Just sharing Boal!

[Ravi Ramakantan]

Form the little I have read of TO, the following passage seems to reflect a watershed in Boal's "perception" of TO.

As a physician, I have been particularly  fascinated by this writing  and the implications it has for the precept, practice of and 'outcomes' from TO.

Any thoughts?

So, why I am I sharing it today, suddenly?  Well...I was backing-up  stuff off my hard disk and came across this - surely, there cannot be a better reason :-) !!

BTW, sorry, I searched, but I have been unable to locate the source for this writing - maybe from his ROD book.

-------------------

"In 1978, I was invited to Paris following the publication of my book - Theatre of the Oppressed in French and I was to give a year-long class at Sorbonne. I thought I would go back to Brazil after that because this was the period of amnesty there.

 

But in these Theatre of the Oppressed workshops, there also appeared to be oppressions which were new to me. Loneliness, the impossibility of communicating with others, the fear of emptiness. For someone like me fleeing explicit dictatorship of a cruel and brutal nature, it was natural that these things should seem superficial and scarcely worthy of attention. It was as if I was always asking mechanically ‘but, where are the cops?’-  because I was used to working with concrete, visible oppressions.. Little by little I changed my opinion. I discovered for instance, that the percentage of suicides was much higher in countries like Sweden and Finland where the essential needs of the citizen-in matters of housing and food and Social Security are met than in countries like our Third World countries. In Latin America, the major killer is hunger and in Europe, drug overdose. But whatever form it takes death is still death.

 

And thinking about the suffering of a person who chooses to take his own life in order to put an end to the fear of emptiness and loneliness, I decided to work with these new oppressions and to consider them as such. In the beginning of the 1980s, I led a workshop over a period of two years called ‘Cop in the Head’. I started from the following hypothesis. The cops are in our heads and have their headquarters elsewhere and their barracks must be on the outside. The task was to discover how these cops got into us and invent ways of dislodging them. It was an audacious decision. During the last few years, I have continued to work on this aspect of Theatre of the Oppressed- the superimposition of fields the theatrical and the therapeutic.

 

Theatre is therapeutic, it is not therapy.  I think that it is so for all of you; if you do theatre it is good for you. And Theatre of the Oppressed is dynamic theatre, it is not static. It allows people to go and try, and to try again a third and a fourth time - and this is extremely therapeutic. Forum theatre is therapeutic. When you come here and you exert it, it is therapeutic. It does good for you, because the fact that you made the transgression and took part, makes you stronger. It makes you a person who does not accept the fiction of the reality here, and that’s good. It is therapeutic, but it is not a therapy. Therapy assumes that you have a psychological problem and a need for treatment. Therapy also assumes that there is a therapist, a person who knows better than us. Theatre of the oppressed does not." - Boal.

Ravi

[Prabha Pandey]

'Theatre is therapeutic but it is not therapy' 

That sums up BOAL and TOI!

Thanks for the input,  Ravi.

Best
Prabha

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