Augusto Boal, the legendary Brazilian political playwright and popular educator, died in 2009, at the age of seventy-eight.

Boal was the founder of the Theater of the Oppressed, a popular international movement for a participatory form of theater as a means of promoting knowledge, democratic forms of interaction, and transformation. He conducted workshops all over the world. His techniques of using theater to discuss power and oppression have been widely inspirational and influential. He was inspired by Paulo Freire, who wrote The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Among the books written by Augusto Boal are “The Theater of the Oppressed” “Games for Actors and Non-Actors”, as well as “The Rainbow of Desire and Legislative Theater”. In 1971, the Brazilian military dictatorship imprisoned and tortured Boal for four months. After his release, he was forced into exile for fifteen years.
(excerpted from http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/6/augusto_boal_founder_of_the_theater )

Here are some quotes from Boal:
“We have theater inside, because we act and we are the observer. We are the spectators.”

“At the same time, when we get together many people looking at one point, they create a space which is different from the physical space. It’s more than a physical space. It is pentadimensional, not three dimensions. It has also memory and imagination. So we create the theatricality.”

“When I was moved from this cell to a cell with many other prisoners, political prisoners, I learned something very important also, that when we are free in space, we are arrested in time. We have to go look at the watch. It’s what time? And we have to go here, we have to go there. We are arrested in time. And when we are arrested in space, we have the free time. We have the liberty of using our time.”

“There is a poet, a Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, who says, “The path does not exist. The path, you make by treading on it. By walking, you make the path.” So we don’t know where the path leads, but we know the direction of the path that we want to take. That’s what I want, and not to accomplish, but to follow, until I can’t.”

listen to the 2007 interview with augusto boal on the democracynow site:

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/6/augusto_boal_founder_of_the_theater