Write a research proposal that needs to be on Augusto Boal’s audience participatory ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ and his concept of the “spect-actor” in his Forum Theatre.
Abstract of the paper is as follows :-
Augusto Boal famously regards the term “spectator” as less than human. To him, it invokes images of a domesticated, physically restrained group that observes in stillness, what transpires beyond the proscenium arch. In his seminal work, Theatre of the Oppressed, he declared that in order to “restore to [the spectator] his capacity for action… he too must be a subject”, and with this came the birth of an audience-participatory theatre that advocates for the transformation of the passive spectator to the active “spect-actor” i.e., the subject. However, there is no clear articulation on how this transformation can be achieved. Boal maintains a meticulous record of instances where people participated in his to workshops, but how they were led to do so is most often not considered worthy of comment. The research would thus attempt to demystify the processes of audience participation in to, with an overriding objective to understand how to generate the impetus to participate. In order to address this question, locate Boal in the genealogy of philosophical subjectivity, and examine his positionality on the human subject, actor subject, and spectator subject from a psychophysical purview.
