Staging Resistance: Theatres of the Oppressed

This chapter presents the implications of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed for a critical ethnography of education in a three-act ethno-drama. The Theatre of the Oppressed uses dramatic theory, performance technique, and critical pedagogy to help persons resist and come to a critical consciousness (conscientization), regarding systems of oppression and the ways they work in and influence their lives. This play is all about history, power, freedom, and progressive pedagogies. Using the facticities of experience, the chapter discusses the author's attempt to change history, by resisting neoliberal discourse and imagining new futures. Using dramaturgy and Theatres of the Oppressed to get to these spaces, it explores a politics of resistance and acts of activism. The result is a new theatre, workshops, public stages, bodies in motion, everybody a playwright, a new model of performance, a new but old agenda, to engage radical performances in the name of social justice.