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Reviewed by:
  • Augusto Boal, and: A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics
  • Kelly Howe
Augusto Boal. By Frances Babbage. Routledge Performance Practitioners series. London: Routledge, 2004; pp. vi + 155. $90.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.
A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics. Edited by Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman. New York: Routledge, 2006; pp. ix + 208. $100.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

In the introduction to A Boal Companion, Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman argue that Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), a body of praxis coined and continually rearticulated by Brazilian director and theorist Augusto Boal, possesses a "modularity that allows people around the globe who share the TO vocabulary an opportunity to meet and dialogue across vast differences" (1). Both A Boal Companion and Augusto Boal, a recent volume in the Routledge Performance Practitioners series, account for and expand TO's modularity, raising difficult questions about Boal's work, which attempts to use theatre as the dialogic mode through which oppressed peoples come to recognize their oppressions as constructed and therefore alterable. Additionally, both books constitute important partial translations of Boal's ideas to groups of readers for whom they might otherwise be less accessible.

In keeping with the aims of the Routledge series, Augusto Boal combines fairly straightforward critical biography with an overtly pedagogical component; Frances Babbage frequently pauses to explicate the rationale of her methodologies. In her first chapter, she emphasizes sociohistorical contexts of Boal's artistic development, including violent political unrest and censorship in Brazil; the efforts of the Arena Theatre (where Boal worked upon returning to Brazil following graduate study in the United States) and other Brazilian theatres to develop a distinctly Brazilian aesthetic; Boal's experiences in prison and in exile; and his personal contact with other theoreticians and practitioners. The volume skillfully refuses any temptation to regard Boal as an isolated genius whose work developed in an ahistorical vacuum. The book's second chapter, in which Babbage distills the key points of Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (which contains some of his most famous yet arguably most opaque writings), is where she translates most impressively, not only synthesizing Boal's language with rigorous attention to defining key terms (many of which also appear in the book's useful glossary), but also providing astute analysis of Boal's tendency to construct "a historical grand narrative" (64) of Western theatrical practices that "elides complexities and obscures differences."

Designed to help readers imagine the more specific embodiment of Boal's theories, the project's final two chapters prioritize depth over breadth. Chapter 3 offers an in-depth account of two United Kingdom–based Forum Theatre projects, while chapter 4 presents a thick description of a possible trajectory of a TO workshop session. Though Babbage tends to model a critical self-reflexivity, she occasionally misses what could be opportunities to model the interrogation of uneasy power relationships that can arise in TO practice. For example, she recounts an exchange in which a "joker" (the person who serves to "facilitate, but not control" [143] a TO event) entreats audience members to stay for "just a couple of minutes," even though they had planned to leave in the middle of the forum process. The participants, Babbage recalls, did stay, and "two minutes became five, then ten, then twenty, as they were drawn into participation without even realising it" (81). Later, impressed by the persuasiveness of several of the jokers she analyzes, Babbage notes: "A seemingly passive audience could be teased, flattered, or provoked into identifying oppressions and the possibility of combating them" (104). I worry about the relatively positive valence Babbage extends to a scenario that, at least by her description, oddly echoes the condescension of the bemused parent who manipulates a child into eating her "good-for-you" vegetables. Glossing over (and even valorizing) such a potentially paternalistic attitude seems inconsistent not only with TO's Freirian rejection of top-down pedagogy, but also with Babbage's otherwise quite sensitive analysis.

Nevertheless, Augusto Boal is a concise introduction to Boal's work that balances healthy skepticism with a passionate investment in TO's capacity for generating "creative and critical engagement" (105...

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