Augusto Boal and Jean-Marie Brohm: Games for Embodied Liberation
Location
Hager-Lubbers Exhibition Hall
Description
PURPOSE: This paper seeks to compare the deinstitutionalization of play in the French sociologist Jean-Marie Brohm’s critical theory of sport and the Brazilian theatre-director Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to understand proven strategies for reconceptualizing, remobilizing, and engaging the body in its struggle for its own liberation. SUBJECTS: Literature by and about Jean-Marie Brohm and Augusto Boal. METHODS AND MATERIALS: A literature review and textual analysis using the lens of Boal’s “Aesthetics of the Oppressed” and Herbert Marcuse’s critique of Marxist aesthetic theory. ANALYSES: N/A. RESULTS: Boal unraveled the physical effects of labor production through the games of Theatre of the Oppressed, while Brohm rallied against the capitalist ethic in organized sport and conceived of a new approach to France’s physical education. Theatre and sport each found their boundaries blurred as audiences became spectator-actors, and the non-athlete discovered the pleasures of movement without a capitalist push for maximum output. Herbert Marcuse’s idea that political struggle requires a renewed “sensibility, imagination, and reason emancipated from the rule of exploitation” finds an answer in Brohm and Boal’s positioning of the body as both ideological tool and embodied response. CONCLUSIONS: This research highlights the role of an embodied approach to ideological dissonance and liberatory practices. In their attempts to de-mechanize the body within the same systems they sought to shatter, Brohm and Boal emphasize a sensorial consciousness that returns play as a means of liberation back to the people.
Augusto Boal and Jean-Marie Brohm: Games for Embodied Liberation
Hager-Lubbers Exhibition Hall
PURPOSE: This paper seeks to compare the deinstitutionalization of play in the French sociologist Jean-Marie Brohm’s critical theory of sport and the Brazilian theatre-director Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed to understand proven strategies for reconceptualizing, remobilizing, and engaging the body in its struggle for its own liberation. SUBJECTS: Literature by and about Jean-Marie Brohm and Augusto Boal. METHODS AND MATERIALS: A literature review and textual analysis using the lens of Boal’s “Aesthetics of the Oppressed” and Herbert Marcuse’s critique of Marxist aesthetic theory. ANALYSES: N/A. RESULTS: Boal unraveled the physical effects of labor production through the games of Theatre of the Oppressed, while Brohm rallied against the capitalist ethic in organized sport and conceived of a new approach to France’s physical education. Theatre and sport each found their boundaries blurred as audiences became spectator-actors, and the non-athlete discovered the pleasures of movement without a capitalist push for maximum output. Herbert Marcuse’s idea that political struggle requires a renewed “sensibility, imagination, and reason emancipated from the rule of exploitation” finds an answer in Brohm and Boal’s positioning of the body as both ideological tool and embodied response. CONCLUSIONS: This research highlights the role of an embodied approach to ideological dissonance and liberatory practices. In their attempts to de-mechanize the body within the same systems they sought to shatter, Brohm and Boal emphasize a sensorial consciousness that returns play as a means of liberation back to the people.