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

notes to pages 124– 6
taken, most of whom were in their teens and twenties; 54 percent were
from the working class (to paralyse working- class reaction to the regime),
30 percent were women, of whom 3 percent were pregnant. The Catholic
Church was complicit in this regime of terror, and objecting priests were
also ‘disappeared’. See Jo Fisher, Mothers of the Disappeared, Boston:
South End Press, 1989.
70 Boal, Hamlet and the Baker’s Son, p. 194. Boal recalls that in north-east
Brazil, ‘we did a play that ends with our telling people to fi ght for their
freedom, to give their blood. After, someone came up to us and said,
“OK, if you think like that, come with us and let’s fi ght the government.”
We had to answer that our rifl es were false. “Yes”, he answered, “your
rifl es are false but you are true – you come, we have enough real rifl es for
everyone.” Then we had to say, “We are true, but we are truly artists and
not truly peasants.” We were ashamed to have to say that. From that
point on, and never again, have I incited audiences to do things that I
would not do myself. So the seed of forum was to not give solutions, to
not incite people. Let them express their own solutions.’ (Boal, cited in
Michael Taussig and Richard Schechner, ‘Boal in Brazil, France, the
USA: An Interview with Augusto Boal’, in Mady Schutzman and Jan
Cohen- Cruz [eds.], Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism, London
and New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 24.)
71 Boal, cited in ibid., p. 29.
72 Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non- Actors, London and New York:
Routledge, 1992, p. 19.
73 Ibid., p. 19.
74 Boal, cited in Taussig and Schechner, ‘Boal in Brazil, France, the USA’,
p. 27. For Boal, Brechtian epic theatre still places too much emphasis on
understanding (dianoia) rather than on the possibility of change.
75 Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, p. 142.
76 See Boal, Games for Actors and Non- Actors, Chapter 1. This is also in line
with the general shift from Marxism to identity politics across numerous
disciplines in the 1980s.
77 Boal, Hamlet and the Baker’s Son, p. 324.
78 Mady Schutzman, ‘Brechtian Shamanism: The Political Therapy of
Augusto Boal’, in Schutzman and Cohen- Cruz (eds.), Playing Boal:
Theatre, Therapy, Activism, pp. 138– 9.
79 See Taussig and Schechner, ‘Boal in Brazil, France, the USA’, p. 21.
80 Catherine Wood, ‘From Invisible Theatre to Thai Soup’, Untitled, 32,
Summer 2004, p. 45. See also Carrie Lambert- Beatty, ‘Make- Believe:
Parafi ction and Plausibility’, October, 129, Summer 2009, p. 54: describing
what she calls ‘parafi ctional’ art projects (fi ctions that are experienced as
fact, but which leave the audience unsettled as to whether this is actually
the case), she argues that such works deal less with the disappearance of
reality into simulacrum than with the ‘pragmatics of trust’ (p. 54).
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