It was maybe the first impacting death to reach me first via Twitter: Augusto Boal died at the age of 78 Friday from respiratory failure after a long battle with leukemia.
I was immediately transported back in time to the first time I'd studied the theater legend in undergrad at USF — I'm pretty sure it was during a course taught by Nancy Cole called something to the effect of The Theater of Post-Cultural Pluralism. I'd go a lot more in-depth the next year in Dr. Pat Finelli's Senior Colloqium class (perhaps the best class I had as an undergrad theater student). By the time I'd moved on to UF for grad school, Boal would be shoulder to shoulder in my theatrical Mount Rushmore, joining Dario Fo, Jerzy Grotowski and Peter Brook.
Two of Boal's books — Theater of the Oppressed and Games for Actors and Non-Actors — still hold special spots on my bookshelf. What was fresh and exciting about Augusto Boal to me as a student in the mid-’90s (he developed his methods in the ’50s and ’60s) was that he worked lifelong to completely demysitify the form, worked tirelessly to put art and power into the hands of the common citizen and worked to use the form as a tool for change.
He worked with professionals, he worked with farmers — give him bodies and he'd create. Some of his work laid the foundation for what we'd today call drama therapy (which he called Forum Theater), where "spect-actors" would work through scenarios of oppression toward change. Boal's methods encourage an actual dialogue with the audience as opposed to simple one-sided conversation. Theater was to be an active relationship. He created and taught others how to create theater ripped from local news or based on current or proposed legislation. He created what was called "Invisible Theater" that could spring up anywhere and where those witnessing wouldn't be clued in that it was performance.
His work was regarded as dangerous — the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from the '60s to the '80s detained, arrested, jailed and tortured Boal before finally exiling him to Argentina. He returned home in the late '80s after that regime's collapse.
This article appears in Apr 29 – May 5, 2009.