I was stunned to receive this email today from Carla Estefan, with whom we had quite a lot of contact during our World Theatre Day celebrations. Augusto Boal was the given the honour of writing this year’s World Theatre Day International Address.

The playwright and theater director, Augusto Boal, died in the early hours of today, at 78 years, of respiratory failure in the Samaritan Hospital in the district of Botafogo, Rio. He suffered from leukemia and was hospitalized since April 28. The location and time of the funeral have not been disclosed.

The work of Boal, who was also essayist and theorist of theater, gained prominence in the 1960s and 1970s, when he created the Theater of the Oppressed, which was internationally recognized by combining drama to social action.

Boal graduated with a degree in Chemistry fromthe Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in 1950, but then traveled to the United States, where he studied dramatic arts at Columbia University. Back in Brazil, his first piece as a director was Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, which garnered him an award from the the APCA (São Paulo Association of Art Critics). He directed of the show Opinião, with Zé Kette, João do Vale and Nara Leão, which went down in history as an act of resistance to the military coup of 1964.

From Boal’s WTD International Address:

Weddings and funerals are “spectacles”, but so, also, are daily rituals so familiar that we are not conscious of this. Occasions of pomp and circumstance, but also the morning coffee, the exchanged good-mornings, timid love and storms of passion, a senate session or a diplomatic meeting – all is theatre.

Participate in the “spectacle” which is about to begin and once you are back home, with your friends act your own plays and look at what you were never able to see: that which is obvious. Theatre is not just an event; it is a way of life!

We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.

Boal was a man who truly used theatre to change the world. A bright light has gone out today, and he will be sorely missed.

Read the entire WTD address.

Read my interview with David Diamond, Boal’s colleague here in Vancouver.

–Rebecca Coleman

With just over a week before the celebrations begin, you may be wanting to get the word out on WTD09 to your city or local theatre community. With that in mind we’ve prepared a downloadable getting started kit for your use.

You’ll find a comprehensive background to the day itself, some ideas for celebrating, a copy of the WTD address – this year written by Augusto Boal – and a template document which you can use to insert your contact details and company’s plans for WTD09. Fill in the template and send it on its merry way.

This is the first time that the networking power of the web has been used to generate interest and engagement in World Theatre Day.  Please join us on March 27th wherever you are in the wide world.

Here in Vancouver, one of our World Theatre Day traditions is to have a fundraiser for our local theatre alliance. This fundraiser always has the same name: “My first time….” and theatre folks from the community volunteer to come and perform: they tell stories, perform monologues, songs and scenes related to the theme.

Prior to the beginning of the fundraiser, one distinguished person from the theatre community is asked to read the WTD address. This year, that person will be David Diamond, Artistic Director of Headlines Theatre.

Diamond is especially right for this job, as Augusto Boal, author of this year’s WTD international address,  is his mentor, and dear personal friend.

I interviewed David about Augusto, The Theatre of the Oppressed, and why it is that we are all so crazy about this theatre thing.

TAOTB: Tell me how about how you met Boal.

DD: We started Headlines Theatre as a collective  in 1981. Our company was founded on doing  community specific, issue-oriented theatre.  We were working in an agit-prop model, in which we would  decide on a pertinent issue, then we would seek out and interview people living with those issues, and then, pretending to be those people, write a play from that place. We were quite successful, doing that.

By 1984, the collective had dissolved, and I had become Artistic Director. I got a Canada Council grant to travel to Europe and study some of the forms of theatre that were going on over there. I had a question inside me: how do we make theatre with people, instead of about them? I had just read Paulo Freire’’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and it spoke to me profoundly. While in Europe, I attended a workshop facilitated by Chris Vine on Augusto Boal’s  Forum Theatre, and those two things became the basis of where I knew I wanted to go.

Boal had been arrested and tortured in his native country of Brazil for his work there, which was contributing to the revolution. He had escaped to Paris, started a centre there,  and was giving a workshop. So, I went to Paris, and participated in a 10-day skill-sharing workshop with him there.

TAOTB: What kind of a man is he?

DD: He’s one of those people, where, when he walks into the room, you immediately notice this very special energy. He is a magnificent human being. He deals with heavy subject matter, but somehow manages to make it seem fun. He has a true love for people.

TAOTB: What happened after Paris?

DD: I came home, and started to try to understand how to apply Boal’s teachings into my work here. I experimented with creating a process, wondering if it was possible to take a group of people from zero, through issue investigation, play creation, and then forum theatre performance in 6 days. In order to find out if it would work, Headlines took it out into the field and tested it in 7 workshops around the province. I (along with friends Kevin Finnan from theUK and Margo Kane), really honed the method during that tour, and those Power Plays, as I named them, are the heart of Headlines’ work today.

TAOTB: How did your relationship with Boal progress?

DD:I continued to attend his workshops and learn from him. After a number of these encounters he asked if I would assist in a workshop in eastern Canada. We became friends and colleagues. Over the last ten years or so my own work has transformed from his model, to a more systems-based approach that I call Theatre for Living – still, we remain close. I am going to visit him along with others from around the world who do this kind of work, in July.

TAOTB: Why do you think Boal is a theatre artist worthy of the honour of writing the WTD international address?

DD:He has had a huge influence in what would be called, I guess, Theatre for Development all over the world. He remains fueled by a core belief that all of us are theatre, and truly uses theatre as a laboratory for empowerment. All of this very profound work continues to evolve into new forms and happen in the midst of a wonderful playfulness.

TAOTB: How about you? Why do you think theatre is powerful?

DD: It’s about our ability to be transformed through the theatre. Communities, like people, have the need to storytell. To collectively process fears, desires, anger, sadness…. when communities lose the ability to do this, they get sick – just like people do. It is pretty basic that we need to express our emotions to be healthy. Theatre is the language through which this can happen.

Humans think, not in sentences, but in metaphors. That’s what makes art powerful–it is expressed in metaphors. What makes good theatre is the transformational power of the work. You can have a play that has the highest production values possible, but how can it be good theatre if it has no transformational ability – if the audience isn’t challenged – pushed into disequilibrium in some small or large way? Conversely, a show in a black box with no costumes or set may very well be good theatre if you walk away from it having changed in some way.

To read more about The Theatre of the Oppressed, click here.

–RC

World Theatre Day – International Message

27th March 2009

Augusto Boal

All human societies are “spectacular” in their daily life and produce “spectacles” at special moments. They are “spectacular” as a form of social organization and produce “spectacles” like the one you have come to see.

Even if one is unaware of it, human relationships are structured in a theatrical way. The use of space, body language, choice of words and voice modulation, the confrontation of ideas and passions, everything that we demonstrate on the stage, we live in our lives. We are theatre!

Weddings and funerals are “spectacles”, but so, also, are daily rituals so familiar that we are not conscious of this. Occasions of pomp and circumstance, but also the morning coffee, the exchanged good-mornings, timid love and storms of passion, a senate session or a diplomatic meeting – all is theatre.

One of the main functions of our art is to make people sensitive to the “spectacles” of daily life in which the actors are their own spectators, performances in which the stage and the stalls coincide. We are all artists. By doing theatre, we learn to see what is obvious but what we usually can’t see because we are only used to looking at it. What is familiar to us becomes unseen: doing theatre throws light on the stage of daily life.

Last September, we were surprised by a theatrical revelation: we, who thought that we were living in a safe world, despite wars, genocide, slaughter and torture which certainly exist, but far from us in remote and wild places. We, who were living in security with our money invested in some respectable bank or in some honest trader’s hands in the stock exchange were told that this money did not exist, that it was virtual, a fictitious invention by some economists who were not fictitious at all and neither reliable nor respectable. Everything was just bad theatre, a dark plot in which a few people won a lot and many people lost all. Some politicians from rich countries held secret meetings in which they found some magic solutions. And we, the victims of their decisions, have remained spectators in the last row of the balcony.

Twenty years ago, I staged Racine’s Phèdre in Rio de Janeiro. The stage setting was poor: cow skins on the ground, bamboos around. Before each presentation, I used to say to my actors: “The fiction we created day by day is over. When you cross those bamboos, none of you will have the right to lie. Theatre is the Hidden Truth”.

When we look beyond appearances, we see oppressors and oppressed people, in all societies, ethnic groups, genders, social classes and casts; we see an unfair and cruel world. We have to create another world because we know it is possible. But it is up to us to build this other world with our hands and by acting on the stage and in our own life.

Participate in the “spectacle” which is about to begin and once you are back home, with your friends act your own plays and look at what you were never able to see: that which is obvious. Theatre is not just an event; it is a way of life!

We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.

Augusto Boal

Click here to see the list of past WTD International Address writers.

Boal is the inventor of Forum Theatre and Theatre for the Oppressed, and was recently nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Read his entire biography here.