ABSTRACT

Benjamin Constant, a writer and politician of the French Revolution, had a beautiful definition of what a political revolution is: the moment when no statesman can tell a citizen, “mind your own business,” because all matters became those of all. 1 This lack of specialization, this fundamental democratic aspiration, this breaking of the monopoly of politics by professionals, is at the origin of many of the emancipatory projects of modernity. It is a similar impulse that underlies Theatre of the Oppressed and the idea of a radical democratization of the means of symbolic production of reality. When Boal states that “[e]veryone can do theater: even actors,” 2 it is this aspiration that he carries not only for the theatre but for society itself.