In Memorium - Director Augusto Boal

[nomdeplume]

Posted: 5/4/09 at 2:54pm

The influential Brazilian and world-renowned theatre director Augusto Boal. Involved in politics and intuitively possessing a great understanding of human emotion and behavior, he founded the theatre company and wrote the Theatre of the Oppressed. Another book he wrote, Games For Actors and Non-Actors, has fantastic exercises.

Well aware of the oppression, torture and abuses committed by dictatorships and military juntas in South America, Boal created play exercises to help humans understand oppressive behavior and even to identify the same roots of behavior within their own emotions in hopes that awareness could help people overcome oppression within and without.

A seemingly silly exercise, in which you pretend to be a bear and the other is your victim, and then change sides, can immediately identify to the participant their own emotional connections to both aggression and fear.

I haven't read his most recent book, The Rainbow of Desire: The Boal Method of Theatre and Therapy, but I'll bet it's good.

This genius just passed on May 2nd, but he left a tremendous gift to theatre in his life and works, including his books. This site notes that he was honored at the Abbey Theatre in 2008 with the Crossborder Award for Peace and Democracy.
Augusto Boal Updated On: 5/4/09 at 02:54 PM