Augusto Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed (TO)

Theatre of the Oppressed has the power to change the world one rupture at a time. It might be a bold statement to make but it has already changed lives and laws. The oppressed can speak and have their stories told in order to get their oppressor's and the community's attention. Without Augusto Boal and TO, theatre would not play a strong role in inspiring society to change and deal with ruptures that are put away on the top shelf and never looked at again. Boal is a brave man who realized that the oppressed need to express themselves to be liberated. It is our job as liberation artists to share our techniques of TO and help the oppressed communities.

Augusto Boal is a theatre director from Rio de Janeiro who founded a type of theatre called Theatre of the Oppressed. In the Theatre of the Oppressed Declaration of Principles, the first objective is to humanize humanity. Boal's main focus of TO is to go into communities of people who are oppressed and play games, create images, and create a final project in which a rupture is expressed, evaluated, and presented. A rupture is any kind of problem that a particular group of people have to face in society. For example, a rupture for gays and lesbians is the way that others see them through society's lens of homophobia and how it affects them. The community of gays and lesbians would then play games to feel like a community and then create images that present their own personal take on the rupture. Through those images, a play is created which may involve combining multiple images. The play would then be presented to the members of the community that the gays and lesbians feel most oppress them.


Boal says that Theatre of the Oppressed will get the communities to face their ruptures, help them fight against their oppressions, and create change in their society. An important aspect of TO is Forum Theatre which is a play that the oppressed group creates without a solution. The rupture is presented on stage in various types of scenes and then the audience gets to pick which scene they would like to see again. The play involves a protagonist presenting their issue to the antagonist. Any audience member, called a spect-actor, is invited to come up on stage and take the place of the protagonist and continue acting out the scene to find all the possible solutions. The rupture is then explored and experienced by other members of the surrounding community. The oppressed community invites the people who are their antagonists and people who cause the rupture so they can experience what they have to go through. Through Forum Theatre many lives have been changed because ruptures are coming to the surface. Legislative Theatre also comes out of Forum Theatre which expands and asks that new laws be made to deal with the specific rupture.

In an example of Legislative Theatre, our professor told us of another project he did a couple of years ago. They were investigating the rupture of profiling juveniles as gang members. If a cop stopped any one because they think that the person is affiliated with a gang simply because of what they are wearing or how they look, the person's name is tagged as being in a gang. If that person then gets in trouble with the law later in life, they will get a longer or harsher sentence because they are tagged as being in a gang. The class presented a forum theatre piece in which the scene described above was played out. The class had invited their Congressman to the play and had the spect-actors switch places with the protagonist. There was no solution that they acted out that could solve the rupture. At the end of the play, they invited the Congressman onto the stage and had the audience members write on a piece of paper if they think that a new law should be made to help the rupture. The Congressman received a lot of "yes" answers and said he would now create a new law.

Through the many different forms of theatre such as Image Theatre and Forum Theatre, ruptures are explored and brought into the open. The audience members are shown the problem and asked to create their own solutions. My Professor told us that in his class last semester they explored the rupture of residents of our community feeling threatened by USC's Master Plan. USC is planning on expanding their "land" in the community to create housing for students. As a result community members are being pushed away or forced to pay higher rents which they cannot afford. As a class they explored the issue and presented crosswalk theatre. They dressed up in colonial wigs and had signs saying "USC MASTER PLAN" and would go out in the middle of crosswalk when the lights were red. They also presented the issue at Tommy Trojan. Although there was no definite outcome from their theatre projects, they were able to provide the community members a way to be heard. Students, faculty, and other community members who may not have known about the issue are now informed and can help find a solution to the problem.


Augusto Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed have changed the way I see theatre acting upon social change. I have always been drawn to artists, plays, and directors who present material that sends a message about an important topic. I never knew that there was a type of theatre devoted to social and political (legislative) change until college. I thought that the extent of theatre inspiring social change was plays that have good messages at the end that cause the audience to think twice about the presented topic. TO is a whole other world to theatre that gets the oppressed to have their voices heard when they might be in a situation in which they cannot speak. There are already examples of how TO can change the world by exposing ruptures that are kept quiet. If TO continues its work, then pershaps some day all the ruptures will be out in the open and our world will be forever changed. I will strive to continue to do TO throughout my career as an artist because I believe that it can cause change or inspire people to create change.