1st Edition
A Boal Companion Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics
This carefully constructed and thorough collection of theoretical engagements with Augusto Boal’s work is the first to look ’beyond Boal’ and critically assesses the Theatre of the Opressed (TO) movement in context.
A Boal Companion looks at the cultural practices which inform TO and explore them within a larger frame of cultural politics and performance theory. The contributors put TO into dialogue with complexity theory – Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, race theory, feminist performance art, Deleuze and Guattari, and liberation psychology – to name just a few, and in doing so, the kinship between Boal’s project and multiple fields of social psychology, ethics, biology, comedy, trauma studies and political science is made visible.
The ideas generated throughout A Boal Companion will:
- expand readers' understanding of TO as a complex, interdisciplinary, multivocal body of philosophical discourses
- provide a variety of lenses through which to practice and critique TO
- make explicit the relationship between TO and other bodies of work.
This collection is ideal for TO practitioners and scholars who want to expand their knowledge, but it also provides unfamiliar readers and new students to the discipline with an excellent study resource.
Introduction
Mady Schutzman and Jan Cohen-Cruz
Politics and Performance(s) of Identity: Twenty-five Years of Brazilian Theatre (1954-79)
Campbell Briton
SECTION I: SITES
POLITICAL THEATRE: Staging the Political: Boal and the Horizons of Theatrical Commitment
Randy Martin
PEDAGOGY: Critical Interventions: The Meaning of Praxis
Deborah Muntnick
ACTIVISM: Tactical Carnival: Social Movement, Demonstrations, and Dialogical Performance
L.M. Bogad
THERAPY: Social Healing and Liberatory Politics: A Roundtable Discussion
Mady Schutzman with Brent Blair, Lori S. Katz, Helen Lorenz, and Marc D. Rich
LEGISLATING: Performing Democracy in the Streets: Participatory Budgeting and Legislative Theatre in Brazil
Gianpaolo Baiocchi
SECTION II: TROPES
ART AND EVERYDAY LIFE: Action in Feminist Performance Art
Suzanne Lacy
STORYTELLING: Redefining the Private: From Personal Storytelling to Political Act
Jan Cohen-Cruz
METAXIS: Metaxis: Dancing (in) the In-Between
Warren Linds
AESTHETIC SPACE: Aesthetics Space/Imaginative Geographies
Shari Popen
JOK(ER)ING: Joker Runs Wild
Mady Schutzman
WITNESSING: Witnessing Subjects: A Fool’s Help
Julie Salverson
SECTION III: IDEOLOGIES
POSTCOLONIAL THEORY: Re-envisioning Theatre, Activism, and Citizenship in Neocolonial Contexts
Awam Amkpa
FEMINIST THEORY: Negotiating Feminist Identities and Theatre of the Oppressed
Ann Elizabeth Armstrong
RACE THEORY: Unperforming "Race": Strategies for Re-Imagining Identity
Daniel Banks
Notes on Contributors
Index
Biography
Jan Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts: Community-based Performance in the US, edited Radical Street Performance, and, with Mady Schutzman, co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism. She is an associate professor at NYU where she teaches in the Drama and the Art and Public Policy Departments.
Mady Schutzman is author of The Real Thing: Performance, hysteria, and advertising, and co-editor, with Jan Cohen-Cruz, of Playing Boal: Theatre, therapy, activism. She teaches at California Institute of the Arts and is an advisory board member of L.A. Center for Theatre of the Oppressed.
Jan Cohen-Cruz and Mady Schutzman hosted Boal at NYU in 1987-88, brought a group of 20 cultural practitioners to Rio de Janeiro for 3 weeks to study with Boal in 1989, and co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, therapy, activism in 1994.
'[An] engaging collection of essays ... a fine contribution.' – Contemporary Theatre Review
