Rendering №5

The headline of the article is Who is Augusto Boal? The article was created on February 18, 2013 and last updated on February 19, 2013. The author of the article is Maycon Dimas Oliveira Dos Santos. The purpose of the article is to give the readers some information about a Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal’s life and work.

The writer states that in the middle of the 1960s Augusto Boal was touring with his theatre company when a peasant woman from the audience stood up and stopped a presentation. She was not pleased with the resolution of a certain conflict in the play. Instead of pleading with her to calm down, Boal asked the woman what her approach to the matter would be. This was revealing: not only was the idea she gave a plausible one, but also the awareness that her action raised amongst the public proved to be much more active than the play itself would have achieved.

The writer clarifies that this episode, as Boal would describe later on, had a crucial importance on the development of his very own kind of theatre, the Theatre of the Oppressed. “In this usage,” Boal described his theory in the 1992 book 'Games for Actors and Non-Actors', "all human beings are Actors and Spectators. They are Spect-Actors." The goal in his new method of working was to give voice to the audience, once only the recipients of the one-way form of communication that the theatre used to be, enabling them to take a part in the action and, as a consequence, learn from this involvement.

Further the author gives Augusto Boal’s quotes: "Everything that actors do, we do throughout our lives, always and everywhere." “Actors talk, move, dress to suit the setting, express ideas, reveal passions - just as we do in our everyday lives. The only difference is that actors are conscious that they are using the language of theatre, and are thus better able to turn it to their advantage, whereas the woman and man in the street do not know that they are speaking theatre." Then the author claims that Boal believed that the only way to achieve social development was by giving a chance to each person to express his or her feelings, especially those who were historically subdued - hence the use of the term oppressed.

The writer states that considering the importance of Augusto Boal to the making of theatre worldwide, his career began a bit late. It wasn’t until he moved to New York to pursue a master’s degree in his original field of study, Chemical Engineering, in 1952, that he started attending drama classes. Among Boal’s professors there was John Gassner, the same one who had previously taught the likes of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. With this kind of tutoring Boal staged his first plays in 1955, and from then on he dedicated himself exclusively to the field of arts. In the following year, soon after his graduation, Boal was invited to join a declining theatre company in the southeast of Brazil, called Arena, which he helped to save and prosper with avant-garde ideas like the "newspaper theatre" and, ultimately, the revolutionary Theatre of the Oppressed.

Further the author points out that Boal stayed with the Arena company until 1971. In this year, one of the most hard of the military dictatorship in Brazil, he was kidnapped, tortured and left in prison for over three months accused of subversion. The social awareness that his participative plays were provoking captured the attention of the government, who considered it to be a menace to the regime. After jail, Boal was sent to Argentina in exile, and there he wrote a book called "The Theatre of the Oppressed", which settled all the theories he had gathered in the years prior and propelled his name to international acclaim.

In the author’s opinion, to the present the name of Augusto Boal remains as one of the most influential of all times in the theatre matter. His book "The Theatre of the Oppressed", along with "Games for Actors and Non-Actors" and "Legislative Theatre", are still widely used in many schools of acting and directing around the world. His legacy can be perceived in countries as different as France and Angola, such was the scope of his work.

In conclusion the writer say that in  2008 Boal was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and in March 2009 he was entitled “World Theatre Ambassador” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Less than a month later Augusto Boal died during his sleep due to a respiratory failure. He had been fighting leukemia for the past five years.

To my mind, this article is really worth reading. Having read about Augusto Boal I was really amazed by his biography. This man deserves a lot of respect because he was not only a theatre director but also a writer who wrote many books. Most importantly I was just struck by the fact that he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize! I was actually upset when I learned that he died of leukemia.