Conflicting Signs of Violence In Augusto Boal's Torquemada

Conflicting Signs of Violence In Augusto Baal's Torquemada SEVERINO JoAo ALBUQUERQUE The political views of Augusto Boal, Latin America's foremost theorist of the theatre,l have brought him much tribulation personally as well as professionally . A dramatist in his own right, Boal saw most of his plays banned. from the presses and the stage by the intolerant censorship which stifled Brazilian art following the 1964coup. After much personal harassment over the years, Boal was finally arrested without charges by the military in 1971, keptin confinement for several months, and only following intense pressure from noted foreign playwrights such as Arthur Miller, was he released from prison and forced into exile, first in Argentina, and then Peru and other Latin American countries, until his return to Brazil following the 1978 loosening of the military rule. On February 10, 1971, while he was in solitary confinement in the DOPS-Fundaodetention center in Rio de Janeiro, Boal started writing a playas a way of recording the prison experiences of an autobiographical "Dramaturgo .,,2 In the next two months, as he continued writing, now in the infamous Presidio Tirandentes in Sao Paulo, Boal added to the playa historical element of intolerance and torture with the inclusion ofthe character Torquemada, who gave his name to the title ofthe work. By the time it was completed - precisely on November 2, 1971, in Buenos Aires3 - Torquemada was a complex investigation of past and present interrelations of power and violence in the Ibero-American experience.4 In Torquemada Boal explores the theatre's multisignation by making use ofa vast number of signs of violence, which can be divided into two large groups, the verbal and nonverbal languages of violence. Since the information transmitted by the nonverbal system is for the most part duplicated by the verbal system, of more significance are the instances in which the nonverbal system takes precedence over, or appears in opposition to the verbal system, thus giving rise to the contradictory messages from which Boal's play draws much of its effectiveness. Signs of Violence in Boal's Torquemada 453 A study ofthe interplay of the two systems in Torquemada must start with an examination of how the nonverbal system is made to contradict the verbal system in the communication of violence on the stage. Undoubtedly the most striking manifestation involves costume. According to Tadeusz Kowzan, the costume sign in the theatre is, traditionally, "the most external and conventional means of defining the [character] ,,,5 the most accessible indicator of a character's sex, age, profession, social class, and so on; importantly, the suggestions of costume can express latent violence without the use of words. Since; again according th Kowzan, "the semiological power of the costume does not only define who is wearing it ... [but] corresponds to several circumstances at once,,,6 a gifted playwright can add much force to a scene by animating the conflicting signs of costume and those of other systems. That is exactly what Boal does in Torquemada, one ofthe few plays in all ofBrazilian theatre to make use ofthe costume sign for the indication ofviolence. While the other sign systems establish Torquemada as a play which depicts police agents inflicting torture on political activists in the Latin America of the sixties and seventies, the costumes worn by the torturers endow them with signs which are doubly conflicting: they are perceived as having another occupation (monks), and as belonging to another historical epoch, that of the Spanish Inquisition under its first Grand Inquisitor, the Dominican monk Tomas de Torquemada, who lived between 1420 and 1498. As the play opens, five "monks" are seen on stage, in an apparently normal situation, "uno casi dormido, sentado sobre una silla con la cabeza sobre la mesa; dos alfondo en medio de una conversacion interrumpida." ("one half-asleep in a chair with his head on the table; two others upstage, in the midddle of a conversation"). As the fourth "monk" is seen, handling "un aparato etectrico, como un reostato, adaptado de un aparato de T.V." ("an electrical device, like a rheostat, made from a T.V. set.") (pp. 67-68), the spectator experiences a vague feeling of unusualness which is confirmed...