Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

social sadism made explicit
and waiter were unwittingly played by the real manager and waiter – who
said, ‘almost word for word, what we had scripted’. 66 Moreover, being set
in a busy restaurant at lunchtime, this form of theatre was guaranteed
always to have a full house. In Theatre of the Oppressed, Boal recounts one
particular example unfolding as follows: a number of actors are seated at
different tables in a restaurant; the protagonist loudly announces that he
wants to eat à la carte, since the rest of the food available is too bad. The
waiter tells him it will cost 70 soles, which the actor says is no problem. At
the end of the meal he receives the bill, and announces that he’s unable to
pay for it. (Boal notes that the diners nearby are of course closely following
this dialogue, and far more attentively than if they were witnessing it as a
scene on stage.) The actor offers to pay with his own labour power –
perhaps taking out the rubbish, or doing the washing up. He asks the waiter
how much he would get paid for taking out the rubbish. The waiter avoids
answering, but a second actor, at another table, pipes up that he’s friends
with the rubbish collector and knows that he earns 7 soles per hour – so he
would have to work ten hours for a meal that took ten minutes to eat. The
fi rst actor says he would perhaps rather do the gardening for them – how
much do they pay the gardener? A third actor pipes up: he’s friends with
the gardener, and knows that he gets 10 soles per hour. By this point the
head waiter is in despair. He tries to divert the attention of the customers,
but the restaurant is already becoming a public forum. Eventually one of
the actors starts collecting money to pay the bill – which offends some
people, and causes more disturbance, but they manage to amass 100 soles. 67
It is tempting to compare this level of integration between artifi ce and
reality to the last two events of the Ciclo de Arte Experimental. Both operate
by stealth, unannounced to the public as works of art. Both turn the audience
into active agents and rely on their intervention for the work to unfold.
But whereas the actions of the Ciclo operate on a metaphoric level with an
art audience, activating spectatorship as a transitive passage to political
action, Boal’s work takes theatre to an audience who don’t even recognise
themselves as an audience, and stages with them a discussion about specifi c
issues of labour. For Boal, a political agenda requires precise aesthetic solutions.
It is crucial, for example, that the actors do not reveal themselves to
be actors: ‘On this rests the invisible nature of this form of theatre. And it
is precisely this invisible quality that will make the spectator act freely and
fully, as if he were living in a real situation – and, after all, it is a real situation!’
68 Needless to say, the invisibility of this theatre was politically
necessary given the extreme violence of the dictatorship at this point. 69
Boal’s Invisible Theatre can be seen as an explicitly Marxist iteration of the
Ciclo’s metaphorical events (the closed gallery, the scuffl e, the prison). If
the artists in Rosario produced coercive situations that function as poetic
analogues for political repression (infl icting restriction on the viewer as a
wake- up call to his/ her oppression by the Onganía dictatorship), Boal
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