Brasil Blog 3: Do actions speak louder than words?

Thursday 23rd July 2009

Blog Category: Brasil Blog

It was a full day of speakers yesterday. We heard from Augusto’s son Julian Boal who spoke about his hopes for the future of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO). There has been talk about the idea of creating a license to practice TO.  Julian said he didn’t think it was wise or possible to do this. The issue is very important. The whole idea behind TO is to make theatre accessible for people who were not professionals. Other forms of practice have to be accredited so why not TO? Many people say they are using TO but how do we know that they are using the techniques properly? Does it matter?

Dan Baron Cohan thought we should stop using the terms like ‘art’ and ‘artists’ because they can easily separate people. Doug Patterson talked about some of the principles underlying TO. He said that TO does not belong to any one organisation. It belongs to the people.

Some people at the conference are getting quite restless. We are at a conference, which is about how to be in dialogue with each other, but we seem to be spending much of our time sitting and listening passively. If we want to ask a question then we have to write it down. We went to see a forum play last night it was in Portuguese so we did not understand what was going on. The play was very beautiful to watch though.

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