the authorship, because when we do, I don't say that what is down here is wrong or right.  I compare only what we do when we produce a play, the author and the owner of that play is the whole community who produced it.  We don't separate them.  We made the plays, we discuss what the theme of the play is going to be.  Everyone participates.  Everyone has access and everyone participates.  We try to make a play.  Everyone has the right to propose the text and scenes of the play and then when we produce with the actors everyone is entitled to get a role in that play.  Of course by consensus they say who should play what, but the authorship of the play for instance belongs to everyone and the ownership the same.  It can happen in a more rare case in which someone taking as a basis of work his plays that have been done they can write the play of their own.  So this is a practice in some countries like the United States and many authors sometimes use the actors to improvise scenes that they do not know how to handle very well, and then taking notes of their improvisations they wrote their play.  So the ownership and the authorship belongs to the author even though the hints and suggestions were given by the actors improvising, but in our case that's very rare - because we never publish our plays.  So the ownership no one cares very much about and the authorship everyone collaborated in it.

Tom     I  think the reason why we put it in was because when authors have come into that community to write a play for that community to script it from the group's improvisations.  The people that we work with were concerned that the authorship and the ownership should be theirs.  So that's why they split the terms authorship and ownership, to make sure that they remained with the community.

Boal       Because in your case you have an author that comes and is commissioned to do that.

Tom       Yes sometimes.

Boal    In our case it rarely happens, mainly because people collaborated.  Myself, I write parts of the text also based upon what they improvise.  There is not the pre-occupation as to whom it belongs because it's so ephemeral.  It lasts only the time you produce the play and it's not taken over for other presentations.  It's ephemeral.  It's not a durable thing.

Tom    Augusto, the result of much of your work is the collapse of hitherto seemingly secure boundaries like the difference between actor and spectator, image and reality, internal and external, public and private, citizen and legislator.  What other boundaries do you want to collapse in the near future and why?

Boal     (Laughing)  I think that all the barriers have been collapsing already and now what I think we should reinforce are some barriers instead of collapsing them.  Building new walls against racism which is one of the horrible things that exist in the world. A wall against intolerance which is not accepting and is a form of racism, not accepting the existence of the other one.  The wall against sexism which enslaves half of humanity - women.  A wall against globalisation which makes all of us become clones of ourselves to become robots, so now is the moment to build barriers, to build walls and to fight against intolerance, against racism, sexism and globalisation, to fight vigorously against that.  And to re-unite people.

Tom    Was  that a conscious move forward from actor/spectator, citizen/legislator, or did it evolve?  Was it a plan?

Boal    It was not a plan in the sense that it happened because of economical conditions.  It was the moment that they could no longer go on with the central Theatre

Interview with
Augusto Boal
by Tom Magill,

leading community theatre activist.

Tom     Here we are in the Europa.  It's about 11.30 am on Sunday 25 October and I'm talking to Augusto Boal about his work.

Augusto in your latest book Legislative Theatre you used a term community theatre.  Could you define this term and tell us how it's different from conventional theatre.

Boal     The word community, communitage in Portuguese, we use to define sometimes a region of the city, e.g., a slum. In this state there is a communitage within that slum.  Sometimes we can talk about also the communitage of psychiatric hospitals or we can talk about the communitage of a trade union for instance, so the word communitage/ community has not the same meaning as it has in English, and of course they don't have theatre inside those communities.  In slums there is no theatre only one slum which is an area called  Digegow in Rio has a community and curiously, Cicerly Berry, who is the great teacher or a voice of the  Royal Shakespeare Company when she went to Brazil twice she went to that community in the slums to teach the people how to pronounce better, how to free their voices and so community means that.  It means a group of people who can be located geographically or because they have the same interests and they don't have specialities so there is not a difference between that community theatre and the other forms because they don't have other forms.  And then we worked with those communities to make them produce theatre.

Tom       So basically it's defined in terms of its lack.  There is no theatre there in the community and so....

Boal     No no, this is different.  In the United States the community theatre means a theatre that is only for that region or whatever you know.  It's not our case. Our poor communities, or workers communities.  They don't have theatre at all and then what they make is not creative theatre but to help them to make theatre, wherever, in any place, but not in a special place. That is our task.

Tom    Community Arts Forum, CAF, has defined four principles of good practice when working in community arts - access, participation, authorship and ownership.  Would you like to comment upon CAF's efforts towards defining a model of good practice?

Boal     Well I think that if they came to that conclusion it's because that's what they really need.  When I read that I say okay the access is a minimum condition for any kind of popular work to be done, so you have to have access.  Everyone democratically should have access to Bachelor of Art and all that.  The second word, the participation, which I agree totally.  What I don't understand well is the two last terms, the ownership and