Respect for Boal

Augusto Ball died sometime last week in Rio. It was hardly reported in the mainstream press. Here was a man who took the Pedagogy of the Oppressed and transformed it into the Theatre of the Oppressed. Boal went beyond Brecht, when it came to political theatre. He crashed through walls, stages, barriers, obstacles, political opposition and intervened with bare hands, feet and the free will where bullets, batons and tear gas threatened to intervene.

There was a time when my theatre days meant combining the street, the sounds of people, the noise of social turmoil and breaking through stagey concepts and fixed audience seats and wading through audiences and making participation an electric moment and not a forced Aquarian love-in. Boal taught me those special out-of-the-stage experiences. Respect!