This entailed delaying the time of rehearsals and turning all the procedures into a collective exercise, thus going further than the staging of the text known by heart.

In the field of dramaturgy, after an internal course offered to the group in order to share the so-called ‘carpentry’ learned in the United States, he founds the famous Seminar of Dramaturgy, open to writers and students, aiming at stimulating the writing of national texts. By that time, he believed in classical dramatic structures: the play is born out of the conflict of individual wills striving for a reversal. However, that technique would become attenuated in the experimental practice of exchange with the young people who were most politicised by the Arena theatre; Vianinha and Guarnieri were both sons of artists related to the Communist Party and disciples of Ruggero Jacobbi, the most cultivated Italian director who ever passed through the TBC (Teatro Brasileiro de Comédia: Brazilian Comedy Theatre) from São Paulo.

Even if it is difficult to evaluate the period due to lack of documents, there is no doubt that Boal was the catalyst of an aesthetic revolution coming out of his action in the Seminar of Dramaturgy. What seems to have occurred there, relative to the pattern learned in New York, is a process of Aufheben (i.e. a dialectical surpassing, in the Hegelian sense, of the clash between synthesis and antithesis). This was the case with, among others, the success of the theme addressed in They do not use Black Tie, by Guarnieri; this production put the struggles of working class life at centre stage and brought into focus the process by which social content impacts upon the morality of the dramatic form. Thus the form of a psychological conflict was refunctionalised on behalf of a critical project of a popular and Brazilian art. The structural technique learned from Gassner, built on a Hegelian basis, was reshaped into a systematic search for dialectic in the drama, amplified by the author of Phenomenology of the Spirit. Thus he opened up the practice of political debate on a scene where the risk of ideological control was a minor evil when compared with the impressing mobilisation of the scenic senses for the acute historical moment into which the country was heading. We can guess all this based on assessments of the time, as well as by the evidence of so many people who started to write overnight. Many of the best playwrights of the country, who would afterwards migrate to TV channels – such as Lauro César Muniz and Benedito Ruy Barbosa –, owe their technical knowledge to Boal.

But the dialectical logic that Boal communicated in his courses would impose on him an attitude of denial. The best play he wrote in that period, Revolution in South America (Revolução na América do Sul), first staged in 1960, is so far from the intersubjective conflict that it reaches the point of turning into something different. The comic saga of hungry Zé da Silva, who is more and more unable to understand the functioning of the economic system, is close to circus clownery in its shredded structure. The piece entails episodes of great naiveté in the form of ironic sketches. It is impossible to see in it the self-conscious realism and the positive outcome that are so common in the social plays of that period. Boal relates, more than ever, to the technique of Brecht’s epic theatre; Brecht was an author he knew well and admired, but who could not speak to his Luso-Brazilian heart, probably on account of his too distanced and sharp materialism.

But they are both dialecticians. And even if Boal has been, from a philosophical point of view, an idealist, he knew how to subvert that tendency within a complex artistic practice, made up of critical and reflexive gestures and attitudes. Like many modern artists, Brecht and Boal wanted theatre to be something else besides “theatre,” in order that it could deconstruct the dominant social imagination, even at the cost of denying – in the Hegelian sense of deepening and surpassing its aesthetic dimension.

The actor turns into a character. The real stage engenders unreal worlds. It is common that this contradictory quality of theatre be reflected in idealistic terms: the essence of theatre residing in its constantly being ‘other’. But the brilliant work of Boal suggests that this dialectic should turn in on itself. Hence his movement to refuse theatre! It is not enough to know that theatre draws the contraries near, it is necessary to create something else besides an abstract conciliation. As an artist of mimetic fiction, he was looking for something that is not representational, but rather something that can be anticipated, you have a hunch that it will happen. Boal aimed to achieve an undefined vitality which is born out of a singular – but not absolute – concretisation, out of a capacity for a free and active traffic between stage and audience.

His differences in relation to Brecht’s project owe a lot to his interpretation of the historical situation of Brazil in the 1960s. Criticism of pre-1964 populism coming from the main artists of that time was based on a painfully obvious observation: namely, there were illusions regarding the project of an art that could be socially integrating in the luminous period between 1960 and 1963, comparable to the mythology of a ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ within the country which would fight for the socialising reforms aimed at by João Goulart’s team.

But the populist misunderstanding of the experimental theatre of political consciousness raising proved to be insignificant when compared to the enormous artistic advancements of the new labour relationship that had come about by that time. One of the most advanced examples of that experimental kind of theatre was the CPC (Centro Popular da Cultura / Popular Centre for Culture) working within UNE (União Nacional dos Estuddantes / National Students’ Union) and led by Vianinha. When that generation of artists approached the culturally dispossessed, it definitely changed. It learned to expose the frailty of a cultural production that needs to reinvent its forms and meanings. Even if on some occasions Boal shared the unjust criticism directed towards CPC, the Theatre of the Oppressed would not be possible without that previous initiative, just as CPC would not exist without Boal.

With the political toughening in post-1964, Boal sees himself in a new situation imposed by circumstances, and thus his laboratory moves into a new phase of experimentation and invention. In the performances of the sequence Arena Tells (Arena Conta) on historical Brazilian figures (Zumbi de Palmares and Tiradentes), Boal creates a form of interpretation in which the cast assumes the performance as a narrative event. Thus he created the Coringa’s system, in which the character would pass from one actor to another. This system entailed a convention of exchange, an emphatic strumming of the guitar and the repetition of this gesture by the next interpreter. Several actors would play the same character, helped by the master of the revels, the Coringa, who comments on the fiction. The idea of a social gesture that is quotable and of a narrative and musical theatre are Brechtian legacies. They serve as a support for a lyrical allegory of the country confronted by its immediate past: the imposition of a genocidal regime; the failure of the intelligentsia to understand the social situation. Whenever he would come back to this matter, Boal would comment on Brecht’s sentence “Sad is the country that needs heroes.” And he would remind us that ours is sad because it needs liberating individual acts. We could debate Boal’s insistence on the importance of a dramaturgy able to create myths (contrary to what Anatol Rosenfeld’s criticism did propose at that time); a kind of dramatic idealism that would show its sleeves inside out, it was rendered dialectical by the collective practice of the rehearsals. Boal wrote Zumbi with Guarnieri, at the same time in which Edu Lobo would create music for the lyrics. In the rehearsal that evening, the text would be corrected by the interaction with the actors. The work was both collective and non-specialised. Paradoxically, or perhaps dialectically, Boal’s acute sense of individualism required the group; and for him group theatre only exists when the project turns to be transmissible, quotable, like the gestures of the actors in the Coringa system.

Struggle in exile

The most interesting and paradigmatic artistic experiences of Boal during the existence of Arena Theatre were linked to his wish to intervene in the historic moment. But when (despite the tolerance of the previous years) the military regime decided to besiege the students’ movement, as well as cultural life in general, it was very clear that the artists were no longer in power. While it was still possible to act collectively in the field of theatre, Boal’s laboratorial imagination produced new experiments. Nucleus 2 of Arena Theatre did broadcast exercises of Newspaper Theatre, in which the day’s newsreel was staged through a critical perspective of the night before. Once more Boal stressed the methodological perspective of the exercise. It was not only the newspaper material that the audience would see, but also a transmissible technique he himself could reproduce to have access to other images of reality. Boal tried to recover agitprop (the newspaper theatre was much used by Vianinha at the CPC) together with the concept of cells multiplication. The tool would be able to adapt itself to the hand using it.

With his imprisonment in the beginning of the1970’s and his subsequent exile, in the most violent period of murders by the dictatorship, that scientific disposition, linked to a communitarian artistic practice, was severely damaged.

Isolated by exile, Boal could only try to make sense of his past experience. Just as had been the case with Brecht, who wrote his most famous plays during the years in exile from the war and the Nazism, so Boal launched the main bases of his most renowned work Theatre of the Oppressed while he was moving across Argentina, Peru, Portugal and France.

All great artists related to a collective practice will feel the tragedy of having to act at a distance, in abstract, through texts that are not confronted by an audience. Brecht thought of some of his later plays as displaying a “regressive technique,” which was, nevertheless, necessary due to the new context of their production. Some of Boal’s first works in exile indicate the change of his course: from dialectical theatre experimentation to formulae that pass over the contradictions of the project of a critical and radical popular art that seemed to have failed. “It is necessary to imprint new formulae,” Brecht had said, but the compromise which enables wider dissemination of the artwork also entails a loss of complexity.

Perhaps there is a deliberate and necessary withdrawal in Boal’s reflections in one of his most famous books, Theatre of the Oppressed and Other Political Poetics, published by Enio Silveira’s publishing house Brazilian Civilization (Civilização Brasileira) in 1974. It is a compilation of critical material linked to the years prior to Arena Theatre, reoriented by an idea that will prove to have been decisive for him from that time on: namely, the notion that the tradition of Western theatre is based on the poetical and political intimidation of the audience. It would then be necessary to literally activate the audience: “The spectator by being passive is less than a man and it is necessary to re-humanise him, give him back his ability to act in all his possibilities. In other words, it is necessary that someone say “stop” and the spectator himself go on stage and tell his own version of the story, as it happens in the technique Boal later baptised as Forum Theatre (Teatro Forum).

There is a theoretical simplification in the idea that the act of being part of an audience is necessarily passive. It is similarly simplifying to suggest that the audience, since it is seated, has always been a victim of image consumption. Being a good dialectician, Boal knows that to exercise imagination, critical sense and sensitivity are productive activities. It all depends on the way in which the theatrical relationship is established. But, as on other occasions, this idealistic limitation of theory is self-denied by the practical demonstrations that are included in later books, all of them manuals for theatrical practice: Latin-American Techniques of Popular Theatre; 200 Exercises and Plays for the Actor and the Non-Actor who is Willing to Say Something Through Theatre; Stop: C’est Magique! No other Brazilian artist has ever produced such an inventive synthesis of procedures for theatrical work aiming at a dislocated use of them.

In Stop: C’est Magique! Boal reveals the main dynamic of the various techniques that fall under the title of Theatre of the Oppressed (that of the Forum, Image, Invisible, etc.): which is to transmit to anyone the means of theatrical production as tools for a pedagogical consciousness. That search did not end until his death, as is proved by so many works in progress that Boal published throughout his productive life.

Enio Silveira was right when he baptised the famous book by Boal according to Paulo Freire’s terms.[3] The emphasis shifted from the aesthetic field to the theatrical learning process through an anti-ideological process in which there is not any longer the authorised word, only the common experience.

Reading through his writings will reveal the care Boal took, as a dialectician, to extrapolate the dualistic scheme upon which the oppressor/oppressed opposition is founded. To become free is to transgress, he kept saying. Yet, at the very point at which the formula seems to abstract from the class struggle and the political categories of social conflict, Boal demanded that cases of personal oppression discussed by his groups be exemplary according to both political and social viewpoints. The tool of theatre was being used to serve change in all levels of existence. As a Hegelian, Boal worked for a system. As an artist he maintained its inconclusiveness, waiting for the practical change.

In the ‘idea’ that we all can become actors abides the radical desire that those who are oppressed by the dynamics of exploitation become subjects of history. Hence his revolutionary inversion of the sense of theatre, hence his ascertaining that work depends always on the other, on the continuous exchanges with agents of social struggle, which includes his experience as city councillor and his beautiful work with MST (Movimento dos Sem Terra - Movement of those Without Land) in the recent past years.

Few people have loved theatre as much as Augusto Boal. He, who taught us to prove the oppressive theatricality ingrained in the cultural formations and showed us that theatre should be practised with risk, since what is at stake is indeed the struggle for life.

[1] This article is a compact and revised version of the text “A practical idealist,” published in Carta na Escola, issue 37, São Paulo, Editora Confiança, June-July 2009, pp.52-55.

[2] Sérgio de Carvalho is a playwright, dramaturge, researcher and director of the São Paulo-based theatre company Companhia do Latão (Company of Brass). He teaches dramaturgy and theatre theory at the University of São Paulo. He is also a journalist and editor-in-chief of the journal Vintém (=’Penny’). He published Introdução ao Teatro Dialético e Atuação Crítica (Introduction to Dialectical Theatre and Critical Interpretation), Expressão Popular, 2009, and Companhia do Latão 7 peças (Companhia do Latão 7 plays), Cosacnaify, 2008.

[3] As Publisher (Civilização Brasileira), Énio Silveira was responsible for the title “Theatre of the Oppressed.”

Remembering Boal

Iná Camargo Costa[1]

1. Through the mass media

As a teenager living very far from São Paulo in the Sixties, I first became aware of Augusto Boal and his work at the Arena Theater through the news on the radio and television, and in the magazines and newspapers. That means I knew him in a very indirect way because, as we all know, the cultural industry tears all cultural processes into many pieces and uses only those it can manage for its own purposes. From the work of Boal and his colleagues, the first branch of the culture industry to buy raw material was the music industry. This is the reason why my friends and I became interested in singers like Elis Regina and Maria Bethania and their hit songs, such as Carcará[2] and Upa neguinho.[3] And of course neither radio, nor television shows, nor magazines even mentioned that songs like those came from theater shows. But at least the names of the composers were sometimes announced and so we could say we had already been listening to Gianfrancesco Guarnieri, Edu Lobo and other members of this great generation of Brazilian culture since 1965.

It was only around 1968 that I became aware that Upa neguinho came from the play Arena conta Zumbi, written by Augusto Boal and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and Carcará was part of the play Show Opinião,[4] which Augusto Boal had co-produced. At that time I had already got involved with politics and theater. That means I had already understood how and why a civil-military dictatorship was ruling the country and our lives since 1964 and I had known by experience the unbelievably violent ways in which the armed forces and censorship acted. I also understood the above mentioned cultural productions as expressions of a kind of political resistance movement. From this year on, Boal became a central reference in my cultural life.

2. Through epic narrative

At the school where I studied it was still possible in 1968 to take part in student theater shows and, more relevantly, to hear about what was going on in São Paulo. Some of our senior colleagues, who were already university students, used to come at weekends and tell us all about the shows they had seen. And they told us everything about the acting, the costumes, the songs, the singing. Although at the time I still didn’t know anything about Brecht and epic theater, now I can say that at those moments I was already having an epic experience of the first epic experiments of Brazilian theater. And this is the way the plays of Arena and Oficina theaters entered my life. It goes without saying that we tried to emulate everything we heard about in our own shows.

My school had a theater at which we could rehearse and produce many kinds of plays and sometimes student festivals. There I watched Liberdade, Liberdade,[5] an important play from the resistance movement. My first experience with the censorship also happened there. The police forbade one of our festivals and in doing so prevented me from watching a play by one of the most cherished Brazilian playwrights, Nelson Rodrigues, who, by the way, also being a journalist, used to write on a weekly basis the most awful articles endorsing the dictatorship; the same dictatorship which arrested Augusto Boal and sent him into exile. But at that time this last piece of information came from my friends living in São Paulo, not from newspapers working under the censorship.

 

3. Through books and research

My family moved to São Paulo in 1974 and three years later the history of the Arena Theater became my research subject at the University of São Paulo. The first thing written by Augusto Boal that I read was a narrative about his imprisonment, torture (so-called ‘interrogation’) and exile, which circulated among students in a clandestine way; as I was personally involved in the fight against the dictatorship, the copy which I read was also read, secretly, by many others. The second book of Boal’s which I encountered was a volume which anyone could buy in bookstores, namely the well-known Teatro do oprimido.[6]

At that time I had also read The Epic Theatre, written by Anatol Rosenfeld.[7] It is probably the first work written in Brazil about epic theatre and the work of Brecht. This author somehow shaped my relationship to Boal’s work. But from this moment on, my research into Brazilian political theatre became essentially focused upon Boal, as an artist as well as a thinker. And that is the reason why when I first met him I felt like I was meeting an old comrade. Incidentally, I have had the chance to talk directly to him only three or four times since he came back from exile.

Boal’s arrest, followed by torture and exile, is only one example of what was happening in Brazil at that time. The assassination of Heleni Guariba, one of his greatest associates at the Arena theater project, should be mentioned as extreme evidence of the hatred the agents of the dictatorship had for every form of cultural militancy.

In 1977, as I have said above, I became part of a research group at the Philosophy School at the University of São Paulo. The research subject dealt with all the arts developed in Brazil in the Sixties and their confrontations with those in political power. My subjective reasons for carrying out this work were as already stated; I wanted to take part in a kind of intellectual operation rescuing memories of experiences I had had only indirectly some years before. Only then could I read the plays themselves and other materials Augusto Boal wrote through those years, like Revolução na América do Sul, Arena conta Zumbi and Arena conta Tiradentes,[8] to mention only a few well-known ones. I think it was at that time that I completed my image of Augusto Boal, confirming my admiration of him, though that did not prevent me from developing a critical relationship to his work.

Among loyal comrades criticism and admiration are not mutually exclusive. My criticisms of Boal’s work are confined to the realm of theory, which I obviously will only mention now. To give a hint, I think he didn’t achieve in theory the same level he attained in his practice as a playwright, a director and a politician. Nevertheless, we think the same way about democratization of cultural and theatrical production and he was the first one to explain to me this goal. More than a comrade, he is one of my masters in this realm.

4. Boal is alive!

Boal’s work at the MST[9] is one of the many ways we have to attest that he is more alive than our foes can even imagine. And this may be unbelievable for those who are not aware of the logics of our social and political process.

In the year 2000, a regular Congress was held by this movement, which was founded around 1984. Fifteen years later, this congress evaluated the ongoing cultural program and concluded it was time to start political-theatrical activities and a commission was put in charge of the conversations with Augusto Boal at the Center of the Oppressed Theater in Rio de Janeiro. That means that some militant people of the MST already knew Boal’s historic fight and the work he was then carrying on.

Those who are interested in culture and politics should pay attention to this point: it was the movement which asked for help from Boal, and not the other way around. In these times of so many NGOs (and the Center of Oppressed Theater is one of them), people usually think that they can offer their services as if political movements were a sector of a cultural industry, like any other. Augusto Boal prepared a workshop right away and thus formed the first MST militants as forum theater technicians. Then the movement organized its theatrical brigades in order to reproduce that project and other techniques of the oppressed theater. I was invited to talk to those MST militants around – in 2004 because they wanted to study a little more about political theater and specifically about Brecht and Epic Theater. I think that only when I could watch how the movement appropriated Forum Theater did I really understand what it was.

The first thing to be mentioned is that the theater groups talk to other comrades inside the movement, which means that from the starting point they establish the necessary horizontal relationship. They select for the plays subjects which cannot be dealt with by other means and stem mainly from the realm of private life, such as the oppression of women and children. And once the story is told, the players ask the companion – remove audience to face the problem and try to solve it. Everybody takes part and laughs and thinks and talks critically about what is going on in their own lives and inside the movement. I can say that I understood the secret of forum theater when I watched it at the MST. That secret is: when the session happens among a few people who know each other, and of course, trust each other, and if the play goes to the point, everybody feels compelled to talk, which in this case means to play. And they do so without shame or other kinds of self-repression we see in other public spectacles, where people do not know each other.

I think the MST theater groups did not see Forum Theater as orthodoxy, but, rather, developed it according to their own needs. And I think they understood the very meaning of playing here: you can play seriously about any important issue and while playing you can criticize, on a humorous basis, your own way of life. Augusto Boal lived to see Forum Theater become a precious weapon to MST. That is why I say he is alive.

[1] Iná Camargo Costa, has a Phd in Philosophy (USP - University of São Paulo). She has taught Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at the University of São Paulo (1989-2008). She is the author of several books on theatre, namely: A hora do teatro épico no Brasil (The Hour of Epic Theatre in Brazil), São Paulo: Graal, 1996; Sinta o drama (Feel the Drama), Petrópolis: Vozes, 1998; A luta dos grupos teatrais de São Paulo por políticas públicas para a cultura (The Struggle of Theatre Groups of São Paulo for Public Cultural Policies), São Paulo: Cooperativa Paulista de Teatro, 2008 (co-authored with Dorberto Carvalho).

[2] As the lyrics explain, carcará is a kind of eagle known in Brazilian Northeastern states.

[3] A rough translation would mean “come up, little black FREE boy.” The lyrics imply a boychild born free at the Palmares Quilombo seen as he is trying his first steps. One of the legendary leaders of that Quilombo was Zumbi, after whom the play Arena tells Zumbi was named.

[4] Opinion Show was a collage of three stories—of a woman middle-class singer and two popular composers—about the resistance to the dictatorship.

[5] Freedom, freedom was also a collage, but now including material about two thousand years of the struggle for freedom, like Socrates Apology, The Battle Hymn of the Republic and Pete Seeger’s song If I had a hammer, to give a few examples. It was produced by Opinion Group, named after the show above.

[6] Theater of the Oppressed.

[7] Like Bertolt Brecht, this true Brazilian master was a German emigrant who escaped from the clutches of the Nazis. But he came to Brazil probably uninformed about our country.

[8] South American Revolution, Arena tells about Zumbi and Arena tells about Tiradentes.

[9] Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Terra, or Landless Workers’ Movement.