Quotes from Augusto Boal

Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.

We are all actors: being a citizen is not living in society, it is changing it.

It is forbidden to walk on the grass. It is not forbidden to fly over the grass.

Theatre is the most perfect artistic form of coercion.

The theater itself is not revolutionary: it is a rehearsal for the revolution. ~ Augusto Boal

It is not the place of the theatre to show the correct path, but only to offer the means by which all possible paths may be examined.

Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it. ~

Empathy is the most powerful weapon [...] ~ Augusto Boal

The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!). ~ Augusto Boal

The smallest incidents of our social life contain all the moral and political values of society, all its structures of domination and power, all its mechanisms of oppression.

Motion, according to him, is an illusion, because we can demonstrate that it does not actually exist; the same for the multiplicity of existing things, which are in his logic, a single being, infinite, eternal, unchangeable. Like Heraclitus, Parmenides too, had his radical disciple, named Zeno. The latter had the habit of telling two stories to prove the inexistence of motion.

The poetics of the oppressed is essentially the poetics of liberation: the spectator no longer delegates power to the characters either to think or to act in his place. The spectator frees himself; he thinks and acts for himself! Theatre is action! ~ Augusto Boal

A person to whom the oracles had said that he was going to marry his own mother and kill his own father would have to be a little careful and abstain from killing men old enough to be his father or marrying women old enough to be his mother.

Nothing is going to remain the way it is. Let us, in the present, study the past, so as to invent the future.