The world is diverse, composed of billions of unique entities, and constantly in flux. In other words, everything is ultimately a unicity – something unique which signifies only itself. People use habits and categories to survive the resultant vertigo of sensory input. Naming, for instance, is a way of fixing things in time and space. Although Boal sees such categorising processes as necessary (its absence leads to madness), he also sees them as dangerous, and implies that they are over-used in existing societies. Language is alleged to have a role in the degradation of the senses. Words can even over-ride senses, making people imagine the world is different from what they experience.

Boal situates his theatrical work in relation to a particular politics of knowledge. He contrasts a desirable, human state of creative freedom with various oppressive social realities. Oppression goes hand in hand with voicelessness and the inability to act on one’s own desires. As such, Boal insists that ‘to speak is to take power’. Theatre is one of the domains of the resultant struggle. Theatre is necessarily political, because all human action is political. Theatre is about power, human relationships, and who gets to speak. In his earlier works, Boal writes of theatre as a weapon to be fought for. The ruling class will seek to hold onto it. The oppressed need to wrest it from their hands. It is clear from such statements that Boal is both a conflict theorist and a believer in an underlying human potential for creative becoming. All culture is involved in aesthetic production. However, theatre has a special significance, in that it embodies the capacity for self-observation. Theatre stems from humans’ ability to observe ourselves – not only to see, but to see ourselves seeing. At root, theatre is the uniquely human capacity to observe oneself in action. By seeing ourselves seeing, we can see ourselves in situ – in the situations we’re in. And we can imagine what we can become. We can split ourselves into the person in situ; the observer; and the “not-I”, the person we are not. The doubling or splitting of the self into observer and observed is crucial here. It allows reflexivity. The role of theatre is to enact this split. Hence, theatre is change and creation. It does not simply represent realities. Lccn 2015937863 Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-alpha-20201231-10-g1236 Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 0.9693 Ocr_module_version 0.0.13 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA19942 Openlibrary_edition One of the roles of art is to restore the sensory level of perception and communication. This requires that art break down, or move past, the armouring provided by bodily rigidity, habit and language. Art is a process of stimulation, likened to dream and utopia. Boal speculates that it activates a particular kind of aesthetic neurons. We are all artists. Everyday practices, such as lovemaking, can also be art.Welcome to the Human Body Theater, where your master of ceremonies is going to lead you through a theatrical revue of each and every biological system of the human body! Starting out as a skeleton, the MC puts on a new layer of her costume (her body) with each "act." By turns goofy and intensely informative, the Human Body Theateris always accessible and always entertaining. Forum Theatre works from rehearsal improvisation to create a scene of a specific oppression. Using the Greek terms “protagonist” and “antagonist,” Forum Theatre seeks to show a person (the protagonist) who is trying to deal with an oppression and failing because of the resistance of one or more obstacles (the antagonists).

Brazilian playwright and radical activist Augusto Boal is the founder of a number of experiments in radical theatre. The most widely known terms for his overlapping contributions are Forum Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed. These approaches were originally designed for use in Brazil during the era of the struggle against the dictatorship. They went hand-in-hand with radical organising in this period. Boal’s methods have also been used in diverse settings marked by oppression, and today, Theatre of the Oppressed is performed all over the world. An International Festival of Theatre of the Oppressed was held in Palestine in 2013, and there are groups in the UK too. Theatre makes a special contribution in enabling dialogue. For Boal, all human relations, especially those across difference, should be dialogues. Real dialogue is not simply a set of overlapping monologues. It requires listening, and respect for difference. Boal also draws a recurring contrast between really seeing or hearing, and simply watching or being silent. This is exemplified in his critique of mass media. Television encourages watching, but not seeing. In contrast, art and science help us to see or hear. Boal shows what he means by this distinction with various examples. Newton really saw the apple fall to earth, where others had simply watched it. Beethoven makes us hear silence, a psychoanalyst hears what is not said. The implication in each case is that to really see or hear is to perceive or intuit an underlying, inner or qualitative dimension which is obscured in the surface appearance. Too often, we only watch or absorb sounds, without really seeing and hearing in this sense.Tweens and teens working on science reports will find the Table of Contents useful in identifying chapters on each of the body systems. Youth will also use the glossary and bibliography as reference sources.