p.151

Theatre & Culture

ENRIQUE BUENAVENTURA

At a 1967 symposium in Montreal, I, along with other colleagues, had to answer the question: "What kind of theatre should we do?" Throughout almost my entire professional life, I have been asked that same question and with each new stage of my life I responded differently. But when I heard it in that foreign country, where the only thing familiar to us Latin Americans were the Indian reservations, I suddenly felt I was on another planet, stunned. I don't remember what I answered. I said something vague and unrelated-"anti-culture"-and I realized I was again entering a new stage.

At this time I had just finished Documents from Hell, which was staged by Danilo Tenorio of TEC (Experimental Theatre of Cali), my own theatre in Colombia, and was the most serious attempt we at TEC had made to become involved in the life of our people. Previously we had worked to build a "cultural" theatre-with certain conflicts and occasional attempts at liberation. I have never cared much for the vague word used for everything, the word "culture." My hostile attitude was not one to boast about, it was something like a rebellion against one's father. Yet I was a "man of culture," living and working in it, defending it, and speaking in its name.
What does "culture" mean for a theatre worker in Latin America? Look at TEC, when it was an "official," established theatre. It was a modernist company, that is, a company that had ended the star system in its staging and ensemble work; generally, it reserved the star system for the director, who felt it was necessary to be up on plays currently produced in Europe and the U.S. These, together with a few classics, formed the repertory.

Little by little rny innocent distrust of "culture" became a conscious rejection of the dramas prepared and elaborated in Europe and the U.S. for us to sell here. In theatre, the product comes with instructions for unpacking and displaying. It is necessary to travel abroad-naturally!-to see plays and acting techniques, to keep up to date.

Our most serious problem is clientele. The need to consume those theatrical products-created for totally different people who are accustomed to them-is not felt

p.152

by our potential customers. It must be created. Movies and television have satisfied their basic need to "spend" the dead time between work and sleep, and all our theatre can do is try to lure audiences away from them. Our urban theatregoers are those who, having more time between work and sleep, become interested in "culture." They know something about European, American, and new Latin American authors; this select nucleus of initiates little by little wins over a few sensitive professionals and the bourgeoisie who have "traveled."

In the large Latin American capitals this process sometimes creates a solid theatrical institution with producers, backers, connections, authors' rights, actors' unions, etc. Of course it is subject-and increasingly so-to violent, cyclical attacks of barbaric Latin-Americanism, military landslides which do away with all art out of simple self-defense. The situation is the opposite of what many people think: the current battle of the CIA is to stabilize, to institutionalize the Latin American "intelligence" forces. Sometimes the CIA finds itself caught between two opposing forces: those of order, which in many countries consider art a kind of disorder, and those of disorder, the students, who fight to turn the cultural resources we get from Europe and the U.S. into something digestible by "corrupting" the product with an infusion of politics. Many Latin Americans who belong to the international republic of arts and letters resolve this contradiction by making a radical separation between art and politics. As artists, their fundamental concern is art; their only objective is good art. As men they are politicians and commit themselves to all kinds of declarations. The best way to do this is to live in Europe and support Cuba. I am not making any accusations-I consider that position deeply honest.

I traveled for five years throughout my continent, to ports, cities, and villages, my contacts with culture only occasional. Except in Recife, Pernambuco, and in Buenos Aires, where I was with theatre people, I didn't have enough money to go to plays or movies. Once, in Recife, I went by the Santa Isabel theatre and I saw that an Italian opera was playing (with Brazilian singers). I continued walking and a few blocks away I came upon a "Bumba meu boi," a kind of popular dance/ opera/pantomime. How can they call either one "culture"? I told some Brazilian friends that instead of the opera they should be a "Bumba meu boi" at the Santa Isabel. Today, with even folklore sucked into "culture," I wouldn't make the same suggestion. In Bahia and in Haiti there was once a culture which united marketplace and ritual, the sea with the port, the city with the peasant who comes to sell his products. It had nothing to do with folklore, that is, with those remains of an exotic life shown to the tourist, but dealt with organic relationships. But the system has penetrated even the farthest corners of these places, corrupting them. Political bosses like Duvalier use these forms for electioneering, giving them local and racial "color," perverting them: such is the tragic case of Haiti.

We artists are not going to decolonize culture by ourselves. We alone are not going to achieve a fusion of the European and North American elements which-although the folklorists and indigenists protest-are imbedded in us. We are not able to join those elements with the timid-because colonized-culture of the majority. The abyss between the two, like the abyss between productivity and misery, can begin

p.153

to be closed only by revolutionary violence, and only new forms of society born out of revolution can heal the split permanently.

A director-actor-playwright, a "comedian" as one says too aptly in Spanish, does his job with his whole organism, and transmits experience through a form that is direct, alive-and ephemeral. He cannot pack up his way of life and memories and go off to set them down in a tranquil place without soldiers, without guerrillas, without starving proletarian masses, without students. I confess that I regret very much that I am unable to escape, that every day I have to make an almost mystical effort not to run away. My commitment, fortunately, is not just a personal attitude nor has it been an individual decision. It encompasses the story of TEC.

We have been an official theatre, pampered by the government and the press, invited to the Theatre of Nations. We have sold the cultural product like more or less honest merchants. Yet without really knowing how, without anyone suggesting it to us, the need to develop our own work with our own raw materials and to show it here led us to confront the system structurally. The challenge inherent in the kind of independence that is not proclamation, not manifesto, not folklore nor nationalism, willy-nilly ends up questioning the system. This challenge cannot be absorbed, it is not culture, it uses art for subversive ends. The system doesn't accept it. The trouble is that we don't accept it totally either. To believe that we are outside the system when we only have serious differences with it is self-deception. To shake loose entirely from established institutions requires a solidarity and experience that we do not have. Many Latin American theatre people find themselves in a similar trap. In our country, however, especially in university groups, there are ways out of the dilemma. The most common has been to do "political" theatre, to use the theatre as a form of political agitation. That way you can kick and scream, you can scratch the skin of the system-but you continue to be its prisoner, you remain in its power.
To let yourself be forced to either the pole of commercialism or that of agitprop only leads to eliminating any possibility of true artistic subversion, of undermining, the system in its essentials: the consciences and conduct of its victims..

The only possibility is to become the owners of our own means of production, to develop our product and communicate among ourselves directly, even to exchange the product directly-in large zones of our community-for other things that we do not produce. Such exchange at the margin of the system is extremely difficult, not only because the system attacks us from the outside, but because its mechanisms within us, the mechanisms of moral and psychological "order," paralyze us constantly.
TEC is being thrown out of the system. What we are trying to learn is where we are landing and what we can do there. Can we continue doing theatre? And so I have returned to the question that was asked me in Montreal. There are other groups-the Living Theatre and the Bread & Puppet Theatre among them-who share our situation. What differentiates us from them is the society in which we work, the audiences to whom we direct ourselves I think that the insistence on "giving" and "giving of oneself," on giving love, on reaching the audience, on hurt-

p.154
ing them, shaking them up, even frightening them, is imposed on those groups by an audience from big cities, obliged to consume everything. The fear of being consumed, being directed, obliges these groups in turn to produce something so irritating-or so pure-that it cannot easily and harmlessly be digested by the consumer.

Our people in Colombia do not consume. They are consumed and they are avid, in great need of something to consume. Of course, with things presented in such a simplistic way, our work seems cut out for us. Those who don't consume are apathetic because immediate and primary needs do not give them rest;, they barely have time for anything else. Besides, they are on the margins of society. They are used by the system, but the system keeps them separated. They are a "reserve army"; they are the only ones who need to destroy the system to survive. Many of them don't even have the timid and secret "folk" culture I spoke of before, which still flows-like underground rivers-beneath certain isolated rural zones. The language of these outcasts needs deciphering, and we must learn it in order to establish communication. For a long time TEC has been involved in the language of books and magazines, in the language of "culture," in the problems of theatre as an institution. And it isn't easy-unless we cease to be theatre people, unless we stop doing our work in theatre as well as we can so that it will be more effective-for us to succeed in this new form of communication. Yet each day the system obliges us more to be what we have to be. We can only thank it for pushing us by its total opposition to men, opposition to life.

Now, we could have deduced from all this that we had to dedicate ourselves to what is usually called "popular theatre" or "theatre of the masses," a theatre for a fixed audience and about a specific.set of problems. Yet this is just another trick of the system, as elementary as nationalism, folklore, or agitprop. Because the system has cast out the exploited, should you create a product for them that is no more nutritious than the food surpluses it leaves them? Some maintain that the exploited don't want anything else, that they don't have the capacity to participate in the full and complex diversion of a real theatrical production. These people have degraded the notion of "popular art" and have put it on the farcical level of our democratic vote. To accept that we must do low quality theatre at the outset in order to be able to "elevate" the level of the people, is to enter wholly into the system. It is to say that the people are not yet mature enough for freedom and that the system, through its artists and technicians, will have to prepare them little by little for it.

Then there are the demagogues who inaintain that all true art is popular, that art has always come from the people and that it is necessary to dispense with "decadent forms" and use "popular forms." But "decadent forms" are nothing more than attempts at self-expression made by the outcast artist, the artist isolated by the system but condemned to sell his work in the market of the system itself. His only resort is to use a personal code, to perfect and refine his technique, or, as a lone witness, to make a pop-inventory of the reasons for fighting against dehumanization. In Latin American countries the avalanche of imperialism, the great colonial adventure,

p.155

has caused and continues to cause cultural genocide. Destroying the indigenous cultures (which, in the original great American empires, were not "popular," but as refined and aristocratic as were those of China and India), it created a mestizo people that had barely begun to crystallize its way of life, when it was destroyed by the second and third imperialist avalanches-by capitalism and the United States, which with the help of the gentle poets of the agrarian idyll (generally landowners, in reality or nostalgia) killed mestizo art and converted folklore into archeology.

(What we need for the revolution is to be able to use freely the colonizers' conquests in science and art in developing our peoples' buried tradition, their experiences as outcasts and workers-exactly as Vietnam uses modern arms, engineers, doctors, heavy industry, planes to defend its right to live in accord with its cultural tradition.)

There is an even worse demagogy: to make the exploited believe that through their marginal position they automatically acquire an aware proletarian mentality. Such populism is fascist at root.

TEC doesn't do theatre for the masses. We do not consider theatre an adequate means of information nor do we want to propagandize anyone. We direct ourselves to the men and women whom exploitation wants to reduce to an amorphous mass, to the lowest common denominator. We believe that theatre's objective is not to jell the masses around a few minimal aims, but to present maximal aims, of great complexity, so that the condition and conscience of class is a transitory means of accomplishing those aims. We are looking for communication basically in the relationship between play and audience. That is why our work and style are not directed solely to workers or peasants, but also to the bourgeoisie and students: colonial deformation concerns us all in different ways. By making different classes aware of their role, we can divide the public, confront it with a demystified, un-routinized reality. But we need to go still further. The colonized man must be divided within himself, to show him how, at the level of habit, conditioning, morality, he continues to carry within him the exploiter against whom he is fighting. And the exploiter must be shown that all charitable ways of soothing his conscience or of calming the wrath of the exploited will not last long, because they are resting on a radically false foundation.

In this period of "impersonal," mechanized power, of neo-capitalism "without proprietors," theatres should create plays not about machines but about dehumanized beings with concrete privileges and interests, with ridiculous little stories-and also about the hands which operate that gigantic backdrop, the mass media. That is why communication in the theatre is for us not a problem only of emoting, of creativeness, of empathy. It is not a problem of "objective research," not a demonstration of ideology. It is an action which is taken apart, piece by piece, impinging on all our means of perception, touching the experiences of the actor and the spectator, and finally, is put back together for us to criticize.

My play Documents from Hell, several episodes about violence, showed some decomposing social classes, made up of vague, amorphous people. A play about vio-

p.156

lence should have involved us with all the documentation existing on that problem in Colombia. But the production was based fundamentally on stage images, on improvisation. It is a mistake to think that within us are all characters, and it is a mistake to think that the images improvisation creates on the stage reveal by and of themselves the weakness or the intensity of the play's contradictions. The images of improvisation, if we are able to let them happen through objective, concrete stimuli in the actions we are representing, can dig out the gestural and spatial styles implicit in the text and can define behavior, but they can also turn into a chain reaction of magical associations, that is, of associations whose causality resides in other associations and not in the things happening on stage. A minute establishment of fact from the most exhaustive documentation is the only thing that can guarantee us true creative freedom. It is necessary to understand that creating is not inventing. We and the audience are re-creating a model reality, and only through that reality, in active proof of it, are we revealing ourselves to ourselves and to the public, just as we reveal the public to ourselves and itself.

Our task in the theatre is to begin to synthesize the two Colombian cultures. And we must begin now, because in this period of acute and increasing contradictions we can weigh the life of imported art against the resistance from our buried cultural elements, we can see and show their traumatic cross-assimilation. If we do not work now to discover a truly artistic and truly revolutionary style, the problem of art in a future, different society will be reduced to vulgarizing the synthesis at the level of shallow "popular art."

In TEC's work we have prepared for a profound attack on our basic situation. We have dispensed almost entirely with scenery, lighting effects, and other purely technical resources, for two reasons. First, we live in an underdeveloped environment and are, in the true meaning of the word, a poor theatre. Second, we think that the theatre should be one means of avoiding enslavement by the mechanical and to mass media. That doesn't mean doing away with the media, but setting down a clear boundary line between the direct oral and gestural communication of man to man, and propaganda. The forms of direct communication, man to man, exist among our people and they must be studied and used.

Translated by JOANNE POTTLITZER