Theoria Negativa: Making Sense of Boal's Reading of Aristotle

Abstract

Theoria Negativa:Making Sense of Boal’s Reading of Aristotle Paul Dwyer (bio) Judging by the proliferation of recent works by and about Augusto Boal, as well as the number of course readers and critical anthologies in which his work is excerpted, his place in the canon of modern theatre theory seems assured.1 This critical consensus might almost seem too cosy given that Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques are usually regarded as a means to help effect progressive, perhaps radical social change. Thus, Douglas Paterson and Mark Weinberg (in an interview with Boal) puzzle over the fact that "people in established critical circles have not come after you. We would think there would be a ground-swell of resistance, because by taking on the Aristotelian structure, you are critiquing one of the fundamental grounds of the way western theatre is practiced" ("We Are All Theater" 18). Of course, the short answer to this puzzle is that it is no puzzle at all: Boal's celebrated critique of Aristotle is itself firmly grounded in a theoretical position that is familiar to many "established" and supportive critics as having been staked out by Brecht a good fifty years earlier.2 The real puzzle, I wish to argue, is that so many critics and academics (not to mention their students) still seem to take Boal's reading of Aristotle's Poetics at face value, rather than examining the way Boal, like Brecht, first constructs – and then demolishes – the "Aristotle" he needs in order to suit his own rhetorical purposes. As Drew Milne puts it, the basic strategy is a "negation of Aristotelianism as the poetics of oppression [which] makes Boal's poetics of the oppressed the positive term to that which is negated" (116). I should stress at the outset that my purpose here is not so much to salvage the reputation of Aristotle as to highlight the problematic justifications of TO which arise from Boal's apparent desire to "have done" with Aristotle once and for all. I would also add that this critique of Aristotle can only really make sense (and here it makes good sense) when the theatrical and political context in which Boal was writing is kept very closely in mind: while offering an [End Page 635] oversimplified view of the relations between theatre, theory, and the state in Ancient Greece, he nevertheless provides a compelling account of the struggle to make theatre a tool for progressive social change under a regime as brutal and coercive as the military dictatorship that took control of Brazil after the coups of 1964 and 1968. However, this is not the context in which Boal's work is now most enthusiastically being taken up by theatre practitioners in North America, Europe, Australia, and other "First-World" settings, practitioners who are typically engaged in state-subsidised health, welfare, and education programs. For this "new breed of cultural workers," dubbed "TO 'multipliers'" by Schutzman and Cohen-Cruz (5, 7), I suggest that a return encounter with Aristotle's Poetics is long overdue. A careful review of Boal's critique of Aristotle shows not only that it is a tendentious reading in many parts but also that it leads to an unlikely claim for TO as a radical alternative. To the extent that contemporary TO practitioners are content simply to recycle Boal's anti-Aristotelian rhetoric, they are obscuring the magnitude of the task that faces them, namely to refashion the theory and practice of TO for deployment in fields – like public health, education, and welfare – that are saturated with multiple, competing discourses and where no theatre-worker is ever "outside the system." This is not to suggest that TO practice is not still evolving in interesting ways, nor that it has completely lost its progressive political edge. Some adaptations and extensions of TO (such as the "Rainbow of Desire" and other, more introspective uses of Image Theatre) have been strongly promoted by Boal as a means of accommodating the shift in context from his early work in Latin America to work in First-World settings. Other innovations have grown from the interaction between "TO multipliers" and community workers in related areas...