Augusto Boal was a theatre director and
writer. Grown up in popular neighbourhoods of Rio where his father was a baker,
he realized how poverty influenced people’s mentality and started to write
plays at only 15. He used theatre to discuss power and oppression, to make
people know each other and to create links between arts and human beings.
In 1971, because his plays were
controversial, the Brazilian military regime captured and tortured him for over
4 months. Boal explained that when he was jailed, he learnt how to listen to
silence, how to live with it and to appreciate it, which considerably changed
the way he directored his plays once he got released. Forced to exile himself
for more than 10 years, he wrote books such as theatre of the oppressed. From
his own words, theatre was “what we have inside”
and not only written scripts well-organized. What he longed for was to create
the dialogue, to get people listening to others, not to hear but to listen.
Dialogues are often monologues in every day life and that’s what he fought
against: loneliness, oppression of any kind and lack of understanding. He was
preoccupied with human nature and isolation, game of powers and modern slavery
that has new forms but can still be easily found everywhere. Augusto Boal spent
his life helping people to find their own ways of fighting and always acted in
favour of population and against dictatorship of any kind.
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