Theatre of the Oppressed

Aristotle was a philosopher who was born in northern Greece in 384 B.C. The thinker was the third in an important line of philosophers who established foundational principles that continue to influence modern art, science, mathematics, and other disciplines. Aristotle was the student of Plato, who studied under Socrates. After Plato’s death, Aristotle opened his own school—the Lyceum. His lectures were compiled at the school and preserved.

Nicomachean Ethics is a foundational text for Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. In the first chapter, Boal carefully outlines Aristotle’s influence on Western ideology and drama. Aristotle argues that art is separate from politics, and Boal shows that this stance finds its roots in an already established Western tradition of isolation and disparateness. Aristotle’s understanding of these distinctions is based upon concepts established in both Zeno’s Paradox and Plato’s definition of forms.

Boal argues that the line of separation that Aristotle draws between politics and art is indicative of a significant blind spot. In Politics, Aristotle asserts that humans are innately and inherently political animals. However, Boal shows that the beginnings of art are interwoven with political and social issues and that these disciplines cannot and should not be separated from one another.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) was a German playwright and director who was deeply influenced by the principles of Marxism. His ideas about theater were highly controversial. During World War II, Brecht left Germany to escape the Nazi regime. While living in California and working as a screenwriter, Brecht was monitored by the U.S. government and subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee for alleged affiliations with the Communist Party.

Brecht’s plays explored class relations, class conflict, and social transformation, and he and his colleagues worked together to develop a radical form of theater called “Lehrstücke” in the 1920s and 1930s. Lehrstücke is translated by Brecht to mean “learning-play,” and the technique involves breaking down the barriers between actors and audience. In Chapter 3, Boal examines the work of Bertolt Brecht and analyzes how it fits within the tradition of “epics” as outlined by Aristotle and Hegel. Brecht challenged many of the conventions of the form.

Paulo Freire (1921-1997) is best known for writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which served as the catalyst for a critical pedagogy movement that was focused on building consciousness and social awareness through shared power in the classroom. The Brazilian educator and philosopher grew up in poverty before moving to Jaboatão dos Guararapes when Freire was 10. Freire struggled in school, where the academic focus felt misaligned with what the young boy was experiencing at home and with his friends. Moacir Gadotti, a close collaborator of Freire’s, quoted his friend in the biography Reading Paulo Freire: His Life and Work; Freire stated, “I didn’t understand anything because […] my social condition didn’t allow me to have an education” (New York Press, 1994). The dissonance between Freire’s experiences and his struggles in school helped to shape his understanding of the fact that knowledge is often locked behind a gate, its access restricted according to class.

Freire studied law and philosophy before becoming a teacher at a secondary school. He was made the director of the Pernambuco Department of Education and Culture in 1946. Freire’s efforts brought literacy to hundreds of Brazilian workers who had been denied access to learning. Following the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil, Freire was imprisoned as a traitor and then exiled to Bolivia. While away from his home country, the educator continued to devote his life to service for both the Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform Movement and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. During this time, Freire wrote and published two works: Education as the Practice of Freedom and Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Boal’s work was heavily influenced by Freire, whose Pedagogy of the Oppressed decentralizes the role of the teacher in the classroom and elevates students as active co-participants in learning. The Brazilian educator challenged the hierarchical structure of traditional models of education and argued that the function of education was to raise students’ critical and conscious awareness through active participation in learning.

Boal believed that Freire’s argument—that structures of power are resurrected in classrooms—mirrored what Boal himself was witnessing in performance arts. Like Freire, who imagined students as conscious participants in the making of meaning, Boal constructed a concept of theater that transformed spectators into what he called “spect-actors.”

In March of 1996, Boal and Freire appeared together at the Second Annual Pedagogy of the Oppressed Conference in Omaha. Together, the two philosophers reflected about their methods and commented on how their experiences growing up in Brazil and working under a military regime impacted their perspectives on the world. After Freire passed away in 1997, Boal remarked at the following conference that he mourned Freire’s passing like the loss of a father.

Georg Hegel (1770-1831) was a German philosopher and an influential figure in the development of the German idealism movement. Hegel is considered one of the founders of phenomenology, which centralizes the lived experience and personal perceptions of the individual. The philosopher challenged Aristotle’s separatist approach to disciplines in The Phenomenology of Spirit, in which he explores the idea of a transformative consciousness.

Boal draws on Hegel’s work as a contrast to Brecht’s. Boal examines Hegel’s definition of the word “epic” and juxtaposes it with Brecht’s approach. Both Hegel and Brecht’s ideas contribute to Boal’s techniques.