18/07/2025, 6:00 pm,

Theatre of the Oppressed. On the theory of a liberating theatre according to Augusto Boal. Lecture and discourse by and with Bernd Ruping

, Stadthausgalerie Münster

At the centre of the exhibition Olho da Rua [Out Loud] is the film of the same name by Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade. For this film, 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, which was developed in the 1970s by the Brazilian theorist and activist Augusto Boal. The Theatre of the Oppressed focuses on the political potential of the participants and on reshaping and changing their lives through active observation, collective brainstorming and unwritten expression.

Following on from de Andrade's artistic work, theatre scholar Bernd Ruping will give a deeper insight into the aesthetic-performative format of the work in a lecture followed by a discourse as part of the exhibition Olho da Rua [Out Loud]. As Professor of Performing Communication and Theatre Pedagogy at the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences in Lingen, Ruping has been an expert on the theater of the oppressed for over 30 years. In his practice, he is also concerned with establishing a form of teaching and learning that does not spectacularize the complexity of reality, but develops forms of design from encounters with local people, regardless of age or background.

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.