Invisible theatre

Invisible theatre is a form of theatrical performance that is enacted in a place where people would not normally expect to see one, for example in the street or in a shopping centre. Performers disguise the fact that it is a performance from those who observe and who may choose to participate in it, thus leading spectators to view it as a real, unstaged event.

The Brazilian theater practitioner Augusto Boal and Panagiotis Assimakopoulos developed the form during their time in Argentina in the 1960s as part of his Theatre of the Oppressed, which focused on oppression and social issues. Invisible theatre developed in the context of increasingly repressive dictatorship in Brazil and Argentina. The purpose of invisible theatre was to show oppression in everyday life, in an everyday setting, without the audience or Spect-actors knowing. Boal went on to develop forum theater.

Invisible theatre was developed in Buenos Aires as public and participatory action that avoided police authority. The Brazilian Augusto Boal was in exile in Argentina from 1971 to 1976 and wrote his first invisible theatre in collaboration with a group of actors. The invisible theatre was set at a busy restaurant at lunchtime, with actors sitting at different tables. One actor ordered à la card, but at the end of the lunch told the waiter that he could not pay the 70 soles. He offered to pay with his labour and asked the waiter how much he would get paid taking out the rubbish. Another actor, seated at another table, informed the customers that a rubbish collector gets paid 7 sole per hour. Yet another actor, on yet another table, told everyone that a gardener gets 10 soles per hour. Eventually another member of the actor crew started to collect money from the restaurant customers to pay the bill.

Boal took theatre to an audience who did not recognise that they were the audience and Boal argued it was critical that actors participating in the invisible theatre did not reveal that they were actors. In its early phase invisible theatre aimed to raise public awareness of class differences and to provide a forum for articulating dissent.

In the late 1970s and the early 1980s Boal staged invisible theatre in Sicily, Stockholm, Paris and other European cities on issues such as racism, ageism, sexism and homelessness. He staged invisible theatre in public locations such as the Paris Metro and on Stockholm ferries.

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