ABSTRACT
Theatre of the Oppressed begins, literally, with bodies in relation in space. 1 In the book’s foreword, Augusto Boal describes historical divisions between actor and spectator. “[S]ome persons will go to the stage and only they will be able to act; the rest will remain seated, receptive, passive—these will be the spectators, the masses, the people.” 2 In other words, before Boal even talks about how power relations might shape what a spectator says or thinks, he zeroes in on where a body can or cannot move in a theatre—and how those norms articulate power. Later in the book, he writes:
We can begin by stating that the first word of the theatrical vocabulary is the human body, the main source of sound and movement. Therefore, to control the means of theatrical production, man must, first of all, control his own body, know his own body, in order to be capable of making it more expressive. Then he will be able to practice theatrical forms in which, by stages, he frees himself from his condition of spectator and takes on that of actor, in which he ceases to be an object and becomes a subject, is changed from witness into protagonist. 3
