Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal dies

Augusto Boal, the Brazilian theater director and playwright known for the interactive genre called the "Theater of the Oppressed," died Saturday. He was 78. Boal died of respiratory failure following a long battle with leukemia, according to Elisa Nunes, a spokeswoman for Rio's Hospital Samaritano. Boal studied theater arts at New York City's Columbia University. Shortly after graduating from university, Boal was asked to work with the Arena Theatre in São Paulo, southeast Brazil. It was here that he began to experiment with new forms of theatre, creating Theater of the Oppressed in the early 1960s as a way to establish a dialogue between audience, playwright, director and actors that encouraged political activism. Boal's teachings were controversial, and as a cultural activist he was seen as a threat by the Brazilian military regime. In 1971 Boal was arrested and tortured. He was eventually exiled to Argentina, where in 1973 he published his first book Theatre of the Oppressed. He fled to Europe, and eventually lived in Paris. There he taught his revolutionary approach to theatre for 12 years, creating several Centers for the Theatre of Oppressed, and in 1981, organizing the first International Festival for the Theatre of Oppressed. After the fall of Brazil's military dictatorship, Boal returned to Rio de Janeiro and established a major Center for the Theater of the Oppressed in Rio (CTO Rio). He started over a dozen theater companies that work to develop community-based projects. In 1994, Boal won the UNESCO Pablo Picasso Medal, and in August 1997 he was awarded the 'Career Achievement Award' by the Association of Theatre in Higher Education at their national conference in Chicago, Illinois. Boal is also seen as the inspiration behind 21st Century forms of performance-activism, such as the "Optative Theatrical Laboratories".