Intended Audience
Political theatre, like any kind of political action, can only be judged in relation to the political moment in which it tries to intervene. Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is a type of theatre for social change that was created to fight against dictatorship and an extremely centralized conception of politics. Now it is used in more than 80 countries around the world. How does Theatre of the Oppressed function in a time of social media and so-called participatory democracies? Come join the author of Theatre of the Oppressed and Its Times--theatre facilitator and researcher Julian Boal of Rio de Janeiro--to hear about how theatre can be used to help organize collective struggles for social change. What is oppression? How do we fight against it? What can art do?
The event is free and open to the public; no reservations required.
Julian Boal is a teacher, researcher, and practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed. He has facilitated workshops in more than 25 countries and has collaborated on several international festivals of Theatre of the Oppressed: In India with Jana Sanskriti, in Spain with Pa'tothom, in Portugal with 6prima, in Croatia with the lstrian National Theater, in France with GTO-Paris, and in Brazil with CTO-Rio. Some other groups and movements with whom he has worked closely include MST (the Landless Workers Movement) and MSTB (the Roofless Movement of Bahia) In Brazil and La Dignidad in Argentina.
In Paris, he was a founding member of the Ambaata collective, which worked alongside migrant workers, and he also worked with GTO-Paris and Feminisme Enjeux. He participated in the design and realization of the exhibition on Augusto Boal at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brazil in 2015 and curated part of the Utopia International festival, held In Marica, Brazil, in 2016. He collaborated with Sergio de Carvalho as assistant playwright for two recent plays of Companhia do Latilo (SAo Paulo): Those Who Stay (2015) and The Bread and The Stone (2016). He holds a Master's degree In History from the Sorbonne (Paris IV) and a Ph.D. from the School of Social Work at the Unlversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.
Boal is the author of Images of a Popular Theatre (Hucitec, 2000), Sobre antigas formas em novos tempos: o teatro do oprlmido hoje, entre "ensaio da revoluc;:3o" e tecnica lnterativa de domestlcac;:3.o das v[tlmas (Hucitec 2022), and Theatre of the Oppressed and Its Times (Routledge, 2023). He ls also co-editor of the DVD & essay booklet Theatre of the Oppressed in Actions (with Kelly Howe and Scot McEtvany, Routledge, 2015) and the anthology The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed (with Kelly Howe and Jose Soeiro, Routledge, 2019). He is co-founder (with Geo Britto) and pedagogical coordinator of Escota de Teatro Popular (ETP; The School of Popular Theatre, in Rio de Janeiro), a school run by social movements for social movements where political unity is practiced at the grassroots level through the practice of theatre. In addition, Boal Is a member of the Institute Augusto Boal in Rio.