Kyle’s Reviews > The Aesthetics of the Oppressed > Status Update
Kyle
is on page 102 of 146
A shorter but just as devastating discourse on how a globalized economy crushes the spirit of the artist, leading Boal to the symbolic suicide - and yet his warning from Guanajuato, Mexico, shows how even as a literal corpse the manic market will find some way to make money. Boal faces the indifferent times with a sense of purpose, however, knowing that for all the moribund monetization that culture lives within art.
— Mar 15, 2018 07:07PM
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Kyle
is on page 133 of 146
The seventieth birthday celebration, among many other milestones Boal faced midway through March 2001, brings about quite a few complex emotions. Foremost is the envy he perhaps jokingly directs at older colleagues who still live vibrant, youth-filled lives. Boal has much to feel proud about as his centre runs and conducts research on the arts, but like the aged actor playing a doddering Lear, his speech is for show.
— Mar 21, 2018 04:17PM
Kyle
is on page 129 of 146
Not what I expected to find in a chapter on drama in prison - many others trodding upon the redemptive Christianesque “those poor souls, lookat ‘em performing HMS Pinafore, lovely.” Instead Boal points to the grittier realities of what brought the inmates into prison (including himself in Brazil’s dark days) and what artists and citizens need to know about their eventual return to society by staging a Forum.
— Mar 20, 2018 08:18PM
Kyle
is on page 95 of 146
Boal applies some narrative kung-fu to his theory, telling stories about Thespis and Solon, a street-wise Aristotle, an evolutionary tale of tree-dwelling apes and a feisty Lady at a New York Theatre of the Oppressed workshop. Each account brings to life the point that an artistic approach to a forum is perhaps the best countermeasure to the threat of imperial-like globalization that Hollywood has successfully shown.
— Mar 14, 2018 08:28PM
Kyle
is on page 56 of 146
I jumped the gun with my last progress update knowing that there were endnotes for the chapter and yet posting before I read them. The Prometheus Project continues to describe how neurons are firing in multiple parts of the brain of the spectator perceiving reality. There is perhaps some irony in naming the project thus, knowing that aesthetic acting can only go so far (uphill?) before needed to be repeated.
— Mar 10, 2018 07:59PM
Kyle
is on page 43 of 146
A more mature Boal recounts the multiple ways his forty-year experiment called Theatre of the Oppressed has branched and blossomed into its own theory, the present Aesthetics, while staying connected to the Brazilian culture from which it arose (no mention of Freire yet, not that there needs to be). He distrusts of the Word yet praises the metaphoric is a curious tension set up in his theoretical foundation.
— Mar 07, 2018 02:32PM
Kyle
is on page 7 of 146
Delving deeper into Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, which has now taken root in the Word, Sound and Image of his playful practice and branched out in many fascinating ways, I am impressed to find all of it take shape as a tree. Not sure if or where Boal cites Jung’s study on alchemy but both certainly are aiming at the same psychological process of transformation. Like Bogart, Boal could do better at citing sources.
— Feb 28, 2018 11:12PM