Both of Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed and the interview both gives you an insight on how it works and what his intentions were when it came to sending a theatrical message. In the first article, Arsenal of Games & Exercise, he explains how he goes from Brazil to Europe and finds more interesting ways to create an entertaining form of sending a message through theater with actors. The whole point is to show an audience a situation that can occur in everyday life. Being that it is an interactive game with the audience, Boal’s group performs for the audience the first time and then have the audience speak on different outcomes for solving the situation and then Boal’s group will then perform again with a different outcome. The main point of that article is to show the set and rules he has for it.
In the interview, Augusto explains the meaning for the Theater of the Oppressed as being therapeutic. He saw that the same theatrical performance was being created with not only adults, but also 4 and 5 year old children. As amazed as he was, he then realized that he not only travels to spread his performing techniques, but also to bring in new performance scenario. He introduced a new game called Rainbow of desire, which is supposed to be much more difficult than a Theater of the Oppressed. The rules are somewhat the same but the main difference is that in the first one, the idea is to re-create a scene and act it out and switch up the solution with known solutions, but in the Rainbow of Desire, the idea is the same but the solution has to be from an unknown solution, which makes the thought process much more difficult.
My question to you is: Do you believe it is easy for citizens to actually make society better with theatrical performance? and if you can choose a game from a different part of the world that you would want to spread in the US, what game would it be and why?
