Augusto Boal
Brazilian theatre practitionerWikipedia
15
MENTIONS
10
EPISODES
10
PODCASTS
Search complete. 15 mentions across 10 episodes found for "Augusto Boal".
Nov 2, 2026
David NaimonHOST
And the first line in Fargo's essay Notes on Craft says, what does Palestine require of us as writers writing in English from within the imperial core in this moment of genocide? And as part of answering that for himself, he's looking a lot at theater.
David NaimonHOST
And he brings up the Brazilian anti-fascist theater maker, Augusto Boal, speaking of theater, who said, the poetics of Aristotle is the poetics of oppression.
David NaimonHOST
The world is known, perfect, or about to be perfected, and all its values are imposed on the spectators who passively delegate power to the characters to act and think in their place.
David NaimonHOST
In so doing, the spectators purge themselves of their tragic flaw.
7 MINS LATER
David NaimonHOST
I'm wondering if perhaps the use of the same word isn't revealing a difference, but maybe obscuring that you actually have an agreement, though you use the word differently.
David NaimonHOST
So the word is witness.
David NaimonHOST
Fargo and Augusto Boal in Notes on Craft, they talk about the problem of catharsis being that it makes witnesses of us and nothing else.
David NaimonHOST
And I know, Lina, you've talked a lot about being against the notion of witness for any number of reasons, making a voyeur of us, absolving us.
Kerstin CaldwellGUEST
so learning to then know that that's a part of me that i can activate somehow off stage yes to be confident and be okay and not give a what anyone thinks
Mia Perry BowickHOST
yes that was i think i was telling you last time we spoke one of the theorists theorist I study is Augusto Boal's work, Theater of the Oppressed.
Mia Perry BowickHOST
And one of my favorite quotes of his is this idea of we are rehearsing for the revolution, rehearsal for the revolution.
Mia Perry BowickHOST
And whether that means in a big community of people or just our own personal revolution of I know in my cells what it feels like to feel confident and authentic when I'm in this space.
Heather Hansen O'NeillHOST
hello and welcome to from fear to fire secrets to overcome fear embrace your gifts and achieve success this is the place where real people share real challenges and where you can find a common bond and uncommon wisdom through their journeys to help you move from fear to fire I am Heather Hansen O'Neill your host and And our quote today is by Augusto Boal.
Heather Hansen O'NeillHOST
Theater is the art of looking at ourselves, and we are going to do that today.
Heather Hansen O'NeillHOST
But let's do it by introducing our guest first.
Patrisse CullorsGUEST
And so we infuse people with two hours of just playing.
Patrisse CullorsGUEST
And we use... a theater practice called Theater of the Oppressed, created by Augusto Boal.
Patrisse CullorsGUEST
And then our fourth workshop is a quilt-making workshop where each of our participants are coming together and making a quilt patch.
Patrisse CullorsGUEST
And at the end of the year-long series, we're going to have a massive community quilt that we've brought together and that Dr. Bath and I are going to figure out.
Leyton SchnellertGUEST
It's an, it's a really cool approach.
Leyton SchnellertGUEST
It comes from, um, this, um, uh, an approach called the Theatre of the Oppressed from Augusto Boal, and it's all about folks who face issues should have an opportunity to, um, create their own messages and their own solutions to be part of making a change.
Leyton SchnellertGUEST
There's a phrase in the disability community called the nothing about us without us.
Leyton SchnellertGUEST
And so it's really about, um, include us.
Carolina RavassaGUEST
And I had all these dreams of like Brazil since I was 14.
Carolina RavassaGUEST
But then I learned, but Theater of the Oppressed was invented in Brazil by a guy named Augusto Boal in Rio, the city I was going to.
Carolina RavassaGUEST
So then I was like, Oh, let me look into this and see if I can like, I don't know, do something with them.
Carolina RavassaGUEST
Like literally I learned about theater of the oppressed and the next semester I went to Brazil.
Brian ZaneHOST
Yeah.
Brian ZaneHOST
I mean, it just makes me think of how... like powerful ritual is basically and uh it has the capacity to bring people together but it also yeah it also has this kind of darker capacity to um i don't know i don't know if i want to use the word program or control like mind control but like just to to to get people to go along with certain things and uh I read that you studied with Augusto Boal and it just makes me think a little bit.
Brian ZaneHOST
I've studied a little bit of his work and it just makes me think of what he was trying to do.
Brian ZaneHOST
And, um, when he talked about like the Aristotelian theater and how it's kind of, it can, can be like didactic and can be, uh, you know, a lot of these shakes, if you think about a Shakespeare tragedy or a comedy, you can think about the comedy as basically telling the audience, like, this is why you need to, you need to get married, like get, get married.
Christopher FuellingGUEST
But like the tuned in-ness of some of those amazing embodied physical theater actors.
Christopher FuellingGUEST
Wow.
Christopher FuellingGUEST
What Boal's critique of Aristotle was, I mean, Aristotle's whole idea of catharsis was it was an escape valve.
Christopher FuellingGUEST
So when you have social tensions, um, that this is the kind of thing that we can all like, you know, go, get our, you know, go through this emotional process and body process, release it, and then we'll go home and submit to the business of use usual, you know, social order.
Zack PolanskiGUEST
Yeah.
Zack PolanskiGUEST
But a lot of my work was something called Theater of the Oppressed, and this is by a guy called Augusto Boal.
Zack PolanskiGUEST
In the 70s or 80s, he went to South America to work in the favelas, which are like the poorest areas.
Zack PolanskiGUEST
And he was working with people living in poverty and or marginalized groups or oppressed people.
Sarah MargolisGUEST
So if I am experiencing something really sad and hard in my life and I read a book about a young person that's experiencing something really sad and hard, and I get to get up and act like that character and work through that character's challenge on my own, that's gonna give me perspective of how to make that change in my own life.
Sarah MargolisGUEST
We say, Augusto Boal says something like that in theater we can rehearse for life, so we're rehearsing for our own future.
Sarah MargolisGUEST
Pre-pandemic, new- the New Victory Theater did this incredible study, I believe it was W- with Wolfe Brown, and they found these result that theater supports young people in dreaming for the future and hoping for the future.
Sarah MargolisGUEST
Our work in the ARC program and at Literature of Play in general gave students an aesthetic distance from what they were experiencing at home.
David StoneHOST
What terms we use to describe it are always contestable.
David StoneHOST
Uh, Anish Kapoor, the sculptor, who was always encouraging the viewer, uh, if you like, the patron of the art, to view themselves through the sculpture, as was, um, Augusto Boal, the kind of theater, uh, producing spectators who were participants in the drama.
David StoneHOST
Uh, in a very similar way that Brecht, Bertolt Brecht, um...
David StoneHOST
Uh, a lot-- And I've seen most of Bertolt Brecht's stuff written, um, during the rise of fascism and after the Second World War.