This system of 12 techniques represents the first attempt that was made to create the Theatre of the Oppressed, by giving the audience the means of production rather than the finished artistic product. They are devised to help anyone to make a theatrical scene using a piece of news from a newspaper, or from any other written material, like reports of a political meeting, texts from the Bible, from the Constitution of a country, the Declaration of Human Rights, etc.
Augusto Boal describes Newspaper as “a play about how to create a play” that he with his theatre group created adn suggests simple ways of transforming non-dramatic like Newspaper articles into a performance and critical reading of social reality. Newspaper Theatre is the first technique of Theatre of the Oppressed created during the Brazilian dictatorship times. and inspired so hundreds of popular group to create theatre events which provided a critical reading of the news published by the regime. This has created such distress to the regime that it led for the arrest, torture and eventually the exile of Augusto Boal.