Introduction. Experiments in Situation

trasted with the permanent variety shows in big cities, this model explored non-urban social sectors and was characterized more by travelling and permanent touring than by stable theatrical seasons. That obligated the construction of a theatrical stage derived from the classical circus model, but with its own aesthetic, drawing on more opulent music hall precedents. In this case, the popular quality is measured using two entirely objective yardsticks: success in ticket sales, as a product; and content, i.e., variety theater or cabaret. Neither of those variables retains any similarity to the idea of popular meaning rooted in tradition, in ritual or classical form, but rather modern mass entertainment, with its immediacy and its fast electric messages intended for rapid consumption. In other words, it situates us firmly within the sphere of pop culture: The tent was spacious and comfortable, designed to stand up to gusts of wind and storms, quite common during hot Spanish summers. The hall would fill up with audiences composed primarily of country dwellers and industrial workers. And the performance had nothing to do with China. It was simply a variety-style musical entertainment, only slightly more polished than other tent shows that were travelling the country around the same time.33

The theater was a standard rectangular steel construction with lightweight trusses, entirely covered by waterproof canvas on the roof and on three of the façades. Attached to the front façade was a decorative apparatus in the form of a marquee, displaying blown-up photographs on canvases (Figure 90). The troupe travelled in a bus, whereas

Figure 88: Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theater, n/d. Courtesy of Juan José Montijano. Figure 89: Advertisement for Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theater, n/d. Courtesy of Juan José Montijano.

the owners and the stars took private vehicles, staying at inns or in rented rooms at each destination. The caravan was rounded out by the trailers where the dancers, secondary artists, and technical crew members lived during the tours. One decked-out trailer, entirely decorated using the same advertisements that covered the theater’s main façade was parked next to the building and was used as a ticket booth. The mobile architectural complex would travel the highways like a real-life kinetic decorated shed, taking one step further some of the ideas laid out around the same time by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Charles Izenour in their manifesto Learning from Las Vegas (Figures 91 and 92).

The tent that housed the theater was outfitted with an extravagant advertisement system of signs, bright colors and semiotic overdoses with persistently repetitive messages: “Variety revue. 50 artists and 20 lovely ladies! Manolita Chen (super vedette)”, “indoor heating”, “air conditioning” or “waterproof tents”.34 The messages give us an idea of the extent to which the theater’s visual language was tautologically derived from advertisement, selling comfort, fun and fantasy – all of which were most probably lacking in the audience’s daily lives. Moreover, advertisements were systematically distributed with newspapers on a daily basis during the theater’s stay in cities, constituting an aggressive sweeping message from which it was impossible to escape.35 As with other travelling theaters, the tent was never put up in central urban areas, but rather in sites on the outskirts, like municipal fairgrounds or other similar places in smaller cities, or even in openly marginal areas, like vacant lots that had been left barren around the peripheries of cities by the urban policies of speculative developmentalism.

The particular mix of extreme realism and extreme fantasy, enlisted alternatively by the location in a vacant lot or fairground and the spectacularity of the lit façade and the interior, is precisely what led to an appropriation of the setup by the avant-garde, interested in exploring formal codes that were both easy to understand and potentially subversive (Figure 93). The write-ups from the time coincide in highlighting this two-fold, realistic and histrionic condition so characteristic of critical, grotesque art forms – permeated, in this case, with an electrified pop aesthetic that connected directly with television, the press and other mass media. The writers Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Francisco Umbral described it with exceptional precision, while also introducing a critical barb in highlighting

Figure 90: Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theater, n/d. Courtesy of Juan José Montijano.

the similarities between this type of spectacle and the avant-garde, introducing a serious ambiguity:

This theater is truly “happening”, provocation, estrangement, theater of cruelty and ceremony. Valle (Inclán) took those things as inspiration for his esperpento. But Valle died and esperpento is still here, virginal, atrocious, in red ocher and Spanish black. Toward the midway point of the performance, since there’s no intermission and the end is still nowhere in sight, it’s worth buying some peanuts from the hawker with the tray, mainly to have something to chew on. You’ll leave this poor-man’s cabaret with a hot head from all the rugged flesh and with cold feet from standing in the dirt, in the pebbles of the suburbs, on the winter ground [...] Bread and circus. Peanuts and variety shows. And as you step outside, there is the cold and dirty face of a working-class neighborhood, the pallid border between the countryside and the suburbs, nightfall on the outskirts, pulsing with trains and dogs. The girls in the troupe, workers of the stage, change their outfits amid rags and early morning dew.36 On October 21, 1971, the newspaper Le Monde published a table comparing the characteristics of the advanced theater culture of the 1950s with that of the 1970s. Only one month later, it was published in Spain in the theater magazine Primer Acto and then again, three months later, in Serra d’Or, which gives us a precise idea of the rapidity and liveliness of the debate.37 The comparative table reflects the rupture brought about by the events of May ‘68 in France, which can be extended to Western culture as a whole, both in theater and in architecture. The table is divided into five categories: where, which discusses space and architecture; for whom, which refers to the audience; through whom, which alludes to cultural policies and management; why, referring directly to ideology; and how, which outlines parameters and specific tools used by the respective languages being compared (Figure 94).

The terms associated with each of the decades in the first category, which deals with the spaces themselves, are very significant in the light of everything we have seen until

Figure 91: Bus belonging to Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theater, n/d. Still from the documentary by RTVE Radio Televisión Española produced in 2012. Figure 92: Trailer belonging to Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theater, n/d. Still from the documentary by RTVE Radio Televisión Española produced in 2012.

now. Whereas in the 1950s, theatrical and architectural culture were summed up in “new venues/without traditional stages/actors facing the audience”, in the 1970s, the dominant characteristics were “the street, the workplace/no fixed structures/actors surrounded by the audience”. With the same shift, rather than a craftsman, specialist and legitimate heir, the artist became a volunteer or amateur in the service of the audience, an activist or an agitator. A universal cultural democracy was replaced by a revolution in a constant struggle and disarray. In short, there was a move from ritual to celebration, from rigor to exuberance, from applause to slogans, and from reflection to action.38 This fascinating comparative table employs 33 parameters which, as a whole and in pairs, describe the shift between different, yet interrelated, cultural forms. This debate introduced by Le Monde helps us to understand the cultural atmosphere that Javier Navarro was navigating as he promoted his Mobile Theater, and it can be very illuminating to delve further into the debate, which has been analyzed in detail by Oscar Cornago:

The new generations rejected the idea of an audience that was largely uniform socially and ideologically, as well as the didactic and paternalistic tone of a theater called “popular” which had failed to attract working-class audiences who did, on the other hand, frequent the cinema or musical variety shows. [...] New theater was looking for direct contact with the audience outside the scope of traditionally consecrated theater spaces, which had been proven ineffective. Streets, squares, garages and the most improbable spaces, emerged as ideal places for a theatrical communication that was freed from the context with which bourgeois theater had identified. The complete opposition to any culturalist attitude led to the development of different kinds of scenic languages with a markedly celebratory tone, inspired by

Figure 93: Manolita Chen’s Chinese Theater, n/d. Image courtesy of Juan José Montijano.

codes that were truly majoritary at the time, such as film, television, magazines, comics, or advertising, and backed up by references transplanted directly from the most immediate cultural systems: iconography, music or slogans, which appealed to the collective imagination of a society and provided an effective emotional communication. [...] Popular theater recovered a sense of spectacularity, playfulness and celebration that realist theater had never achieved.39

The avant-garde assimilation of popular theater culture in Spain was similar to what Brooks McNamara highlighted about the American and even international theater scene: poor and pop at the same time, austere and spectacular, grotesque and imaginative. While La Barraca only had a simple stage, at the same time they built sophisticated sets following a Cubist aesthetic, operating with limited material resources to generate large amounts of content and information, with an enormous semiotic efficiency. The goal was an effective and direct communication with the audience. Four decades later, in order to amplify and even intensify the effectiveness of that communication, there was, along with the reinterpretation of traditional popular culture, a complete assimilation of new formats like comic, television, variety theater, or circus, comparable to what had happened with the historical avant-gardes. As we can see from Javier Navarro’s text, full of contemporary references to that type of register, around the time he designed his Mobile Theater there was already a broad range of avant-garde languages that were immersed in a total reinterpretation of poor, popular and pop culture indiscriminately, blending together all the formats of those codes.40

Figure 94: Transcription of the article El teatre dels anys seixanta from Le Monde, published in the magazine Serra d’Or.

Photocollage for the presentation of the Mobile Theater, Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga 1971.

Fernando Quesada is Associate Professor of Architecture at Universidad de Alcalá, Madrid. He is also a member or Artea, an association for practice research in the performing arts. He has been a visiting scholar in the Netherlands (TU Delft 2009-2010), Mexico (UNAM-MUAC 2013), and Philadelphia (Penn Design 2019).

Mobile Theater Architectural Counterculture on Stage

Fernando Quesada

Published by: Actar Publishers, New York, Barcelona

Edited by: Fernando Quesada

Graphic Design: Actar

Printing and Binding: Arlequin

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ISBN: 978-1-945150-80-7 Publication date: 2021

This book traces the multifaceted relationship between a significant part of architectural culture and the alternative performing arts between 1963 and 1975 in several countries. The Mobile Theater —both a building and a metaphor— is the main argument for the detailed narration of these events through a case study designed at the School of Architecture of the Architectural Association of London by architect Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga in 1971. This book provides a rigorous historiography and a highly speculative theoretical account. The research unveils a significant number of designs, many previously unpublished, which build up a consistent body of work in a widely international spectrum. Far from considering architectural counterculture as a disparate arrangement of individual and group initiatives, this organized account of designs, projects, and theories prove that a carefully constructed exchange of cultural values existed. The book is divided into six chapters and follows the intra history of the archetype of the Mobile Theatre in different contexts. Each chapter examines a particular geographical-cultural debate, the links between individuals or groups, and the specific relation with architecture culture.