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

social sadism made explicit
stability and ultimately, for Boal, this type of Greek tragedy serves as an
instrument of repression (‘what is purifi ed is the desire to change society
– not, as they say in many books, pity and fear . . . I don’t want the people
to use the theatre as a way of not doing in real life’). 74 Instead, he sought to
trigger in the viewer a desire to practise in reality the act that he/ she had
rehearsed in the theatre, and Boal is meticulous in considering the affective
impact of this technique: ‘the practice of these theatrical forms creates a
sort of uneasy sense of incompleteness that seeks fulfi lment through real
action’. 75 In the context of contemporary art, it is telling that we do not
have images of these experiences: the force of Boal’s thinking is best
communicated verbally. His most compelling innovations parallel those of
Eisenstein in the 1920s: using reality as a set, and real people as performers,
to produce a heightened consciousness of social injustice.
Before concluding, it is worth considering the relocation of Boal’s techniques
from the context in which they were devised: rural illiteracy and
oppression under the conditions of military dictatorship, in which anything
less than a positive reference to society would be censored. Working in
Sicily, Stockholm, Paris and other European cities in the later 1970s and
1980s, Boal found himself creating Invisible Theatre based on issues of
racism, ageism, sexism and homelessness, rather than class inequality; he
gives examples of Invisible Theatre performed on the Paris Metro and on
passenger ferries in Stockholm. 76 Despite his hostility towards the West as
the source of Latin America’s problems, he noted that the same extremes of
wealth and poverty existed there too, together with new forms of oppression
that Boal referred to as ‘the cop in the head’ – solitude,
incommunicability, emptiness. Rather than an external armed threat, the
West suffered from an internalised oppression, an anomie leading a greater
occurrence of depression and suicide. 77 Theatre scholar Mady Schutzman
had argued that the Theatre of the Oppressed was devalued by such a relocation:
it is ‘reduced to a technique for coping rather than changing
– adapting oneself to the so- called “demands” an affl uent and privileged
society makes upon a consumption- minded, capitalist individuality’. 78
What were ‘rehearsals for revolution’ in Latin America became ‘rehearsals
for healing’ in the West.
For Boal, the Theatre of the Oppressed has different goals in different
contexts: it could be political (events and demonstrations), therapeutic
(Boal collaborated with his wife Cecilia, a psychoanalyst), pedagogic (in
schools), and legislative (in cities). The latter is perhaps the most relevant
from today’s perspective: on returning to Brazil in 1986, Boal was invited
by a Rio TV station to make a twenty- minute programme of Invisible
Theatre every Sunday. One episode involved a dark- skinned man selling
himself as a slave in the market because he found out that he earned less
than a slave did in the nineteenth century. Another concerned nuclear
power: a group of actors dressed in black went to the beach at Ipanema and
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