Introduction: An abstract is a brief yet comprehensive summary of a scholarly work, often serving as the primary point of contact between a reader and an academic text. In the context of theatre studies, and particularly political theatre, the abstract plays a crucial role in clarifying not only the thematic concerns of a study but also its theoretical orientation and methodological grounding. This extended abstract addresses the possibility of emancipatory awareness in theatre by shifting the analytical focus from ideological content and declared political intentions to the experiential and phenomenological conditions that constitute the theatrical situation itself. Political theatre has traditionally been evaluated according to its subject matter, critical discourse, or explicit opposition to dominant power structures. However, such approaches often overlook a more fundamental question: how does theatre, as a lived and embodied situation grounded in a structural separation between performers and spectators, shape the conditions of perception, participation, and action? This study argues that the position of the spectator should not be understood merely as a functional or institutional role but as a phenomenological situation in which modes of seeing, hearing, and responding are pre-organized. From this perspective, theatre reproduces relations of domination not primarily through content but through the very configuration of experience it establishes. Drawing on phenomenology-particularly the concepts of being-in-the-world, lived body, and the primacy of perception over representation-the article develops a framework for analyzing theatre as an embodied mode of experience. To articulate the political implications of this experiential framework, Jacques Rancière’s political aesthetics is employed as a complementary perspective. Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible” enables a social and political reading of perception without displacing the phenomenological grounding of the analysis. The central research question guiding this study is whether theatre, while maintaining its institutional and experiential structure, can genuinely provide the conditions for reciprocal presence, equality, and emancipatory action.
Methods: The study adopts a qualitative, descriptive-analytical methodology grounded in theoretical inquiry and critical interpretation. Rather than relying on empirical or field-based data, the research focuses on conceptual analysis of philosophical texts and canonical theatrical theories. Phenomenology, particularly in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, constitutes the primary theoretical framework for examining embodied experience, perception, and presence within the theatrical situation. This framework is complemented by Jacques Rancière’s political aesthetics, which provides a socio-political translation of perceptual organization and experiential hierarchy. The analytical procedure involves a close reading and critical interpretation of two paradigmatic models of justice-oriented theatre: Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. These cases were selected due to their central position in the history of political theatre and their explicit claims regarding audience activation, awareness, and emancipation. The analysis examines the relationship between theoretical claims, performative strategies, and the phenomenological configuration of experience produced by each model. By situating these theatrical practices within a shared phenomenological horizon, the study seeks to reveal the structural conditions that both enable and limit emancipatory possibilities in theatre.
Results: The analysis demonstrates that despite their divergent strategies and historical contexts, both Brecht’s and Boal’s theatrical models encounter a shared structural limitation at the level of experience. In Brecht’s epic theatre, techniques such as alienation and critical distance are designed to prevent emotional identification and promote rational judgment. However, these strategies ultimately function as mechanisms for organizing perception and guiding spectators’ cognitive responses. The spectator remains positioned as an observer whose engagement is confined to reflection and interpretation rather than embodied participation. Similarly, Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed seeks to dissolve the boundary between stage and audience by transforming the spectator into a “spect-actor.” While this model introduces direct participation and bodily involvement, the analysis shows that such participation occurs within predefined frameworks that regulate when, how, and to what extent intervention is permitted. As a result, participation becomes a guided and simulated form of engagement rather than an open-ended reconfiguration of experience. Across both models, the findings indicate that the theatrical situation remains governed by a pre-structured organization of perception that stabilizes roles and limits reciprocal interaction. Even in their most radical attempts to activate the audience, these practices reproduce a hierarchical distribution of positions that constrains the emergence of genuine equality and emancipatory action at the level of lived experience.
Discussion: The results of this study suggest that the fundamental contradiction of political theatre lies not in its ideological content or historical intentions but in the phenomenological configuration of the theatrical situation itself. Theatre, as an institutionally and experientially structured event, relies on the production of the spectator position and the regulation of perceptual engagement. From a phenomenological standpoint, meaningful action and emancipation require embodied presence, mutual responsiveness, and the capacity to transform a shared situation. These conditions are systematically limited by the structural separation and perceptual organization inherent in theatre. When read through Rancière’s political aesthetics, this limitation can be understood as theatre’s tendency to remain within an established “distribution of the sensible,” even when it seeks to challenge domination. Equality, rather than functioning as a presupposition of political action, is often deferred as an outcome to be achieved through pedagogical or participatory mechanisms. Consequently, political theatre frequently replaces the disruption of perceptual order with its controlled rearrangement. This conclusion does not entail a rejection of political theatre or its historical significance. Rather, it calls for a critical reassessment of the claims made on behalf of theatre as a site of emancipation. By relocating the question of politics from representation and intention to experience and perception, the study highlights the necessity of reconsidering how artistic practices organize bodily presence, interaction, and shared space. Only through such a shift can the limits and possibilities of emancipatory praxis in relation to theatre be meaningfully addressed.