Theatre of the Oppressed

Forms of Theatre of the Oppressed

Boal's most well-known and widely used TO forms include games, Image Theatre, and Forum Theatre.

Boal's unique games function as physical warm- ups for more advanced work and serve as metaphors for the dynamics and inequity of power between individuals and social groups.

Image Theatre is based on Boal's theory that language sometimes obfuscates what people truly think and feel. Therefore, the participant's body is used as an expressive instrument to articulate his or her innermost attitudes, values, and beliefs through still and fluid images. An example is a group of incarcerated youth sculpting themselves into their representative image of justice.

Forum Theatre is an improvisational, participatory form in which a brief, prepared scenario is presented to an audience that illustrates an oppressive conflict, such as a teacher (the antagonist) unfairly accusing a student (the protagonist) of cheating on an exam. The scene ends unresolved so that audience members (called spect-actors) can replace the protagonist and replay the scenario several times with different tactics to overcome the oppression. The Forum Theatre event is facilitated by a joker who, like the playing card, can assume multiple roles as needed—facilitator, devil's advocate, discussion moderator, and so on.

Other forms of Boal's TO include: Invisible Theatre, the Rainbow of Desire, Legislative Theatre, and Aesthetics of the Oppressed.

Applications in Qualitative Research

Qualitative researchers, primarily from the fields of education, social work, and theater, have applied TO techniques with diverse groups of participants ranging [Page 867]from Latina youth to inner-city secondary school students. Audio- and videorecordings of TO experiences can generate such data as the visual-symbolic representations of concepts produced through Image Theatre and the transcripts of Forum Theatre's spectactor dialogue and debate.