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Teatro de Rua:
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen… Our show’s starting right now!” loudly announced the M.C. under the spotlights of an improvised stage. “Whatareyouguysdoingouthere? C’mon, spread your legs apart. Y’hear? Right now! You’re all being searched and shut up,” grunted one of the green-complexioned soldiers, holding and pointing his machine-gun at a group of people under a street lamppost. I heard those two lines a few times while growing up in my hometown of São Paulo in the 70’s. The first line especially was from the play my theater group used to present in the subúrbios (working-class neighborhoods). We customarily went to slums, unions (metal workers, teachers, hospital staff), grassroots associations, government-owned shelters for abandoned street children, churches and schools in order to present our play so that we would aim at the culture created for and by the povo (masses). I heard the second line several times in the 70’s as well. Under a dictatorship, police officers and army soldiers used to shout that question at any group of people who happened to gather in the streets at night. At that time, there was a curfew in effect all over the country, although, many people today would say that there never was. In my case, one of those fearful police trucks screeched to a halt in front of our high school on two different occasions when a group of my classmates and I got together to chat and gossip, or to have an eventual cigarette. The Brazilian popular theater movement starts in the beginning of the 1960’s when, motivated by a possibility of land and educational reforms throughout the country, a group of intellectuals, playwrights, actors and students found the Centro Popular de Cultura da União Nacional dos Estudantes (Popular Center of Culture of the National Union of Students) in Rio. The key phrase to understanding such a movement is the appearance of “street manifestation” in Brazil. After months of excitement and revelry and more precisely during President Juscelino Kitbitschek’s term when the construction of Brazil’s new capital Brasília was completed in the late 50’s, Brazilians thought life would improve. His successor Jânio Quadros resigned – a little less than seven months in office – in 1961. Next came João Goulart who was President of Brazil for only three years. In his book The Brazilians, writer Joseph A. Page discusses that short period of time, “The Left on its part was hardly of one mind about the tactics it should follow. On one extreme were those who advocated violent upheaval. A more moderate radical sector sought to mobilize workers and peasants by organizing them into state federations and national confederations, to bring about a far-reaching land reform, nationalize certain foreign-owned enterprises, and to change the Constitution to allow illiterates to vote.”2 Although Page classifies Jango’s three years of governing Brazil to be “years of tumult,” it is clear that that time was exactly when CPC tried to do its work among the masses. “ The CPC acted in all areas of artistic expression, but mainly in theater, music and cinema. The theater area worked with plays that were short and needed a minimum of production, so that it was possible to perform in schools, streets, squares, distant neighborhood and favelas. The sparse production also allowed a quick escape when the police arrived. […] The CPC joined the União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE) and were quite active in the period before 1964 spreading throughout schools and universities.”3
Accused of being a leftist (mainly for orchestrating a nationwide land reform, which, by the way, hasn’t happened in Brazil to date) João Goulart went into exile after “he gave a highly charged speech announcing a series of decrees that would nationalize all private oil refineries and expropriate vast amounts of underutilized land”5 on March 13, 1964. No sooner had Goulart left the country, than the military stepped in on March 31s, and were in power for 21 years. General after general took turns in office from then on. In the 70’s, Emílio Médici was in power. Most disappearances of individuals took place in Brazil during his “presidency.” Because everyone’s attention was almost completely focused on the Soccer World Cup, held in Mexico in 1970, arrests and killings were almost strategically unnoticed. Fortunately, some journalists and artists – aware of what was going on in the big cities as well as in the backlands of Brazil where some guerilla activity existed – would not let the military in power get away with their actions that easily. In the meantime, censorship was at its pinnacle. Musicians, poets, intellectuals, actors, actresses and directors started to go into exile. Some of them went abroad voluntarily, but a few of them were summarily expelled. Those who stayed in the country had to make use of metaphors and aphorisms in their art in order to – as we say in Brazil – “dribble the government censors’ wits.” Some claim that – although it was a period of repression – all art forms in Brazil were then proficuous, elaborately crafted because of the lack of free speech. Art should only be the expression of freedom. It was at a high school where I fortunately found a space to experience freedom, or what we thought was freedom. We were at least certain that what we had were “our treasured exercises of freedom” inside four walls. It all really started one afternoon in 1974 when I came to see the very beginning of a theater group at a high school near my house. This school was not the same one I was attending at that time; however, at the end of their first meeting, I was gladly accepted in the group as if I belonged to that school as well. At that first meeting, it was clear that the need for a theater group was due to a very unique reason: during recess, only American music was heard on the loudspeakers on the school’s big patio. With the support of the school principal, Ms. Adib Abujamra, a French teacher, Ms. Beatriz Tragtenberg, then decided to start a theater group. According to Ms. Tragtenberg, Brazil had much more to offer her students than what was being heard on the loudspeakers or, better yet, what was being taught at school. In January 2000, during an interview Ms. Tragtenberg gave to me, she reminisced: Ms. Tragtenberg’s words emulate images that could very well be compared to the ones we had in the streets in the 60’s in Brazil, when people took to the streets. Now, students were taking the school space as a whole. Besides that, the motivation behind the need for a theater group was that the real culture from the povo had always been (and still remains today) totally removed from the school curricula. Of course, some pop culture – the one the establishment okays once in a while – is offered to students through the media, but the origins of this same pop culture are usually never revealed or studied. What our theater group tried to do was to show that a genuine popular poet, for example, who performs in the street reading his verses is totally marginalized by the so-called established media. We at times do not even suspect that the same plumber who has come to repair something in our houses could be an extraordinarily popular artist himself. Yan Michalski, well-known Brazilian theater reviewer, has already pointed out that “in Brazil, there is a ‘divorce’ between the dramatic art and the education process.” That fact has been true throughout Brazil’s history. And how frightening that ‘divorce’ was during those years of dictatorship and repression! Well, the two parties (theater/education) of this ‘divorce’ had nothing in common, not a single form of communication. Sadly, theater in Brazil – as Brazilian writer Ana Mae T. Barbosa has written about art education – has also been considered a “sheer decoration, and what’s worse, sheer snobbishness or effeminization which leads one to a bohemian lifestyle.” While directing the theater group, Mrs. Tragtenberg made use of French pedagogue Celestin Freinet’s ideas and principles. In brief words, Freinet’s pedagogy professes that education is a learning process through the method of experimental trials, learning being essentially active; therefore, it comes from the essential needs of the student and it depends on the necessities of the same society he belongs to, allowing him to face his or her own destiny as a human being. An individual only goes through a new learning acquisition when his previous experience marked him so deeply that that acquisition has become a technique of life, that is, a solid springboard for new acquisitions. With that in mind, Ms. Tragtenberg and a few students started to produce ‘mini-plays’ based on literatura de cordel chapbooks. Literatura de cordel – literature on a string – is a series of chapbooks in which a poeta popular tells people what today’s news is at an open market during any given day in the Northeastern part of Brazil. In the past, these poetas were considered for a long time the ‘anchormen’ of that region. Today, television has been available in almost every Brazilian home; consequently, the poeta’s role as a popular anchormen has changed and is now considered antiquated. A small group of students then started to present these ‘mini-plays’ (called ‘lightning plays’ due to their brevity) during recess. Little by little, the American music on the loudspeakers remained silent while our group literally took the floor on the school patio. That fact was proof that the first battle was won. From then on, the group – eventually called Teatro-Circo Alegria dos Pobres (Theater-Circus Happiness of the Poor) immersed itself in reading everything about literatura de cordel, plus popular plays written by authors from Brazil’s Northeastern region. Those plays usually revolved around the problems of the peasants and the retirantes (peasants who were (are) forced to flee their land due to the never-ending drought in the region). Soon Teatro-Circo consisted of twenty-seven members, rehearsing and writing plays and music plus studying Brazilian culture. Everyone had his own chores and duties. And everything was shared in a democratic way. Out there in the streets, the repression was quite strongly. Our objective was then to reinforce those learning acquisitions. For that objective, Teatro-Circo accomplished a kind of theater that students from middle school, high school and college could see and experience as well. At that time, it was quite costly for anyone to afford a theater ticket. In her book Teatro da Militância, author Silvana Garcia transcribes what Ms. Tragtenberg said during an interview in 1986, “The majority of the members of the group did not know theater initially (…) for that reason, one of the Group’s objectives is exactly to bring its spectacles for those who do not have the chance to know theater and to promote it as well.” From 1975 to 1983, Teatro-Circo presented its own plays in several places around the state of São Paulo. Plays were presented to the bourgeoisie as well, but it was among the povo that Teatro-Circo’s work seemed to be fully comprehended. Brazilian playwright Ariano Suassuna’s plays O Auto da Compadecida (The Act of Our Lady) and A Pena e a Lei (The Punishment and the Law) were also presented at FEBEM (State Federation for the Well-Being of the Minor, the institutions where abandoned street children live) and several schools in the outskirts of São Paulo. Based on a process of collective work, Teatro-Circo wrote and put on a play based on Brazilian popular songs entitled Tocar o Impossível Chão (Touching the Impossible Ground). Its theme dealt with the retirantes and their problems in the big city, and it also tried to convey the importance of listening to Brazilian and not American music. By 1978, Teatro-Circo had already left the school and become an “independent” theater group. Leaving the high school where it was first originated meant Teatro-Circo’s moment of emancipation. Installed in its own headquarters (a small rented house), the new play Teatro-Circo:A Festa do Pastoril conta Cordel e Mamulengo (Teatro-Circo: The Pastoril Feast tells Cordel and Puppetry) was also a collective work based on Brazilian folklore, cordel chap books, puppetry, folk dance and music. It was presented in squares, subway stations, schools and unions from 1978 to 1982. Soon, a new play was mounted, O Último Xaxado em Macaxeira (The Last Xaxado – a Brazilian rhythm – in Macaxeira – either cassava plant or a fictional name of a city). Its title was an intended pun on the famous film The Last Tango in Paris. Brazil has also had its own tradition of resistance, which has somewhat been part of its history for the past 501 years. However, such resistance was most lived and felt from the 60’s through mid-80’s. Two decades showed how Brazilians were also capable of resisting and displaying their own anger in spite of all atrocities that took place at that time. Popular theater worked as an empowering space for voicing people’s dissatisfaction, anger, fear and hope. The Brazilian reality may appear to be quite different from the reality of other Latin American countries due to their own idiosyncrasies. But they, without a shadow of doubt, converge on the same point, on the same struggle, that never-ending struggle for freedom. |
In O Teatro Brasileiro Moderno, the late Brazilian theater theorist and critic Décio de Almeida Prado, writes about those “tumultuous times”, “The alliance between theater and the masses was what everybody intended to solidify based on various forms and reasons – at times because of poetic basis, at times because of political basis, at times for the welfare of the theater, at times for the welfare of the masses. Some expected to find through popular culture, the meta-literature of the Cordel chapbooks or the meta-theater of the autos and puppetry, the key to a truthful national dramaturgy, which reflected Brazil through its most authentic and primitive cultural manifestations. Others saw the stage as the most precious vehicle for those who wished to teach the ‘working masses’ the notions they needed to not only defend themselves but also counter-attack in the right moment.”4© 2006 All Rights Reserved. Mar Creation, Inc.