Practising for the revolution? The influence of Augusto Boal inBrazil and Africa

Jane Plastow*

The Workshop Theatre, School of English, University of Leeds, UK

This article interrogates Augusto Boal’s idea of Theatre of the Oppressed as ameans of ‘practising for the revolution’. Comparing practice and influence inLatin America and Africa the article draws on examples from work in Brazil,Burkina Faso, Eritrea and Ethiopia. The article will argue that while many of thetechniques developed by Boal are useful as part of theatre practice with‘communities of the oppressed’, the impression created by Boal that he hascreated a new universally applicable system is misleading, and uncritical followingof his ideas can stifle creativity and undervalue culturally specific practice.

Keywords: Augusto Boal; Forum Theatre; Theatre of the Oppressed; Africa;Brazil

One of the most dramatic and often quoted claims of the theatre director and

theoretician, the Brazilian, Augusto Boal, is that his work constitutes a ‘rehearsal for

the revolution’ � the revolution in question being presumed to be socialist, and in

support of the ‘oppressed’ � a group which is not specified, but which in the context

of Latin America and Africa is usually seen to be the peasantry and the urban

proletariat. He then continues:

I believe that all the truly revolutionary theatrical groups should transfer to the peoplethe means of production in the theatre so that the people themselves may utilize them.The theatre is a weapon, and it is the people who should wield it.1

This article sets out to examine the influence of Boal across the two continents in

question with particular regard as to how his ideas have been implemented in a

range of situations and whether that work can in any sense be seen as potentially

‘revolutionary’. I will also be interrogating whether the idea that Boal has created

unique theatre forms has led, in some cases, to a rather blind following of a

perceived system that is either not appropriate for certain situations or stifles

creativity and the use of indigenous and alternative meaningful performance

traditions.

The body of Augusto Boal’s work has undoubtedly been the most influential

single input into the area of applied theatre in the past generation. Such concepts as

Image Theatre, Invisible Theatre, Forum Theatre and the ‘Cop in the Head’ and

‘Rainbow of Desire’ techniques2 have been adopted across the world, supported by a

regular stream of publications describing the techniques concerned,3 and backed up

by the regular workshops Boal runs � predominantly in the West, since his statutory

*Email: j.e.plastow@leeds.ac.uk

ISSN 1479-4012 print/ISSN 1754-1018 online

# 2009 Board of Transatlantic Studies

DOI: 10.1080/14794010903069128

http://www.informaworld.com

Journal of Transatlantic Studies

Vol. 7, No. 3, September 2009, 294�303

charge of $1000 per day is unaffordable by most in the developing world � and more

recently a formidable web presence and the establishment of accredited centres of the

Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), the overarching title given to the body of this work.Boal’s single most significant idea has been the breaking down of the barrier

common to formal drama between the actor and the spectator. In developing his

ideas he does acknowledge a huge debt to fellow Brazilian Paulo Freire. Indeed

naming his corpus of ideas the Theatre of the Oppressed is an explicit hommage to

Freire’s seminal text Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970).4 Freire developed his ideas as

an adult educator for the Brazilian peasantry. He came to revile what he called the

dominant ‘banking’ theory of education, where the learner is passively fed the

information and ideas the teacher wishes to dispense, and instead advocated active

and relevant learning with teacher and learner working together as equals to develop

understanding on topics of interest to the student. Augusto Boal saw links between

Freire’s educational ideas and the theatrical aims of another acknowledged source of

inspiration, German playwright Bertolt Brecht. In his Theatre of the Oppressed Boal

sees himself as inheritor and developer of Brecht’s ideas about seeking an actively

intellectually engaged audience, rather than one that passively sought feeding with

theatre primarily as a form of entertainment rather than as intellectual stimulus.5

Boal synthesised these radical, socialist-inspired ideas about doing away with

passive recipients of knowledge and the need to involve the audience in taking

responsibility for theatrical action to come up with the concept of the ‘spect-actor’.

Here, most famously and pertinently to this article, in Forum Theatre, the actors

present a play about a particular issue such as, for example, domestic violence, unfair

working conditions or the treatment of the disabled. However, the play is not taken

through to any neat resolution. Instead, after an initial showing � Forum plays are

not usually very long � the audience are informed that the play will be shown again,

but this time when they see a place where the oppressed character/s could act

differently in order to possibly improve an outcome they should call out to stop the

action. They are then invited onto the stage to replace the oppressed protagonist and

try out their idea on stage. The acting company is required to respond in character to

this intervention so that an alternative line of action can be ‘rehearsed’. Numerous

interventions are encouraged throughout the play, so that ‘spect-actors’ can feel the

possible effects of their ideas and everyone else can consider how effective these

strategies for change might be. In effect everyone is, in a relatively safe environment,

‘rehearsing the revolution’, becoming active in issues that affect their lives, and

experimenting with taking on the power of agency over events.Boal has warned of the dangers he has himself experienced when this ‘rehearsal’

is taken too literally. The story he uses in The Rainbow of Desire is of a touring agit-

prop play produced by the Arena theatre in the 1960s. The show condemned the

circumstances under which the peasantry lived and encouraged them to rebel against

oppressive landlords. At the end of the play a peasant farmer, in good faith, urged

the actors to come and join the peasants that day in an armed uprising against their

landlord. The actors made their awkward excuses, and Boal resolved to modify this

form of agitational drama. Theatre, he says, does not seek to preach revolution per

se, but rather to work with people to conscientise them in relation to their

oppressions and to try out realistic strategies to promote change.6 However, a

continuing ambivalence about the responsibility of the forum theatre practitioner for

Journal of Transatlantic Studies 295

the possible outcomes of their work is something I think Boal consistently fails to

sufficiently engage with in his writing.

Boal in Brazil

If Boal’s theatre is not promoting actual revolution, but is seeking to contribute to

allowing the oppressed to improve their lives, how can it do this beyond the moment

of the performance event? Augusto Boal had begun to develop his ideas when

studying in the United States in the 1950s, where he witnessed the work of many

experimental, radical theatre groups.7 He subsequently worked as a playwright and

director from 1956 to 1971 at the prestigious Arena Theatre in Sao Paulo. Here Boal

created a series of plays which were the precursors to the development of Forum

Theatre and were hugely popular with young Left-wing audiences.

One of the problems with assessing the impact of any of Augusto Boal’s work is

that we are mostly reliant on the words of the man himself, and he is a hugely

charismatic showman rather than a careful academic. The tale of the would-be

revolutionary peasants is a very rare example of Boal telling a story against himself.

Certainly some critics have cast doubt on the extent of Boal’s claims to be a sole

innovator of change at the Arena. David George argues that others were part of the

move to develop plays critiquing Brazilian history from a socialist perspective;8 while

Margo Milleret notes that there is ‘no documentation’ to confirm Boal’s claims that

‘members of the audience really walked out of the performance and engaged in

revolution’.9

In 1971 the then military dictatorship clamped down on a number of theatre

activists and Boal spent three months in jail before going into exile in Argentina,

Peru, Portugal and France until 1986. It was during this period that the fundamental

ideas about Image, Forum and Invisible Theatre were codified and written down in

his Theatre of the Oppressed (first published in Portuguese and Spanish in 1974), a

book which is theatrically inspiring but theoretically extraordinarily weak as it

selects particular historical theatrical moments � embodied by Aristotle, Brecht and

Boal � to chart a whole human trajectory for world theatre from coercion to

liberation; one that necessarily ignores most world performance time periods,

practitioners, playwrights and dramatic forms.

On his return to Brazil Boal set up the Centro de Teatro do Oprimido (Centre for

the Theatre of the Oppressed), otherwise known as CTO, in Rio de Janeiro. He was

now looking for both a new means to make his theatrical ideas have social impact

and for funding to work on any significant scale. For some years he struggled, but in

1992 an alliance with the Left-wing Worker’s Party led to his unexpected election as

vereador (councillor) on the city council. Now Boal had a platform from which to

operate. CTO Rio used his theatre techniques to analyse issues of concern with

nineteen particular interest groups and came up with ideas for laws that could be

promoted by Boal and the Worker’s Party for implementation by the city legislature.

The laws subsequently brought forward as a consequence of this programme of

‘Legislative Theatre’ included measures promoting increased medical facilities for

elderly people, provision of creche facilities attached to schools, and the development

of a witness protection scheme. In all Boal lists 13 laws developed as a result of the

work of CTO with community groups.10

296 J. Plastow

In her excellent book Augusto Boal, Frances Babbage discusses whether the work

of the Legislative Theatre movement is as progressive as Boal claims.11 Boal argues

that the process is genuinely subversive, transforming the citizen into a legislator and

an instigator of change.

In the Legislative Theatre the aim is to bring the theatre back to the heart of the city toproduce not catharsis but dynamisation. Its objective is not to pacify its audiences . . .but . . . to develop their desire for change . . .The Legislative Theatre seeks to . . .transform that desire into law.12

Baz Kershaw begs to differ, arguing that, as is so often the case with Boal, he has

possibly manipulated the facts to make himself appear more radical than he really is.

Kershaw says that: ‘The closest the citizens of Rio seem to have got to actual making

of laws was to suggest, through his council-funded theatre groups, that some laws

might be more welcome than others.’13 It can be argued that citizens involved in this

process were not taking action themselves, but were in fact delegating their power for

making change to the Worker’s Party via Boal and his theatre activists. They were

not rehearsing for revolution, but simply finding a conduit for involvement in the

democratic process. In 1996 Boal lost his seat in the council and though attempts at

Legislative Theatre have been made by him and others subsequently � often at a

purely symbolic level � the work of CTO had to find other sources of funding and

new directions.

In recent years Boal has spent much of his time travelling the world running

workshops to popularise his Theatre of the Oppressed, but he and CTO-Rio

continue to work in Brazil. One of the most fascinating projects given the context

of this paper’s examination of whether TO is in any sense ‘revolutionary’ is the

project CTO ran in conjunction with People’s Palace Projects from the UK,

working in Brazilian prisons. The work began in 1995 and has been conducted in

a wide range of prisons, so that today there is a Paul Heritage (the leader of

People’s Palace Projects) theatre in one of Brazil’s maximum security prisons. The

prisons work has involved both prisoners and guards and raises a whole range of

difficult issues for a theatre practice dedicated to promoting freedom from

oppression. As Heritage asks, are prisoners oppressed or oppressors? What

agency do prisoners have for achieving meaningful change in the conditions of

their lives? How freely can prisoners speak when constantly observed by vigilant

guards?14 Obviously a range of funders and the Brazilian state have found this

work worthwhile for it has been ongoing for over a decade. Its revolution was

never going to be in the overthrow of unjust systems, though it may perhaps lie

in revolutionary change in the worldview of particular prisoners or guards.

Ultimately Heritage argues that his engagement with TO is not about finding

radical solutions to socio-political problems. Instead, he offers a formulation that

is far more philosophical, possibly about awakening minds rather than propelling

bodies into revolutionary action, when he says that, ‘It is in the questions and

not the answers, that Theatre of the Oppressed offers its service.’15

At the time of writing this article in 2008 CTO Rio are involved in numerous

training workshops and particularly with educational work and a project to develop

national ‘points of culture’ � a project that is extending to the ex-Portuguese African

colonies of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

Journal of Transatlantic Studies 297

Theatre of the Oppressed in Africa

The techniques of Theatre of the Oppressed have been exported worldwide, but one

of the intentions behind this paper is to question whether they have not, too

unthinkingly perhaps, been lifted from one context to another without sufficient

debate about assumptions regarding universality; of form, culture, politics and

oppressions.

The most systematic, long-term example of the use of TO techniques in Africa

that I am aware of is the work developed by Prosper Kompaore, professor of theatre

at the University of Burkina Faso, founder and developer of Atelier-Theatre

Burkinabe (ATB) and host of the international biennial Festival of Theatre for

Development in Ougadougou. ATB dates back to 1978, though the widespread

adoption of Boal’s ideas came later, when Kompaore saw much of the thinking

behind Forum Theatre as similar to indigenous African participatory performance

forms, and sought to synthesise the two.

The theatre group Atelier-Theatre Burkinabe (ATB) has been involved for decades inthe form of theatre that is known today as forum theatre. Since its establishment in 1978,ATB has defined its mission as practicing and promoting theatre in the service ofdevelopment: theatre rooted in the Burkinan and African cultural context. Over thisperiod, the group has moved towards an aesthetic of participation that draws on thecharacteristics of traditional African performance.

Today forum theatre is practiced by more than a hundred artistic groups throughoutBurkina Faso. In principle this type of theatre tends to reconcile artistic quality and thesocial finality of performance. It is a question of informing, educating, raisingawareness, enabling people to speak and bringing forward proposals for change.16

ATB is hugely prolific. It puts on around 150 performances of up to 12 new

productions each year, and employs around 60 people at any one time. The work is

largely funded by development agencies such as Oxfam, Danida, Novib and Comic

Relief.17 ATB is now one of the recognised international Centres of Theatre of the

Oppressed.

ATB has made plays about a large number of issues, ranging from the

importance of education for girls, to the need to concentrate on maternal health

and concerns about environmental preservation; from pieces which are largely

information-based, to more abstract productions about human rights and issues of

international trade. Kompaore works predominantly through Forum Theatre which

he often merges with the indigenous form of koteba,18 often followed up by a public

discussion which might be attended, if for example this were an HIV/AIDS play, by

relevant health workers who can help inform and advise audience members.19 ATB

places great emphasis on the value of its theatre as a means of communication with,

particularly, the rural poor, and sees the merging of Forum and indigenous familiar

participatory performance forms as a means for maximising accessibility and

involvement.20 However, the emphasis is usually on information giving rather than

either genuine debate or promotion of any agenda challenging to the state or aid

donors. This is not just a problem for Forum Theatre. In Africa most artistic tools

have been co-opted by the development community, the major funder of the arts

across the continent, and the danger is that they can promote conformity rather

engaging with the agenda of the oppressed themselves. I would suggest that the most

298 J. Plastow

revolutionary, as opposed to social democratic, activity going on in this case is that

for once middle-class Africans, university staff and students, are seeking to work

with the poor. Nevertheless, the poor are most definitely not taking over the world.

My more detailed examples are going to be drawn from work I have myself been

involved in, in Eritrea and Ethiopia. I regularly use aspects of Boalian practice, but

usually as one element of what I call a ‘toolbox’ of techniques, rather than in any‘pure’ form, and while I am certainly concerned about conscientisation, I am

normally operating within a context of, to varying extent, repressive regimes, where

much discussion is called for with participants to see how far they want to go in

courting controversy by challenging a ruling class. It is usually all too easy for

someone like me to take the next plane out. Artistic activists in Africa have often

been imprisoned and in some cases even killed, so calling for revolution � even

practising or ‘rehearsing’ overtly radical solutions to issues � is often not something

to be undertaken lightly.

I will discuss two relevant experiments with Forum Theatre from Eritrea. In 1994

I undertook the first professional training of actors for a country that had only

gained its independence in 1991 after a 30-year civil war with Ethiopia.21 The 30

actors were all ex-members of the cultural troupes that had worked to raise

awareness and promote the socialist, and strongly women’s rights-based liberation

struggle.22 They were a highly politicised group, still feeling the euphoria of an

extraordinary political and military triumph.23 I spent three months introducingthese actors to a range of theatre methodologies with the intention of preparing them

to become community activists in a civilian role. One of the techniques we explored

was that of the Theatre of the Oppressed. However, when we came to discuss the

ways in which they felt oppressed, the simple answer was that they all said they did

not. Partly of course this was the euphoria of a winning team, but it also resulted

from the particular discipline of the struggle they had participated in, where the

individual fully expected to sacrifice his/her life for the liberation war and where

individual concerns had been subsumed in the national struggle. Complaint was seen

as a sign of weakness, if not treachery, and it was a position that had been

internalised by these ex-fighters, many of whom had been literally brought up in the

struggle at the revolutionary schools set up by the Eritrean People’s Liberation

Front. As far as they were concerned the revolution had been won. We thus

abandoned Boal in favour of the overt politicisation of Brechtian theatre and the

adaptation of traditional cultural forms.

I was back working in Eritrea in 1997, though by now the unbridled joy of

achieving liberation had faded as the government appeared more and moredictatorial. Also I was now working with villagers, not ex-fighters. My colleague,

Ali Campbell, lived for a month, along with 12 trained Eritrean facilitators, in the

village of Sala’a Daro, and we were going to make a play with the villagers about the

issues they wanted to raise. Ali Campbell is a friend of Boal and had worked on TO-

style projects in Brazil and the UK. He was keen to make Forum Theatre with our

incredibly enthusiastic youth group of up to a hundred children that came together

every afternoon. I turned up to see the children perform a small Forum piece at the

village meeting place in front of the Orthodox church.24 The play was about child-

spacing (using birth control in order to promote maternal health and family well-

being by not having children in close proximity to each other) and attracted an

audience of villagers and priests. A warm-up piece based on a traditional story about

Journal of Transatlantic Studies 299

a trickster went well and attracted a number of interventions. Then the child-spacing

piece was performed. Campbell describes what happened:

We have built up this piece to deal with issues around family planning, includingarguments for fewer children [ . . .] versus more security [ . . .] all laid out wittily and withconsiderable humour.One by one the faces of the priests clamp shut.It doesn’t matter that our avoidance of the doctrinaire is impeccable: the priests alreadyknow the answers to all this stuff, and to lay out alternatives or, to invite their enactmentby the people is at best a waste of time and at worst � heresy [ . . .] The women don’t justnot speak: they vanish. I don’t mean they move but they vanish all the same, eyesdowncast and mouths covered, voiceless, meek, passive.At last a voice is heard. A priest stands up, ceremonial staff in hand, and all heads turn[ . . .] This is the word of God [ . . .] And God says YOU WILL GO FORTH ANDMULTIPLY.Curtain.25

In Sala’a Daro we had the support of state authorities to address any issue the

villagers wanted to raise, but in this rural setting the church had enormous power. To

speak against its orthodoxy and risk excommunication was too much for villagers.

The open debate desired in Forum Theatre was not possible in this religiously

conservative, hierarchical and patriarchal setting. To promote any confidence to

speak out in public we had to work with separate groups of women, children and

young men. The piece we finally made was a promenade play based on stories we had

been told about the founding of the village and using the music and dance forms of

the community, alongside some moments of Boalian Image Theatre. Our achieve-

ment was ultimately to have groups of the marginalised within village society show

themselves as actors in a village setting dominated by mature men who controlled

both church and state power. Forum Theatre was too much, too soon, and alien to

modes of performance our oppressed groups could feel confident in appropriating.

Finally, I want to give one successful example of Forum Theatre’s challenging

authority � though still only in a way that authority was prepared to tolerate. In the

late 1990s I was involved in a dance theatre project in Ethiopia, The Adugna

Community Dance Theatre, working with young street people. Adugna is committed

to community outreach. One issue young street dwellers faced was abuse by police.

The poor training of Ethiopian police was at the time a matter of concern of Colonel

Teferedegn, the head of the force, and I was asked to meet him to discuss how

Adugna could work with the police to raise awareness of the perspective of street

dwellers in new recruit training. I, and subsequently my friend and fellow community

theatre activist Gerri Moriarty, worked with Adugna to make a series of Forum plays

based on the real stories experienced by Adugna members and their friends. Here the

police saw themselves portrayed behaving in a prejudiced manner to street dwellers,

women and other poor people. They were asked to take part in the Forum pieces,

confronting the common injustice of police practice at the time. The work was so

successful that it became incorporated into all police recruit training in the city, a

strange instance of Forum Theatre being used by the oppressed on their oppressors

with the endorsement of the state.26

Perhaps Boal’s use of terms like revolution, like his rather overblown claims to

the uniqueness of his innovations, is part of his cultural positioning. If we think of

the way South American contemporary politicians speak, Lula of Brazil and Hugo

Chavez of Venezuela, the rhetoric frequently sounds overblown to northern

300 J. Plastow

European ears. Moreover, Boal is no careful academic. However, I do think it is a

problem that Boal fails, possibly to recognise, and certainly to discuss, his own

cultural specificity. The apparently blithe pedalling of these forms as universally

applicable has to be problematic. In conversation mutual friends have told me thatAugusto Boal is happy to acknowledge that his forms should be adapted for use in

particular settings � he has shared platforms with Kompaore at the Barbican Theatre

in London discussing their interpretations of Forum, and run TO training sessions in

Europe alongside Indian practitioner Sanjoy Ganguly who also synthesises Forum

with indigenous folk forms � but this is not the impression given by his books or on

his courses. The only culturally specific development in his forms of theatre has

interestingly been made in relation to his work in the rich West: the United States

and Europe, which is where he now teaches most often. For this group Boal in the1990s developed the ‘Rainbow of Desire’, a technique that looks at psychological

rather than political and social oppressions. No specific work has been undertaken to

look at particular circumstances prevailing in the homes of most of the most

oppressed, those living in Asia and Africa.

The problem here is that many of those taking up the techniques of the Theatre

of the Oppressed, certainly in Africa, are learning the techniques at second hand or

from books. They are likely to feel they must follow the rules as set down, and that if

these do not work the failure lies with them rather than with problems in thedogmatic outlining of the techniques themselves. This tendency is not helped by the

way TO at its worst it attracts a kind of ‘groupie’; possibly encouraged by Boal

almost franchising certain centres by ‘allowing’ them to call themselves the Centre

for the Theatre of the Oppressed in Paris, or Toronto, or wherever it is, thus

encouraging an unreflecting idea of the ‘right’ way to make such theatre.

It seems to me that any theatre practice must be mediated through the realities of

the place, time and society it finds itself in; any practice is only a tool, and one

among many that might be chosen. It is also important to recognise the dangers ofthis supposedly revolutionary tool becoming domesticated, and used not by the

people it purports to serve but by authority to achieve control through neo-liberal

means. Theatre cannot achieve revolution, it cannot really even ‘rehearse’ revolution,

and to achieve any change it needs effective civil society partners. In Africa I think I

have shown my own experiments have sometimes found Forum Theatre to be simply

inappropriate. In any setting we need to recognise just what a particular Forum

Theatre piece is trying to achieve. At its best it provokes discussion and raises

awareness and this is a very valuable thing, but the tool urgently needs to bedisassociated from the charismatic, often inexact rhetoric of Augusto Boal, to be

interrogated and to be used in conjunction with locally appropriate cultural forms

and partners. The uncritical application of any artistic method is, I think, inherently

anti-creative and vulnerable to manipulation. It needs to be as much resisted as any

other form of demagoguery.

Notes

1. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride & Maria-Odila LealMcBride (London: Pluto Press, 1979), 122.

2. ‘Image Theatre’ is based on creating three still images. The first is of an oppression, thesecond of an ideal resolution and the third of an action that can help move from theoppression towards the ideal solution. The images are normally made in groups with

Journal of Transatlantic Studies 301

individuals sculpting other group members to show the images required. These are thendiscussed by all participants and other transitional steps towards the ideal may besuggested.‘Invisible Theatre’ involves actors working in ‘real’ situations in order to make peoplethink about issues in their everyday lives. For example, an actor might go into anexpensive restaurant, order a meal and then say he cannot pay for it because he has beenmade homeless. The idea is to provoke reactions and thought in those witnessing theevent.‘Forum Theatre’: see description later in article.‘Cop in the Head’ is a technique designed to allow people to see oppressions they haveinternalised which stop them taking agency over their own lives. For example, it mightinclude looking at how a parent has denigrated a child and made them feel worthless. It ismuch more psychological than the other techniques.‘Rainbow of Desire’: see descriptionlater in article.

3. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto, 1979); Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. Adrian Jackson (London: Routledge, 1992); The Rainbow of Desire, trans.Adrian Jackson (London: Routledge, 1995); Legislative Theatre, trans. Adrian Jackson(London: Routledge, 1998); Hamlet and the Baker’s Son: My Life in Theatre, trans. AdrianJackson (London: Routledge, 2001).

4. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970). First published inPortuguese as Pedagogia do oprimido, 1968.

5. Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. J. Willet (London: Methuen, 1964); and TheMessingkauf Dialogues, trans. J. Willet (London: Methuen, 1965).

6. See Boal, The Rainbow of Desire, 2�3.7. Boal studied theatre in New York with John Glassner but he was also involved with the

Brooklyn Writer’s group, the Teatro Experimental do Negro and the work of black activistLangston Hughes. He also attended rehearsals at the Stanislavky-inspired Actor’s Studioand became interested in the Epic Theatre of Bertolt Brecht.

8. David George, ‘Theatre of the Oppressed and Teatro de Arena: In and Out of Context’,Latin American Theatre Review, 28, no. 2 (1995), 47.

9. Margo Milleret, ‘Acting into Action: Teatro Arena’s Zumbi’, Latin American TheatreReview, 21, no. 1 (1987), 26.

10. See Boal, Legislative Theatre, 102�104.11. Frances Babbage, Augusto Boal (London: Routledge, 2004), 1�33.12. Boal, Legislative Theatre, 20.13. Baz Kershaw, ‘Review of Legislative Theatre’, Theatre Research International, 26, no. 2

(2001), 219.14. Paul Heritage, ‘Theatre in Prisons’, Metaxis (2001), 33.15. Idem.16. Prosper Kompaore, ‘Artistic Expression and Communication for Development’, Leeds

African Studies Bulletin, 67 (2005), 33.17. For more detail on the organisation of ATB see ‘Raising the Curtain on Aids’, The New

Courier, UNESCO (May 2005), 44�46.18. Koteba is a popular performance form in West Africa, most commonly associated with

Mali. The form includes music, satire and burlesque comedy.19. For a description of an ATB play see ‘The Communication Initiative � Experiences �

Atelier-Theatre Burkinabe (ATB)’, Natural Resource Management website, available athttp://www.comminit.com/en/node/130815, accessed 4 January 2009.

20. See Prosper Kompaore, ‘Artistic Expression and Communication for Development’, LeedsAfrican Studies Bulletin, 67 (2005), 26�36.

21. For more information on the Eritrean liberation war of 1961�1991 against Ethiopia seeDan Connell, Against All Odds: A Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution (Asmara: Red SeaPress, 1993).

22. The Eritrean liberation struggle used culture extensively, both to promote its militaryaims, and its socialist ideology. There was a particular emphasis on educating the populaceabout women’s rights in what had been a very patriarchal nation because one third of thefighting force was made up of women volunteers. For more on the use of theatre to combat

302 J. Plastow

patriarchy in the liberation struggle see Jane Plastow and Solomon Tsehaye,‘MakingTheatre for a Change: Two Plays of the Eritrean Liberation Struggle’, in Theatre Matters:Politics and Culture on the World Stage, ed. Richard Boon and Jane Plastow (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998), 36�54.

23. For an insider view on the extraordinary triumph of the Eritrean war by a leadingplaywright and fighter see Alemseged Tesfai, Two Weeks in the Trenches (Asmara: Red SeaPress, 2003).

24. See Ali Campbell, Christine Matzke, Gerri Morriarty, Renny O’Shea, Jane Plastow andthe students of the Tigre/Bilen theatre training course, ‘Telling the Lion’s Tale: MakingTheatre in Eritrea’, African Theatre in Development, ed. Martin Banham, James Gibbs andFemi Osofisan (Oxford: Currey, 1999), 38�53.

25. Ibid, 42.26. See Jane Plastow, ‘Dance and Transformation: The Adugna Community Dance Theatre:

Ethiopia’, Theatre and Empowerment: Community Theatre on the World Stage, ed. RichardBoon and Jane Plastow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 125�154.

Note on the contributor

Jane Plastow is Professor of African Theatre and director of the Leeds University Centre forAfrican Studies (LUCAS). She has written extensively on African theatre and the use oftheatre within development, community and educational contexts, and is also an Arts inDevelopment practitioner working mainly in the Horn of Africa. Recent publications include:Theatre & Empowerment, edited by Richard Boon and Jane Plastow (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2004); Three Eritrean Plays, edited by Jane Plastow, with introduction (Alumnus, 2004),African Theatre: Women, edited by Jane Plastow and James Currey (2002). Directing andproduction credits include: Obstacle Race by Wole Soyinka, 2005 on the London Eye;Encounters with Africa, devised touring production, Leeds, 2004; and I Will Marry When IWant by Ngugi wa Thiong’o (in Tigrinya) 2001, National Theatre, Eritrea. Acting creditsinclude: The Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, assorted pantomime witches, and MargaretThatcher for an ANC production to the Organisation of African Unity in the NationalTheatre, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Journal of Transatlantic Studies 303