The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!).
Interpretation
Theatre serves as a powerful medium for both expression and observation of the human experience.
Augusto Boal's quote emphasizes that theatre is not just a performance but a profound reflection of human existence. In this context, every person plays a role, either as an actor engaging in life or as a spectator observing it. This duality highlights the interconnectedness of human experiences and the importance of both participation and reflection in understanding our world.
In practice
In a workshop on social change, one might use this quote to discuss how everyone plays a role in societal issues.
Theatre has nothing to do with buildings or other physical constructions. Theatre - or theatricality - is the capacity, this human property which allows man to observe himself in action, in activity. Man can see himself in the act of seeing, in the act of acting, in the act of feeling, the act of thinking. Feel himself feeling, think himself thinking.
The theater is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it.
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
Every device there is in language is there to be used, if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.
I don't want to be owned by a corporation and obliged to make a certain type of album. I want to be free.
A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.
The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.
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