Liberation Arts: Amnesia, Counter-Memory, Counter-Memorial

Abstract

We are in an auditorium in Los Angeles in the spring of 2005 with 700 community activists and cultural workers. Augusto Boal (1985, 1998), now in his seventies, has come from the Center for the Theater of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to explain and demonstrate his latest adaptation of Theater of the Oppressed named Legislative Theater. Boal has been improvising and writing about participatory community theater practices since the 1960s when he was arrested and tortured by the Brazilian military dictatorship and forced into exile, along with many others. In 1992, as part of the electoral campaign of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party), he was elected to be a member (vereador) of the City Council of Rio. He decided to invite groups of people from local neighborhoods to come to the Council to present short theater pieces about the difficulties in their lives that new legislation from the Council could ameliorate. With this public testimony in the form of drama, the vereadors then devised new laws that would address the issues raised in order to improve living conditions.

Encounters with the arts and activities in the domain of art can nurture the growth of persons who will reach out to one another as they seek clearings in their experience and try to be more ardently in the world. If the significance of the arts for growth and inventiveness and problem solving is recognized at last, a desperate stasis may be overcome and hopes may be raised, the hopes of felt possibility. … Art offers life; it offers hope; it offers the prospect of discovery; it offers light.

(Maxine Greene, 1995, pp. 132–3)