Cardboard Citizens Presents: Theatre in Difficult Times

*** We regret to report that due to indisposition, Augusto Boal will be unable to be present for this talk. We are pleased to announce that Julian Boal, his son, will be participating in his father’s absence. We are hopeful of securing an online link for Augusto Boal to participate. ***
Augusto Boal and Cicely Berry in conversation with Adrian Jackson.


In an evening chaired by Adrian Jackson, founder-director of Cardboard Citizens, Augusto Boal and Cicely Berry will reflect on the evolution of their theatrical careers and how they see the future of theatre in these difficult economic times.
Both have gained worldwide acclaim as theatre artists and political activists, and have worked right across the theatre spectrum, with professionals and non-professionals. Both are passionately committed to the power of theatre as a force for transformation.
Theatre is a form of knowledge: it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.
Augusto Boal
Having started work in the Arena Theatre of Sao Paulo, working with classical theatre, Augusto Boal became the founder of a whole movement of activist and participatory theatre, the Theatre of the Oppressed. Having formulated its central tenets in Latin America in the late Sixties and Seventies, Boal then spent many years of exile in Europe, before returning to Brazil in the early 1990s. His work has encompassed working with ‘actors and non-actors’, in and outside theatres.
If we do not/cannot express our inner selves, how do we know what we think or what we feel? How can we have any philosophy or viewpoint? For it is in the expressing of our thoughts and intuitions that we can recognize them and deal with them – and take action. But if we cannot express these ideas and thoughts, the result can only be silent anger.
Cicely Berry
Cicely Berry has been the voice director of the Royal Shakespeare Company since 1969 and is world-renowned in her work as a voice and text coach, having spent some years as an instructor at London's Central School of Speech and Drama. She has conducted workshops all over the globe. Her work has also extended to prisons, using Shakespeare as a vessel to find confidence in speaking and response to imagery. Over the past decade she has worked frequently with the Nos do Morro theatre company based in Vidigal, one of the toughest favelas (slums) in Rio de Janeiro.