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Setting the Stage for Revolution: The Efficacy of Czech Theatre, 1975–1989
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2004
Extract
To affect audiences, to inspire them to consider something new or to consider something old in a new way, to move them emotionally or, as Lee Breuer says, “from one place to another,” is a common, if not inherent goal of those who make theatre.Frederic Ohringer, A Portrait of the Theatre (Toronto: Merritt, 1979), 58. More deeply, some want the movement they affect to endure, to transform something in people. Belief in the possibility of such movement implies another, having political implications, for if an individual can be moved, then a mass of individuals can be shifted; and if a mass of individuals choose to act on such a shift, or if their acts are inflected by such a shift, then events are altered and history made. Here lies the catechism of someone with the faith of an Augusto Boal that “perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for revolution.”Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odelia Leal McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985), 122. And yet, in the United States and much of the West, how often are such professions of faith viewed as mere idealism or transformed, even by the converted, into faith’s safe sister, hope—which is to say, a lack of faith?
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- © 2003 The American Society for Theatre Research, Inc.