I wanted to talk about one of the things I like to do today,
which is the Theater of the Oppressed.
The Theater of the Oppressed was created by a Brazilian in the 60’s or 70’s,
between the 60s and 70s.
I will not tell the whole story.
I say only that it is a form of intervention through the theater
and that the Augusto Boal created scenes from the stories of the people,
and through the theater he rehearsed ways of transforming these scenes.
The curious thing is that Augusto Boal, who had been in Brazil,
had to exile because of the Brazilian dictatorship,
and at one point he was exiled to Europe
and in Paris, began to make workshops
and to ask the people with whom he made these workshops
what were their oppressions, and who were their oppressors.
And he, who was accustomed to be told things like,
“My oppressors are the police who arrived in the middle of the night
and took my husband to a prison where he was tortured “…
Or peasants who said:
“Our oppressors are the farmers
who had our companions killed “…
He, who was accustomed to hearing these stories,
in Paris, in the workshops, he saw people who responded to such petty things as:
“I feel overwhelmed by fear of emptiness.”
Or, then, people who said,
“I think my oppressor is myself.”
That, apparently, did not seem to make any sense.
But he tells a funny story,
of a workshop in Paris,
of a woman who had the following problem:
she had seen a shop on the way to the subway
a red dress she had adored,
and then collected money for a few months to buy that dress.
At one point she managed to buy this dress,
and took him home, most blessed,
had the new red dress she adored,
and the night he decided to use it,
she put it on, stood in front of the mirror and looked …
began to hesitate, to be left with doubts …
But he gained courage, left the house, slammed the door …
She went home, took off her dress, put on another outfit, and left.
This happened once, twice, three times …
No one told her, “Do not put on that dress,”
but she, who had bought the dress and liked it,
she could not dare to use it.
The challenge of Boal was as follows:
he proposed to this lady to think
in the voices that, when she was alone in front of the mirror, they said to her:
“Do not wear that dress.”
Was it her father’s voice that said she could not go out on the street?
It was the voice, for example,
of a person like that police commander of Toronto,
who, reacting to cases of violations on campus, said:
“What women have to do to avoid violations
is to stop dressing like whores, “
making them guilty of the crimes committed against them?
It was her boyfriend’s voice.
that he did not want her to be “offered” to a party?
It was the television ad that made her feel fat.
when looking in the mirror in that dress?
Was what?
Was it the memory of that person who, one day, on the bus, harassed her?
It was this person inside her head.
in the form of an anticipated fear of what could objectively happen
when she went out in that dress?
Boal’s thesis is simple, in fact.
He calls these voices inside our head.
of “head cops.”
We internalize these voices
and in doing so internalize oppression.
But these voices were not born with us.
They live within us, but they live outside us,
and have an origin in society.
In fact, our body lives, is in the social world,
but the social world is also inside our body,
in the form of these policemen in the head, of schemes of perception,
of forms of thought, of categories through which we think the world,
anticipations of what will happen,
provisions.
And if we look at how the social order is reproduced,
we find basically two mechanisms.
One is coercion when someone from outside forces us to do anything.
The other is consent,
when US…
accept or decide to do something.
In the case of coercion,
it is easy to see who is giving us this order
and therefore it is easy to identify and eventually respond.
In the case of consent, we internalize this order to such an extent
that we think that we are our own oppressors
and sometimes we act as such.
We can affirm that, from the point of view of social control,
consent is far more effective than coercion.
And I do not know if we have already realized the power of this mechanism,
but the economic system has long realized that power.
I’ll give you just two examples.
The example or idea of self-employment
is presented to us as a kingdom of freedom:
nobody rules us, we are our own bosses,
just have an idea, make a deal,
we’ll probably win more, have more time, perfect.
But many of us know, at our own expense,
which is not always the case,
and that sometimes this promise of autonomy turns into a fallacy.
It often happens that a self-employed
ends up working a lot longer because there is no limit,
usually we are not very good bosses for ourselves,
ends up working in worse conditions because he has no money
and often paying more taxes
because he is, at the same time, a worker and master of himself.
But there are other examples,
and a very curious example is that of time.
And I’ll talk about the weather
because it is nothing more nothing less than the most precious good we have,
is the scarcest good we have,
for a very obvious reason: we are finite.
And that is why, to a large extent, it continues to be around time
that turn the great questions of our life.
For more than 100 years,
on a Thursday in 1890,
a multitude of thousands of workers
crossed the city of Lisbon,
moved only by an idea,
that was to have time.
And on that day,
when they arrived at the Cemetery of Pleasures, in front of the tomb of José Fontana,
several took the floor to claim a simple idea,
claimed at the same time in various parts of the world
on this first May 1, 1890,
and this idea was simple:
time.
It was the idea that on a 24-hour day,
we should have 8 hours of work,
8 hours rest and 8 hours to do the rest,
and the rest is our life,
is the coefficient of humanity, in short, is what makes them human:
laugh, rest, date,
watching a movie, listening to a lecture, chatting,
talk to someone, meet someone, have a drink, whatever … read …
And, a year later, in 1891,
for the first time, the monarchical government in Portugal at the time,
by law, for the first time,
the limit of eight hours of daily work.
However more than 100 years have passed,
there are many machines, there are robots that can do many of the tasks
which we apparently could not do,
much more wealth is produced,
but the question we can ask is:
it’s time?
Do we have more time to live?
And the paradox is that it seems that not.
There are many people in Portugal today who work more than eight hours
and above all, there is a very large percentage that is said to be exhausted by work.
And there are some pitfalls.
For example:
these our friends,
which, in addition to having bad batteries,
we were presented as allies of our freedom,
and which we accept as a truth,
but they did not tell us that they could also be electronic halters.
Today we can take the work to any place,
do it in any space or time,
and, in fact, in this context of a kind of digital obesity
in which we have to be always connected,
it seems that they require us or that we demand them
the duty to always be available, especially for work.
And the problem is that we have less time,
especially less time to live
and to do those other things that make us human.
The problem has assumed such serious proportions
that in some countries it has begun to find
that something had to be done about it,
and that it was not enough to tell people, “You have the right to disconnect.”
It was necessary to establish rules on the duty to disconnect
by organizations.
In Germany,
Volkswagen decided that between 7 pm and 7 am,
the company’s servers were disconnected
to ensure that no one would receive a message or a request
and that no one would try, or if he tried, he would not come,
send a message
And in France, earlier this year, a law
called the “Disconnection Law”,
which also started from this principle: it is not enough to say “turn off”
because, if the practice is no-one’s turn off,
I always wonder if my colleague will hang up or not,
I will feel guilty if I am not available,
or may even be subject to some pressure or threat
for not being a good worker if it is not always available,
and so they created a law.
And the question of law is curious.
One of the things that fascinated me most in the Theater of the Oppressed
was the Legislative Theater.
How does the Legislative Theater work?
We make a part that presents a problem,
but does not present its solution,
that is, it is basically a question in the form of theater.
We present this piece
and then we ask people who have seen this problem to intervene
and tell us what could be done in that situation to change it.
We ask not only that they tell us, but that they show us, acting,
that is, that they break the fourth wall that separates us here as well,
that come on the scene and show how it could be different.
And in 2008, with a group of friends,
we assembled a play about the students’ problems:
social action grants, pressure to make loans,
the difficulties associated with this.
We set up this piece and went to introduce it,
and people would step in and try different roles.
There was always someone who was going to ask a teacher for help,
someone who went to social action services to ask for the recalculation of the scholarship.
There was always someone who went to the student association
see if he could find a solution to solve his problem.
And the difficulty is that we always faced a barrier:
at best,
we could solve the problem of that specific character,
but we could never solve the problem that the play had,
which were very high tuition and lack of scholarships. Because?
Because our barrier was a law,
and so we were not dealing with an individual problem;
we were facing a political problem.
We started collecting suggestions on what could change in the law
to solve our problem.
I was in my senior year of college then.
And we started collecting suggestions, got hundreds of them,
and then we had a session with all the people
who had watched the pieces and chose the three suggestions
which people considered more important,
of changes in the law that could solve that problem.
And to bring these changes to parliament,
we decided to make a petition, and we discovered something curious.
I do not know if you know how many people need it
petition to have it reviewed in parliament.
A person.
If there is a petition with a signature,
a deputy must report on that matter in parliament.
And if there are more than 4 thousand signatures,
this petition is automatically scheduled in plenary
and parties must submit bills,
finally, with the possible solutions to that problem.
I’m not saying
that there are no things we can not do alone.
There are gestures,
individual, finally,
who sometimes have the power to challenge entire systems of oppression.
One of the best-known historical examples is probably Rosa Parks,
that black lady
who, in 1955, took the bus after a day of work …
in Alabama, United States.
She took the bus and, tired,
sat on a bench where it was forbidden for blacks to sit
because, by law, only whites could sit.
The story you know: she sat down,
when the bus filled, there were whites standing,
the driver stopped the bus and said she had to get out of there;
she and the other black people who were sitting.
Three left and she stayed, did not leave.
In fact, she remained seated and moved to the bench by the window,
probably because he liked it more.
The driver called the police, she was arrested,
and it is said that this gesture of disobedience of Rosa Parks
was what initiated the movement for racial equality in the United States.
But in fact,
Was it just this gesture?
In fact, this gesture shook the system because it became known,
and became known because on the day she did it and was arrested,
the movement to which it belonged printed 35,000 pamphlets
defending a boycott of buses.
And thousands of black people have joined this boycott,
which lasted 300 days,
and, after 300 days, the law changed.
Not only did she change her attitude,
but because she was part of local organizations
who were able to turn that gesture into a movement.
And that brings me back to the lady in the red dress.
When she is in front of the mirror,
in doubt whether to wear the dress or not,
her conflict is not just a conflict with herself;
is a conflict with the whole society,
who lives inside her head and away too;
with his father and what he told him, with television ads, with the songs,
with the education that the mother gave him, with what the boyfriend said,
with the lord of the subway that harassed her,
with the law that protects her or not if she is a victim of harassment,
with the complicity or not of people like us
who will be watching this scene
and that they will decide to ignore or do something.
And, therefore, a decision as hers as putting on the dress or not
is actually a decision that does not depend only on it,
but of the conditions we have created collectively, as a society,
so that it can, under conditions of equality and freedom,
make your choices.
And the point I want to reach, you probably already have noticed,
It’s that we can not change
nor ourselves alone.
Thinking for ourselves is an interesting challenge.
Incidentally, it is the guarantee that it is not the police in our head thinking for us,
but the beauty and necessity of politics
is that we can not even change ourselves.
And because of this, more interesting, more demanding or more transforming
than to think for ourselves
is to think along with others,
and it transforms.
Changing life is not a lonely pleasure.
Thank you.
(Applause)
”
Be First to Comment