The Emergence And History Of Newspaper Theatre.
The 1950s and 1960s in Brazil were marked by considerable turbulence. This period, known as the “populist” era of the Fourth Brazilian Republic (1946-1964), witnessed the liberalization of Getúlio Vargas’ Estado Novo dictatorship. Significant developments included the establishment of the Workers’ Party, which would later play a crucial role in the evolution of the Theatre of the Oppressed and the creation of Legislative Theatre under Augusto Boal’s tenure as a vereador in Rio de Janeiro three decades later. Additionally, Brazil opened diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba, and saw a surge in student and union movements.
This vibrant era was characterized by cultural and political guerrilla activities inspired by the Cuban Revolution, which sparked revolutionary fervor across many South and Central American countries. It was also a time of experimentation with Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. While working at the University of Recife, Freire included 300 agrarian workers, primarily sugarcane harvesters, in an experiment that successfully taught them to read and write in just 45 days. The success of this experiment led to the establishment of 20,000 “cultural circles” throughout the country. Unlike typical classrooms, these circles were spaces for emancipation, the development of critical thinking, and political participation.
At the same time, an increasing number of theatre artists in the entire Latin America were discovering Stanislavski and Brecht, leading to the emergence of a new type of theatre that resisted the outdated melodramatic forms prevalent in mainstream theatres. Theatre also began to move into the streets, with performances being staged in public spaces, blurring the lines between theatrical performance and happening. In São Paulo, in 1953, the “Arena” group was formed. Augusto Boal joined this group in 1956 upon his return from the United States, where he had studied dramaturgy. With experience working with the Afro-Brazilian and working-class populations, and armed with knowledge from Columbia University, he staged a play for the first time in 1958 that centered on working-class characters. Boal and his group continued to explore the possibilities of a new revolutionary theatre, which eventually led to the creation of the Theatre of the Oppressed. This set of techniques, relying on the theory of Paulo Freire and contemporary experiments with popular theatre, erased the classic divisions between playwrights and actors, and actors and the audience.
Boal talks about that period, explaining how they initially created realistic, almost naturalistic theatre, and then in the second era, they attempted to make a “reversal of the classical drama and investigate where the reality of the contemporary Brazilian society could have been found in those.” Finally,
“The third stage was concerned with combining both the first stage, which was too objective (almost Naturalistic), and the second one, which was too abstract. We embarked on the phase of Zumbi in which both principles were fused: the extreme objectivity of Naturalism, and the abstraction, subjectivity or universality of the classical plays. We first put on Zumbi, afterwards Tiradentes, and then Bolivar. Following this there was another stage, which was called the ‘newspaper theatre’ (teatro do jornal).”
Here we find the prehistory of Newspaper Theatre, in the earliest days of experimenting in politically volatile and culturally rich times, filled with revolutionary energy. This movement was abruptly halted by the military coup of 1964, and again in 1968, but that didn’t stop Boal. Even after he was arrested, tortured, and exiled, he continued, perhaps with even greater energy and revolutionary zeal, to revolutionize theatre. Again from the interview of 1975:
“I think that if you make any changes within the theatre—a theatre that has a proscenium, a stage, an arena, or a combined version of stages—all this is but reformism; you are not really changing anything. We believe that you can go anyplace and make theatre. The theatre has to be restored to the people, it has to be regained, ‘reclaimed,’ from the bourgeoisie which has preserved theatre in its own likeness as a closed system.”
“Up till now the theatre has been a kind of place where one presents images of the past. Now I think we have to try to focus on the present and the future. We have to create theatre which will not be a reproduction of the past but a rehearsal of the future.”
This was the spirit in which Newspaper Theatre was created and developed. Boal writes in a book written in 1971, and published in 1973, while in exile in Argentina (here quoted from the English edition of “Legislative Theatre” where it was published in a revised, expended form) about ways in which theatre relates to the people (people are understood as “working people,” i.e., peasants, workers, those who sell their labour on the market).
“To be popular, theatre must always tackle issues from the people’s perspective, that is, the perspective of permanent transformation, of anti-alienation, of struggle against exploitation etc. This does not mean that it can only treat subject-matter which is usually designated ‘political’; all human life is relevant to the people, and consequently of interest to the workers.”
He continues to distinguish between theatre created from the people’s perspective for the people (the legacy of the popular theatre that was extremely popular in South and Central America, and roughly equivalent to the first Arena phase), then plays created from the people’s perspective but for the bourgeoisie, reinterpreting classical works and adding subtlety (roughly corresponding with Arena’s second phase), anti-popular theatre (created from the perspective of the ruling class ideology, but addressed to the people, with the aim of placating them and reinforcing the status quo), and finally, theatre of the people for the people, where they are not only passive observers but active participants: the Newspaper Theatre.
The first Newspaper Theatre method was produced by Arena in 1970, entitled Teatro Jornal – Primeira Edição. Boal identifies two primary purposes for Newspaper Theatre. The first is to bring theatre to the people. He emphasizes this aspect, echoing Bertolt Brecht, one of his major influences, by claiming that the Newspaper Theatre techniques primarily serve as a way to
“popularise the ‘means of making theatre’ so that the people themselves can use them and make their own theatre. To use the analogy present in the title of this method— though we have our own presses, we don’t try to print our own paper and make it popular; our endeavour is to hand over our presses to the people, so they can print their own paper.”
The second objective is more concrete, aimed at exploring the media, developing not only analytical tools and a sound, albeit implicit, media theory (while McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) was still quite new), but also a means of intervention, dialogue, and dialectics. In Boal’s words:
“The secondary objective is to attempt to demystify the pretended ‘objectivity’ of most journalism, to show that all news published in the paper is a work of fiction at the service of the dominant class. Even accurate news, where the facts are not mis-represented (a very rare thing), becomes fiction when published in a newspaper at the service of this class. The importance of a piece of news and the significance we attribute to it depends on its relationship with the rest of the paper. If, on the front page of a newspaper, we read a story about a young woman miraculously saved after having set fire to her clothes as a result of a disappointment in love, the fact that this tragedy is frontpage news reduces events like the criminal massacres of Song My in the Vietnam war to the status of mere faits divers, just another story.
These crimes of imperialism appear as natural, acceptable, quotidian, alongside the sensational suicide attempt. What is more important: the fate of the Brazilian team in the World Cup or the government’s lack of concern for the fate of millions of peasants dying of hunger in north-east Brazil? The headlines of the papers are plastered with the national team’s goals, rather than with photos of infant mortality, an area in which Brazil leads the world. In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles stated with good reason: ‘No news is important enough to merit a newspaper headline; but if any news is printed as a headline in any paper, then it becomes an important piece of news.’ Thus, public opinion is manipulated; the process is simple and painless. The presence of ‘accurate’ news, devalued by its dispersal throughout the paper, and by the layout of the paper as a whole, seeks to give the impression of ‘impartiality’; when in actual fact, the placing of each piece of news gives it a very particular weight. An important element of Newspaper Theatre—and one of its principal objectives—is to teach people to ‘read’ newspapers correctly.”
The field of media theory developed rapidly in the meantime, emphasizing many elements that Boal developed through his Newspaper Theatre techniques. Since he quickly moved on to focus on other techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed, Newspaper Theatre remains a fairly unknown niche in the research of his theoretical opus (although it is more practised than discussed). This is unfortunate: just as Marshall McLuhan was brought back into public interest after the emergence of the internet, Boal’s Newspaper Theatre can realize its full potential in the era of social media and fake news.