HW due (10/18)

Beautiful Trouble

Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed deploys tactics that blur the oppositional binary between the perpetrator and the victim. By assigning audience members roles that are not of their own, they may empathize with the perceived 'perpetrator's narrative and understand oppression is inflicted at the state's level not at the individual's. 

I appreciate the evolving stages of Theater of the Oppressed whose level of direct action varies. Forum Theater and Image Theater produce ethical spectacles. They address a set of issues by engaging the very citizens affected and politicize spectacles. Though spectators confront forces of hegemonic oppression that shape their personal lives, their practice is neither self-gratifying nor masturbatory. For these oppressed individuals (i.e., prisoners, refugees etc), a platform to speak their own narrative alone is liberating. Theater of the Oppressed localizes and personalizes otherwise abstract monolithic forces of oppression.

In Aesthetics of the Oppressed, Augusto Boal cites an example in which spectacle has transformed an inherently oppressive institution. Female prisoners enacted in front of prison guards the dehumanizing regulations of the prison such as being forced to strip naked, allowing wardens to search inside their genitals, etc. It was only after watching their own action as a performance the prison guards realized their complacency in the larger oppression. 

Theater can do so much...!!! 

The Couple in the Cage
The strategies for the performance are pretty obvious. What's not predictable is the complete oblivion of the audience. 

How else could they have delivered their false indigenous display so the whole simulation is a clear satire? Were the audience to feel shame? Are the implications of otherness and colonialism too in your face? Does their performance lack nuance? What does that even mean? Why wouldn't the audience understand it? ????????? The oblivion makes the performance even more absurd.