Activism, Therapy, or Nostalgia? Theatre of the Oppressed in NYC

Abstract

When Augusto Boal first systematized his political philosophy into an aesthetic language, a language he called theatre of the oppressed (Boal, 1985), he was living under a hard-line military-based regime in Brazil. The enemy was evident; the oppressive economic and political conditions derived from a known source, however masked its cultural agents may have been. Censorship, repression, violence, and exile were commonplace. Those like Boal who were not very subtle in their expressions of resistance were targeted for punitive action, at the very least for surveillance. Many such oppositional artists remained in Brazil even after the brutal military coup of 1968. Boal, after serving a term in jail, left Brazil in 1971. After approximately four years, spent mostly in Argentina, he set up residence in Paris where in 1979 he established his Center of Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal and his family returned to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-'8os. As he relates, the issues of oppression that his work addressed amidst Europe's liberalism were far more psychological, esoteric, and metaphysical than those addressed in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina. While Boal's techniques have always interfaced with therapeutic ones (he makes no distinction between his techniques appropriate for therapy and those for political action-he perceives his spect-actor scheme relevant to all social transformations), the tight, codependent weave of therapeutic and political threads appeared to loosen in the first-world context.' For these often middle-class or academic participants, therapy and politics addressed different aspects of life. The postcolonial leisure class with whom he tended to work in Europe were capable of engaging their radical left-wing politics in relative comfort; material and physical urgency gave way to a constant, but far less immediate, sense of despondency and hopelessness. In this bourgeois environment, therapy apparently forfeits its potentially subversive edge and is reduced to a technique for coping-adapting oneself to the so-called demands an affluent and privileged society makes upon an insatiable, capitalist individuality. It doesn't matter how left-identified one