19/07/2025, 11:00 am – 3:00 pm,

Theatre of the Oppressed. On the practice of theatrical interventions after Augusto Boal. Workshop with Bernd Ruping

, Stadthausgalerie Münster

Following on from the lecture on Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed given by theatre scholar Bernd Ruping on 18.7.2025 as part of the solo exhibition Olho da Rua [Out Loud] by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, Ruping will give a workshop on 19.7.2025 on the practice of theatrical interventions after Augusto Boal. For the film of the same name at the centre of the exhibition, de Andrade portrayed a temporary community of homeless people living in the city centre of Recife. He invited them to take part in a series of exercises inspired by the Theatre of the Oppressed.

The Theatre of the Oppressed is a series of methods that combines art and self-awareness with political experimentation. It offers many opportunities to activate social and communicative resources that are often suppressed or neglected in everyday life through playful, aesthetic and theatrical encounters between people. Dialogue in interaction is a central component of this. It is not the director who determines the content of the scenes, but the participants.

In his workshop, Ruping thus opens up a meeting space that unites people, theatre pedagogical formats and self-images and enters into a dialogue with the Brazilian artist's film Olho da Rua [Out Loud] (2022). In the workshop, the participants can freely develop the communicative, interactive and situational-spontaneous qualities in their appearance and behavior. By independently developing and performing scenic experiments in the group, the workshop participants gain a practical insight into their personal repertoire of gestures, ways of speaking and forms of action.

Please register in advance at kunsthalle@stadt-muenster.de

Bernd Ruping is a professor em. of Theatre Pedagogy and Performing Communication at Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences. His teaching areas include Methodology and Didactics of Theatre Pedagogy, Socio-cultural Forms of Theatre Intervention (with a focus on Brecht and Boal) and Aesthetic Theory. His Research focuses are for example the Theatre as a Form of Intervention; Didactics of Brecht´s „Learning Play“; Theatrical Organization Research (TO) and Theatre between Amoral Intensity and Intense Morality. Ruping is one of the founding fathers of the Lingen Campus of the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences; he acted for 25 years as Dean of Studies at the Institute for Theatre Pedagogy. Ruping is a founding member of the Federal Association of Theatre Pedagogy and from the very beginning one of the editors of the series of specialist books Lingener Beiträge zur Theatrepädagogik (published by Schibri). He has numerous publications, Material und Methode - zur Theorie und Praxis des Brechtschen Lehrstücks (1984), Gebraucht das Theater - die Vorschläge Augusto Boals (1991), Theaterkunst und Kinderspiel (1992), Theater, Trotz und Therapie (1999), Brecht gebrauchen (2017, mit Milena Massalongo und Florian Vaßen), among others.