ABSTRACT

“Bad dramatists of all epochs,” Augusto Boal writes in Theatre of the Oppressed and Other Political Poetics, “do not understand the enormous importance of the transformations that occur in front of the spectator: theatre is transformation and movement, not just a simple presentation of what exists. It’s about becoming and not being.” 1 Years later, in another book, Boal insists on this way of understanding theatre as “conflict, contradiction, confrontation” and dramatic action as “the movement of this confrontation of forces.” 2 Conflict, contradiction, confrontation, and movement are not concepts that appear by chance. They result, even prior to any conviction about theatre, from a specific way of looking at the world. And what way is that? For us, this is first and foremost a dialectical perspective.