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