Theatre of the Oppressed

When Paulo Freire wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he upended traditionalists’ views and expectations about education. Freire imagined a new kind of classroom in which both teachers and students participate in a shared experience of learning. Boal, who was highly influenced by Freire, turned his attention to his own field to determine whether similar mechanisms of power were at play. In Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal argues that politics and art are intrinsically connected and that theater has always been used as a mechanism for power. In fact, he posits that the very model of a stage is a platform upon which the structures of power can play out on a smaller scale.

A traditional performance-arts model draws a line of separation between the spectators and the performers. Boal shows that this separation occurs so that the viewers can get lost in the protagonist’s story and experience catharsis from the safety of their seats. In this traditional model, spectators connect to the story and virtues of the protagonist and find their own personal redemption in the sins of the characters, and “[t]he peripeteia suffered by the character is reproduced in the spectator as well” (36).