Unit Four
20th Century

While many of the short forms of popular performance continue well into the 20th century-with the grotesco criollo, the revista, the carpa, and other forms of entertainment doubling as social critique, there was also a strong independent theatre movement that developed to counter the many commercial productions arriving from Europe and the U.S. In 1960s there was a 'boom' of theatrical production that exploded in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. The bulk of the materials included here will draw from this period during which playwrights and collective theatre groups used performance as a way of contesting centuries of oppression. Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed is only the most famous of these many efforts. When the military dictatorships started coming to power in the 1960s and 1970s, playwright began thinking of their work as a form of political intervention. Teatro abierto (Argentina, 1981), for example, remains the most important example of theatre as a form of social activism. 150 banned artists got together to stage a cycle of 21 short plays. The military burned down the theatre, and yet the cycle continued. Playwrights included in this volume (Gambaro, Pavlovsky, and Raznovich) participated in that event. After the dictatorships slowly fell from power, playwrights dealt with the many repercussion of living with the legacy of criminal politics, with and among torturers. Another group of playwrights and performers turned to humor as a way of confronting the many other repressive systems strengthen by the dictatorships-the sexism, homophobia, and racism of everyday life. Performance artists such a Denise Stoklos, Jesusa Rodríguez, Astrid Hadad and others challenge the brutality and corruption of their regimes by drawing on 'lighter' yet equally vital traditions such as revista, circo, and cabaret.