A Response to Milling and Ley (2001) on Boal vs Aristotle: Or When is Tragedy Coercive Theatre?
Augusto Boal was a cultural activist and a revolutionary. Aristotle was a 4th century BCE philosopher and arguably conservative, setting public life above private life. He considered anything that concerned the polis , the city, politics, in the sense that it mattered for order and his conception of the natural hierarchies between men, men and women, and men and slaves. Men who were citizens were naturally meant to be the rulers over men who were not, over women and over slaves. He explains all of this in some detail in his treatise Politics . This difference between Boal and Aristotle is relevant to their theories about the theatre and its function. A baseline for looking at the politics of art in relation to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy is his conception in Poetics that the artist “must of necessity imitate one of three objects, - things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be” (1997: 53). These p...