Augusto Boal's Influence On American Theatre

There are many theatre practitioners that have influenced the theatre world. Many of these have had a focus on the audience and how the audience feel and perceive the performance and its actors. Two of these practitioners are Augusto Boal, a revolutionary director, actor and practitioner and Jacques Lecoq, a director, teacher and famous mime. I believe that these two practitioners revolutionized theatre in terms of how the audience and actors interact with each other.

Augusto Boal was a Brazilian Theatrical Practitioner that created a theatre that is known as the Theatre of the Oppressed. This theatre was created as a way of inspiring social and political change in the world by basically publicly performing a form of propaganda. Within the Theatre of the Oppressed there are numerous techniques used that allow the actors to communicate with the audience.

An example of this is from one of his methods, known as the Image Theatre. These techniques consists of really specific games where some of the participants, which are the audience, become clay so to speak, and are molded into sculptures by

Lecoq wanted to break the invisible barrier between the audience and the actors. He did this by having his actors in his performances, which were mimed directly try and communicate with the audience using over exaggerated body gestures, as if the actors were playing a crazy game of charades with the audience. Sometimes these interactions even extended to the point of his actors going into the audience and directly miming to specific members of the audience. This gave his audience a very close, even intimate relationship with the actors. Lecoq wanted the audience to feel connected with the actors in terms of the audience feeling like they were just like the actors and would do the same thing in that