With theatre of the oppressed, Boal (1979) prepares a performative way of (re-)enacting relations in roles that we too often deem naturalized: the designer and the client, the architect and the layman, the mayor and the citizen, the lecturer and the student, the peasant and the landowner, and so forth. Pages 121-135 of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed blueprint a kind of impromptu theatre to us that we can use to understand those roles in an embodied way, and to then interrupt the play itself to see how we can do things differently.

Can you think of a scene, an encounter, a ritual perhaps that you (and/or your peers) experienced that, if looked again, and (re-)enacted might shed light onto the relations that are (sometimes, wrongly perhaps) taken for granted in our daily lives? This could be an every-day encounter on the street, in a quotidian place, or perhaps from when you worked in a practice.

Re-enact it with your group and prepare a short theatre play of no more than 3 minutes so that we can all experience it and then deconstruct it together.

An excerpt (full PDF of book attached): […] Rituals and masks: The relations of production (infrastructure) determine the culture of a society (superstructure). Sometimes the infrastructure changes but the superstructure for a while remains the same. In Brazil the landlords would not allow the peasants to look them in the face while talking with them: this would mean lack of respect. The peasants were accustomed to talking with the landlords only while staring at the ground and murmuring: ‘yes, sir; yes, sir; yes, sir’. When the government decreed an agrarian reform (before 1964, date of the fascist coup d’état) its emissaries went to the fields to tell the peasants that now they could become landowners. The peasants, staring at the ground, murmured: ‘yes, friend; yes, friend; yes, friend’. A feudalistic culture had totally permeated their lives. The relationships of the peasant with the landlord were entirely different from those with the agent of the Institute of Agrarian Reform, but the ritual remained unchanged. This particular technique of a people’s theatre (‘Rituals and masks’) consists precisely in revealing the superstructures, the rituals which reify all human relationships, and the masks of behaviour that those rituals impose on each person according to the roles he plays in society and the rituals he must perform. A very simple example: a man goes to a priest to confess his sins. How will he do it? Of course, he will kneel, confess his sins, hear the penitence, cross himself, and leave. But do all men confess always in the same way before all priests? Who is the man, and who is the priest? In this case we need two versatile actors to stage the same confession four times: First scene: the priest and the parishioner are landlords; Second scene: the priest is a landlord and the parishioner is a peasant; Third scene: the priest is a peasant and the parishioner is a landlord; Fourth scene: the priest and the parishioner are peasants. The ritual is the same in each instance, but the different social masks will cause the four scenes to be different also. This is an extraordinarily rich technique which has countless variants: the same ritual changing masks; the same ritual performed by people of one social class, and later by people of another class; exchange of masks within the same ritual; etc., etc.

Conclusion: ‘Spectator’, a Bad Word! Yes, this is without a doubt the conclusion: ‘Spectator’ is a badword! The spectator is less than a man and it is necessary to humanise him, to restore to him his capacity of action in all its fullness. He too must be a subject, an actor on an equal plane with those generally accepted as actors, who must also be spectators. All these experiments of a people’s theatre have the same objective – the liberation of the spectator, on whom the theatre has imposed finished visions of the world. And since those responsible for theatrical performances are in general people who belong directly or indirectly to the ruling classes, obviously their finished images will be reflections of themselves. The spectators in the people’s theatre (i.e., the people themselves) cannot go on being the passive victims of those images.

Theatre of the Oppressed (Forum Theatre): Therapists Managing Complicity in Hospitals,NYU Steinhardt Theatre and Health Lab (2024): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y83wTEGPiY

Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. New edition. Get Political 6. Pluto Press, 2008.