PTBoal's theatre inside organizations
Can competencies be developed without handing out a list of skills? The thesis takes the Theatre of the Oppressed, created by Augusto Boal, to 37 women managers at a public financial institution and shows that the technique only transforms when those who use it side with the people who suffer oppression. Explained in 12 screens.
Feeling is also a way of knowing
The thesis has four "acts", one per article. The first asks how science is done in organizations. The most common ways of doing research favour thinking and measuring. The author proposes another starting point, the philosopher Félix Guattari's Aesthetic Paradigm: the body comes first, and feeling weighs as much as thinking, knowing and acting. Pick a way of doing research:
Our illustration: the heights are not measurements. They show the idea, argued in the first article, that feeling has "equal stature" to thinking, knowing and acting. The limits of each paradigm summarize the thesis's section on "dominant paradigms".
Every organization has breaches
The author creates the concept of the organizational breach: a time and place where the rules give a little and sensory practices open the way to another way of working. But any breach can close again, when the practice is "captured" by the usual logic. Pick a scenario and switch:
- Micro-revolutions, small everyday changes, also count: eating in a shared space, outsourced staff and top management spending time together, calling everyone by their name. The test, according to the thesis, is whether what is valued and how people relate have changed.
Scenarios, potentials, risks and examples from Table 1 of the first article. The animation is illustrative.
In theatre, the audience can just watch or step into the scene
Companies use theatre to train leaders, sell better or innovate. A study by Meisiek (2004) separated three ways of doing this, inspired by Aristotle, by Moreno's psychodrama and by Boal. The thesis adds two questions: what kind of person each one helps shape, and what for. Pick one:
Meisiek's (2004) typology with the thesis's additions (Table 1 of the second article). Boal criticized the very idea of catharsis; the thesis keeps Meisiek's reading as a starting point. Our drawing.
Of 430 articles, 35 report actual uses of theatre
To see how theatre has been used, the author searched "theater" and "organization" in the Scopus and Web of Science databases. Much of what came up was about something else: managing theatre venues, "theatres of war", operating theatres. He did not count themes, as in an ordinary review: he made a cartography, a map of the tensions in the field, in four stages of attention. Tap a stage:
Figures from section 4 of the second article. Stages of the cartography following Kastrup: tracking, touch, landing and attentive recognition.
Technique does not guarantee the result
The thesis reads each case with four keys, scales from the adaptive pole (fitting people to the company) to the transformative one (changing relations). Note the two Boal cases on the adaptive side:
Keys and poles from Table 2 of the second article. The positions (three levels) are our reading of the text of section 5; the thesis plots none. Of the 17 articles selected, 16 are discussed; the three Finnish ones are read together.
Those who practise Theatre of the Oppressed choose a side
The Centre of the Theatre of the Oppressed (CTO), in Rio de Janeiro, was founded by Boal in 1986. Those who lead the workshops there are called Jokers (Curingas). The author took courses at CTO and interviewed its board. Four axes came out of the interviews, each named after a phrase from the interviewees. Pick an axis or tap a person:
Quotes from the third article, translated by us from spoken Portuguese. The interviewees authorized the use of their names (consent form). Four of them describe themselves as Black and from the urban periphery: it is CTO's first Black board.
To reach the managers, the door had to open
The author works at a public financial institution with more than 80,000 employees and was a superintendent before taking leave for the doctorate. In April 2025, he brought two Jokers from CTO to workshops of about eight hours, during working hours. But each workshop depended on who opened the door. Tap a door:
One cube per participant. Workshop 1: 15 who arrived on time and 1 back from holiday. The thesis does not say how many attended Workshop 2; the 9 come from 37 − 16 − 12 (our calculation), which matches the 8 at the start plus 1 on her way. Institution and people anonymized by the thesis.
They asked for sales competencies and heard sexist remarks
The author had committed to the institution to work on sales competencies, the theme of workshops 2 and 3. In one exercise, the managers acted out remarks they had heard at work. Before you look, what do you think came up?
The number on each remark is the workshop (1, careers theme; 2 and 3, sales theme). Remarks as transcribed in the thesis, translated by us. They are the ones the author recorded, not all that were said. The four topics and the count are our grouping.
On stage, the way out they rehearsed was collective
In Forum Theatre, the group stages a real oppression and anyone in the audience can interrupt the scene, take someone's place and try another ending. It is a "rehearsal for reality". Pick a scene from the workshops, read the situation and step in:
Scenes, what the group rehearsed and the final proposals come from the thesis. The three options are ours, for the game. The "Black woman!" scene really happened to one of the participants.
Competency stops being an individual attribute
The author followed four movements that ran through all three workshops. Together they lead to a new definition of competency. Tap a block (or a movement) to see what happened in each workshop:
The usual view
Each person's knowledge, skills and attitudes, acquired in training and assessed against targets.The thesis's proposal
"Situated, sensitive and collectively produced capacities to perceive, interpret and intervene" in the organization's reality.Movements and examples from section 6 of the fourth article; definition from section 7. The matrix organizes the text and does not measure intensity: all blocks are the same height.
Competencies also develop as a group
The thesis swaps the question "which competencies should be developed?" for another: what experiences make a group perceive, feel and act on its work? The workshops answered with proposals: a support network, a reporting channel run by women and an anti-racism policy (the last two went into the report to the institution).
For those who hire or facilitate
- Before starting, ask who is paying, whom the work serves, who will be in the audience and how much autonomy the facilitator will have.
- With the boss in the room, the Jokers say, dialogue is rarely horizontal.
For HR and corporate education
- Training each person to meet targets better is only one path. Another is making room for the group to name what makes people ill and rehearse ways out.
- The agreed theme (sales) may lead to problems the company did not foresee, such as harassment and racism.
For managers and teams
- What looks like an "isolated case" may be a pattern. Bringing colleagues together breaks "the loneliness of the position".
- Small daily changes, like having lunch together every week, count as micro-revolutions.
What this research does not say
- Whether the commitments lasted. 34 of the 37 participants were interviewed afterwards, but that was left for another study; the thesis does not follow what came after the workshops. · according to the author
- Privileged access. The workshops happened because the author, a former superintendent, knew who could authorize them. · according to the author
- One place, one group. A highly hierarchical public institution and only women managers; mixed groups or groups with bosses may react differently. · according to the author
- An insider's voice. The interviews heard only CTO's board, who share the same commitments; managers and outside facilitators are missing. · according to the author
- A map, not a measurement. The cartography follows movements; it does not measure gains in competency or compare with other training. · according to the author
Credits
VIEIRA, Rafael Augusto Kwiatkoski. Teatro de Boal como experiência ético-estético-política de aprendizagem transformadora e desenvolvimento de competências em organizações. Tese (Doutorado em Administração de Empresas) · Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, São Paulo, 2026. Advisor: Prof. Dr. Janette Brunstein.
Research approved by Mackenzie's Research Ethics Committee. According to the author, ChatGPT helped organize ideas, review the structure of the articles and correct the text. This version simplifies the work for the general public.