Scaffolds for the City

Scaffolds for the City

Street Theater in the Post-Modern Cities of the Americas and the case of Santiago de Chile, 1980 – 1985.

daphne agosin orellana

SCAFFOLDS FOR THE CITY Street Theater in the Post-Modern Cities of the Americas and the case of Santiago de Chile, 1980 – 1985.

Daphne Agosin O. A Thesis submitted to the faculty of the School of Architecture in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of: Master of Environmental Design April, 2017

Karla Britton, Principal Advisor

Joseph Roach, Second Reader

Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Chair

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the people that have supported my efforts to fulfill this thesis, and those who have provoked ideas and observations to better shape it through seminar work and valuable feedback. To Karla Britton, my advisor, for her patient reading of my writing, and for her enthusiasm and support. To Gonzalo Carrasco Purull and Alessandra Dal Mos, whose great scholarly work and friendship both encouraged me to embark on graduate school. To Kyle Dugdale for his careful reading and insightful seminar on methodology and research. To Joseph Roach for the conversations orchestrated in the Drama, Performance and Mass Culture Seminar, for his careful reading of my thesis and valuable comments. To Gilbert Joseph and Mary Liu, whose distinct approaches to Latin American and urban history had a relevant impact on the approach to the subject of my research. To the MED Committee Reviewers in general for their useful comments, organized by our director Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen. To Alan Plattus, Andrei Harwell and Elihu Rubin, for great lectures on urban design history, and valuable comments. I am grateful to the Beinecke Fellowship and the MacMillan Foundation for their support. To my friend Diego Vilches for avid reading and feedback. To my generation colleague Gregory Cartelli, for his persistent, productive debate provocation and great friendship. To David Turturo, Shivani Shedde, Preeti Talwai, and Jia Weng for being good friends and colleagues. Finally, always thank you to my parents, Marcela Orellana and Eduardo Agosin, for their trust beyond my expectations, and encouragement.

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Abstract Street theater expands traditional notions of audience and the public sphere. Beginning in 1980, street theater in Chile served as an especially powerful expression of political resistance. This thesis highlights the creativity and political message of Chilean street theater especially as seen through archives and the dissident work of TEUCO (Urban Contemporary Theater). In addition to attention to unpublished documents, and images related to Chilean street performances, the thesis also analyzes the ways in which the performers made use of the city of Santiago. The importance of street theater in Chile and its political message parallels other thespian efforts in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s in cities in the Americas and Europe. This thesis also suggests how Chilean street theater may be paralleled as a new cultural and public space phenomenon in cities as diverse as Pittsburgh and Avignon. The genealogy of street theater since 1968 is studied globally, looking at Chile as only one of the examples that used street theater as a creative instance inspired by the postmodern city itself as much as by the political realm.

The narratives of Cold War were present when street theater became a relevant art form of postmodernity in all the spaces of the Americas, and this political factor also generated specific transformative relationships among strangers: in Chile, literally from one day to another (the day of the coup, September 11, 1973). The response to Cold War in spaces beyond its rousing events is a phenomenon being studied today as archives continue to grow and testimonies are gathered. The death tolls of the different conflicts in Latin America remain open cases, as well as fragments of a necessary reconstruction of collective memories.

Street theater interacts with pedestrians in distinct ways according to the place where performance is held. The social, political, and cultural histories have an impact of our predisposition to “the stranger� in different localities. Street theater serves the city by surrogating public celebration in an encoded system that allows for communitarian reconstruction in new forms from the previously known, and from social public relations that have been destroyed. As it is a temporal form of public organization, it can serve as a continuous experiment of social interaction.

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Table of Contents

Abstract . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v List of Figures .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Introduction.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .3 Morphological Definitions of Street Theater, 1968 – 1985: A cross-analysis of interdisciplinary temporal forms in public urban environments Chapter 1. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25 A Geography of Street Performance [Avignon : Sao Paulo : Pittsburgh] Chapter 2.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 Look Up: Creating Extra-Institutional Space in Dictatorship [Santiago] Chapter 3.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87 Expansion of Popular Theater Vocabularies [Santiago] Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116

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List of Figures Introduction Fig. 1

The Living Theatre, Denunciation Pamphlet for Demonstrations at the New York Embassy of Chile (Front and Back Cover), October 1973. Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 2

Dario Fo, “Guerra di Popolo al Cile,” October 20, 1973, in Franca Rame Digital Archive.

Fig. 3

Author Unknown. Campo Marghera, 1974. Ramona Parra Brigadas for Liberta al Cile Venice Biennale.

Fig. 4

Ettore Sottsass, Every Morning my Fiancée Takes The Subway, 1979, in Barbara Radice (ed.), Ettore Sottsass: Design Metaphors (New York : Rizzoli, 1988).

Fig. 5

Alberto Carneiro, Tree for Playing in Seven Reflected Images, 1976, Venice Biennale.

Fig. 6

Sketch of Michael Fried’s observations. Drawing by author.

Fig. 7

Jacques Louis Davis, Belisarius Begging for Alms, 1784, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre.

Fig. 8

CAVART, Structures in the quarry used for “Architetture Culturalmente Impossibili,” 1975, Archivio Michele de Lucchi.

Fig. 9

Architects of Ciudad Abierta, Water Tower at Ritoque, Valparaíso, 1970s. José Vial Armstrong Historic Archive.

Fig. 10 Krysztof Wodiczco, Projections, 1985, Guildall, Derry, Northern Ireland.

Fig. 11

Robert (Architect), Section and Plan with observation form. Pencil drawing dated 26 April 1799. Institute National de la Propriété Industrielle, Paris. Redrawing by Author.

Fig. 12 “Inverted Panoramas” of Street Theater. Drawing by Author.

Fig. 13

Six Public Acts in Italy, 1975, The Living Theatre Archive at Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 14 Alvaro Hoppe, photograph of “The Trip of Maria and Jose to Belen” [El Viaje de María y José a Belén], 1981, Santiago. Photographer Personal Collection.

Fig. 15 Denunciation Pamphlet for Demonstrations at the Embassy of Chile, October, 1973. The Living Theatre Archives at Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

Chapter 1 Fig. 16 Avignon. Castle of the Popes, Rocher des Domes, Celestine Cloister and main spaces used during the Festival du Avignon of 1968. Drawing by Author.

Fig. 17

Mario Atzinger, Jean Vilar at the Palace of the Popes, c. 1947 (In Association for a Jean Vilar Foundation ed., Jean Vilar par lui-même. Avignon: Maison Jean Vilar, 1991, 3.)

Fig. 18 Gianfranco Mantegna, The Living Theatre presenting “The Brig Dollar,” Summer 1968, Carmelite Cloister, Avignon (In Aldo Rostagno, We, The Living Theater, New York: Ballantine Books, 1970, 83.)

Fig. 19 Fragment of seventeenth century map. Anonymous. “Carte du Contat d’Avignon et Venaisin,” Paris, Biblioteque National de France, Department of Maps and Plans.

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Fig. 20 Mario Atzinger, Court of the Palace of the Popes with seats and terraced benches, from 1954 to 1966 (In Emmanuelle Loyer and Antoine de Baecque eds, Histoire du Festival d’Avignon, Paris: Gallimard, 2007, 136.)

Fig. 21 The Living Theatre, Paradise Now Chart, 1968, varying dimension posters. Beinecke Library, New Haven.

Fig. 22 Gianfranco Mantegna, Scene of Paradise Now, Rung 1, “Vision of the Death and Resurrection of the American Indians.” (In Aldo Rostagno, We, The Living Theater, New York: Ballantine Books, 1970, 188.)

Fig. 23 Gianfranco Mantegna, Living Theatre presenting The Brig Dollar, stage set by Camille Demeangeat, summer 1968, Carmelite Cloister, Avignon (In Aldo Rostagno, We, The Living Theater, New York: Ballantine Books, 1970, 82–3.)

Fig. 24 Marcel Jacno, Festival’s Three Keys iconic poster, 1954. Maison Jean Vilar Archive.

Fig. 25 Franck Couvreur, Beaux- Arts student counterposters for the Festival, 1968, varying dimension posters.

Vaucluse Department Archives.

Fig. 26 Letter from Fernanda Pivano and Ettore Sottsass to Judith Malina and Julian Beck, sent to prison in Brazil, 1971.

The Living Theatre Archives at the Beinecke Library.

Fig. 27 Downtown Pittsburgh: areas of intervention by The Living Theatre in 1974 - 75. Areas 1, 2, and 3 indicate Six Public Acts performances in May and September, 1975; Area 4 indicates a performance of The Money Tower in front of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Mill, which closed down a few years later. Map from Pittsburgh Government adapted by author.

Fig. 28 Julian Michele, Point State Park and Gateway Center, ca. 1953. (In Charette 1 (January 1955), back cover).

Fig. 29 Map of Six Public Acts at Gateway Park, September 1975. The Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 30 Julian Beck, Poster for Six Public Acts with Map of Pittsburgh as Background, 1975. The Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 31 Cy Hungerford, How the Old Place Has Changed! From Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 19, 1955. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

Fig. 32 Map of Six Public Acts at Mellon Square and Surroundings, September 1975. The Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 33 Map of Six Public Acts at Southside, September 1975. The Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 34 Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, East Carson Street, Digital Archive accessed May 2016, www. phlf.org Fig. 35 Photo by Judith Malina, The Money Tower in the Pittsburgh Mills. Date Unknown.

Chapter 2 Fig. 36 Enrique Aracena, La Moneda Under Siege, September 11, 1973. Foundation Televisa Collection Fig. 37 Photographer Unknown, Helicopter overflying Nueva La Habana, September 1973. Personal Archives of architect René Urbina and resident Manuel Paiva, as labeled by historian Boris Cofré.

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Fig. 38 Sergio Mura Rossi, La Moneda Days After, September 1973, Santiago. Photographer Personal Collection.

Fig. 39 Alvaro Hoppe, Untitled, September 12, 1973. Santiago. Photographer Personal Collection.

Fig. 40 Cordones Industriales drafted by Ema and Armando de Ramón, 1992. Redrawn by Author.

Fig. 41 Horacio Villalobos, Teatinos Street from Hotel Panamericano, September 11, 1973, Santiago.

Fig. 42 Four Chileans light the “Eternal Flame of Liberty.” Published in political pamphlet “Chile: 11 de Septiembre de 1975.” Digital Library of Political Pamphlets of the National Congress of Chile.

Fig. 43 Dancers of Central Cueca celebrate September 11, 1975. Published in political pamphlet “Chile: 11 de Septiembre de 1975.” Digital Library of Political Pamphlets of the National Congress of Chile.

Fig. 44 Clay House for the celebration of the First Congress of Pobladores at Nueva La Habana. Santiago, February 1972 (In Boris Cofré, Historia de los pobladores del campamento Nueva La Habana durante la Unidad Popular (1970 - 1973), Santiago: dissertation for Universidad Arcis, 2007, 184).

Fig. 45 Mapping of the eradication of pobladores according to communes of origin and destination, 1979 – 1985.

Santiago, CED (Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo de Chile), 1990.

Fig. 46 Self-Construction: Instalation of pobladores at Nueva La Habana. (In Boris Cofré, Nueva La Habana, 110).

Fig. 47 Self-Constructed Houses at Nueva La Habana and residents. (In Boris Cofré, Nueva La Habana, 112).

Fig. 48 and 49. Second phase of inhabitation: Uncompleted project of 1.768 state-sponsored houses, organized by CORVI (Corporación de la Vivienda, Housing Corporation). Santiago, 1971.

Fig. 50 TEUCO Street Theater performances throughout Santiago . Map base from Leopoldo Benavides for the Latin American Social Sciences Institute, 1982. Drawing by author.

Fig. 51 Ivanna Ramírez. “TEUCO performs Bienaventuranzas back in the city center.” Santiago, December 1981.

Newspaper clip, unknown, María de la Luz Hurtado personal archives.

Fig. 52 Photographer unknown, Bienaventuranzas in Nuevo Amanecer. Santiago, December 1981.

Maya Mora Personal Documents.

Fig. 53 Photographer unknown, Bienaventuranzas in Nuevo Amanecer. Santiago, December 1981.

Paulina Hunt personal documents.

Fig. 54 Photographer unknown, Bienaventuranzas in Nuevo Amanecer. Santiago, December 1981. Paulina Hunt personal documents.

Fig. 55 Photographer unknown, National Protests for the death of “worker priest” André Jarlan.

September 1984, Santiago.

Fig. 56 Pamphlet “Rechace los Ruidos Molestos Poniendo Musica Chilena,” (Reject the Annoying Noises by Playing Chilean Music), Digital Library of Political Pamphlets of the National Congress of Chile.

Fig. 57 Cultural Activity in Nueva La Habana, 1971. Archives of architect René Urbina and resident Manuel Paiva, as labeled by historian Boris Cofré.

Fig. 58 Dancers of Southern Cueca celebrate September 11, 1975 in Chiloé. Digital Library of Political Pamphlets of the

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National Congress of Chile.

Fig. 59 Photographer unknown, Bienaventuranzas in Nuevo Amanecer. Santiago, December 1981. Paulina Hunt personal documents.

Chapter 3 Fig. 60 “The Gospel According to Us,” drawing by Miguel Lawner (Ritoque, 30 March 1975). Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Fondo Miguel Lawner.)

Fig. 61 Ramón López (photograph and set designer), Three Maries and a Rose production, 1979 at Teatro El Ángel, Santiago. Chilescena Archives.

Fig. 62 Alvaro Hoppe, Paseo Ahumada, 1988, Santiago. Photographer Personal Collection.

Fig. 63 Map of downtown Santiago in a tourist guide of 1970. (In Guía de Turismo: Santiago, Editorial Contemporánea, 1970.)

Fig. 64 and 65 Alvaro Hoppe, TEUCO performs The Trip of Mary and Joseph and What Happened in the Way, 1988, Santiago.

Photographer Personal Collection.

Fig. 66 Alvaro Hoppe, TEUCO performs The Trip of Mary and Joseph and What Happened in the Way at the Ahumada/ Alameda intersection. December, 1980.

Fig. 67 Alvaro Hoppe. TEUCO performs Act Without Words at the Balmaceda Warehouses on weekend markets.

Santiago, 1980.

Fig. 68 Maya Mora. Photographer and date Unknown, from Mora’s personal documents.

Fig. 69 Ramón López, Cast and theater house arrangement for The Great Theater of the World by Calderón de la Barca, directed by Raúl Osorio, set design by Ramón López, teatro Universidad Católica, Santiago de Chile, 1981.

Chilescena Online Archive.

Fig. 70 Photographer Unknown, Ana La Criada, 1984, Santiago. Maya Mora Personal Documents.

Conclusions Fig. 71 Archizoom, The Theater of Political Encounter, 1967. In Pianetta Fresco, Ettore Sottsass and Fernanda Pivano eds, 1967. Beinecke Library Archives.

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introduction

MORPHOLOGICAL DEFINITIONS OF STREET THEATER, 1968 – 1985 A cross-analysis of interdisciplinary temporal forms in public urban environments Departures from the Modern Theater “The ideological clarity of the theater of Brecht and the paradoxical clarity of the logical pessimism of Beckett and Ionesco, the big innovators of the fifties, has disappeared,”1 wrote theater historian Ferdinando Taviani describing the characteristics of theater after Modernism. If the fifties were the years of the Berliner Ensemble, Jean Vilar’s Théâtre Populaire and the Piccolo Teatro di Milano, by the 1960s, a shift was occurring that moved towards autodidact collectives dispersed throughout the world. Troupes like that of Roger Planchon in Paris displaced Vilar’s Théâtre Populaire for a “Theater for the City;” the Living Theater invited the audience to performances in the form of rites of passage; Grotowski performed the violence imposed to the bodies of World War II in situ in a concentration camp in Opole, Polonia; and the Scandinavian Odin Theater traveled the world presenting a theater that focused on the possibilities and implications for actors’ who intervened in public spaces not meant for performance.2 All these examples reveal a resurgence of theater that focused on the actor and the body, in context and beyond the text, influenced by early-century avantgardes—particularly the turn of the century biomechanics of the Russian and Soviet theatrical producer, director, and actor Vsevolod Meyerhold.3 Among a vitalized discussion on public art and the value of the street as a space for physical and direct communication, one of the art forms that evolved was Street Theater. This type of theater was specific to its period, even though it can be understood as a modern version of old informal theater forms, where the spatial relationship between stage and spectators is more continuous, and is constantly reinvented in-space. Street

1 Ferdinando Taviani, “1964-1980: da una osservazione particolare,” in Civiltà teatrale nel XX secolo, eds. Fabrizio Cruciani and Clelia Falletti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986), 352.

2 Taviani, “1964–1980,” 352–373.

3 Meyerhold developed a series of studies and techniques to “afford the actor all the essential skills necessary for scenic movement—skills that would take the ordinary actor nearly a life-time to learn.” His focus on the relationship of space and movement would be useful for theater troupes that were experimenting with a focus on movement with impact of the theatrical space. See Mel Gordon, “Meyerhold’s Biomechanics,” in The Drama Review 18 (September 1974), 73.

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theater differs from a classic relationship between stage and spectators found in the italiante box or other theater houses which preserve a spacial relationship of Renaissance heritage. It challenges the richness of the theatron architectural typology as it has evolved throughout history, where the visual and acoustic comfort of the audience has defined complex technical forms. By comparison, street theater begins with an elementary (usually less comfortable) relationship between the spectator and the stage. Besides a rudimentary spatial situation in which the audience and actors are placed, the multiplicity of spaces not built for the purpose of theatrical performance lends a layered significance to the event of the performance. The artificiality of street theater allows for the performances to derive into new strategies to convey meaning. It is this charged factor of the informality and artificiality of street theater that became a powerful focus for exploration and experimentation for a generation of theater artists in the assessed period. Philosopher Karsten Harries has argued that architectural space is incomplete without the performance of bodies in space:4 radicalizing this idea, this study looks at built envornments that were activated by street theater simultanuously as a performance and spatial device. A question that drives the analysis of street theater plays is, could street theater had been breching a gap between the histories of place in relation to contemporary society?

Spaces for the theater have developed in relation to visual representation techniques, where new forms of pictorial composition seem to open a new way to conceive places for seeing.5 Bare from this condition, staging a play in spaces for multiple use, street theater had to constantly adjust to the cities as a morphing backdrop. The performers of street theater had a creative, immediate relationship with their spatial context, and so the choreographies and disposition of their bodies went so far as to redefine spaces temporally to their advantage. To reflect on this phenomenon this thesis examines street theater not only in relation to context but as a spatial device in itself.

Looking at street theater as a temporal, spatial device invites to contextualize and conceptualize this artform not only in relation to theater, but also in relation to an array of architects, designers and visual artists that encountered similar political questions than the ones that street theater artists prompted. By comparing this art form with examples of environment art and design that sought to create environments stripped from the structural capitalism embedded in the realm of design production, the similarities in the strategies of spatial engagement become apparent. This introduction will examine concepts that relate both to the arts and design concerns of the time as well as theater, to see through examples how these disciplines shared political and aesthetic problematics. Through this comparison, the spatial morphology of street

introduction

theater, as well as its agency in public space, can be conceptualized.

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4  Karsten Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aestheticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 138 – 143.

5  Theater is etymologically a place, before it is performance; a place for seeing. Theatron is specifically the place of the audience, in sight of the Orchestra and Skene. It is a type of architectural space that relies on the experience of the spectators. The collective engagement of the crowd in relation to what happens on stage can generate an identification between spectators if their presence is not omitted; a kind of public that witnesses itself. For theater typologies see George C. Izenour, Theater Design, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

Moving forward, Chapter 1 will examine international examples that further explain the specificity of

street theater among other artistic manifestations of dissent, in a global stage. Chapter 2 looks at the Chilean political context, and street theater cases weaved among the unfolding protest movement in Santiago. Chapter 3 further describes street theater in Chile in relation to other practitioners and as a pervasive artistic pursuit of popular theater among troupes of this period.

Origins of Street Theater Post-1968 Nomadic theater troupes populated the main alleys and public spaces of an array of international cities after 1968, due with the dissatisfaction to the role of institutions that were structuring postwar societies. It was the branching continuation of a cultural upsurge famously initiated by Parisian students. The generalized discontent of young generations influenced the need to populate public space with all experiences reserved for a few: among them, theater. We can see this influence particularly in the summer of 68 in Avignon, as a direct consequence of the enragés. As May was over and the summer began, the Parisian movement spread throughout Europe reaching cultural events such as the Theater Festival of Avignon, the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale, among others, consequently altering the priorities of many artist circles.

My thesis focuses on the Chilean case of street theater between 1980 and 1985, tracing global relationships between Latin American, American, and European cases of earlier street theater. Although the development of street theater in Santiago was a local phenomenon, there are indications of its artistic premises connecting to a wide range of international artists, and in particular to the Théâtre du Soleil and Living Theatre troupes.

The performances of The Living Theatre in Avignon, Brazil and Pittsburgh between 1968 and 1974; the Théâtre du Soleil’s performance at Avignon one year after The Living Theatre and their creative pursue for a popular theater; and precedents of a theater of dissidence between 1973 and 1980 in Chile by local artists, all configure a constellation of praxis and ideas that the street theatrer troupes of 1980 to 1985 were instilled with and learned from for their own creations. These influences do not explain or determine the creative process of the artists, but are useful to explain the movement of street theater in the cultural, urban and economic processes that western societies were facing in relation to each other. The street theater plays analyzed respond to the local context of the cities they perform in, and their particularities come through as a response to specific urban environments.

Latin America: Chile, for example, had its own student uprisings demanding education reforms in ’68. At the same time, the nomadic nature of many professional theater troupes of the time also allowed for a wider range of international exchange outside of Europe. The case of the Living Theatre troupe and the Odin Theatre are particularly relevant in theater.

The Southern Cone of Latin America, Central America and the Andes experienced a period of heightened mobilization, terror and upheavals throughout the Cold War years. In this political climate,

morphology of street theater

The cultural uprisings of the end of the 60s happened not only in Europe but all over the West, including

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public performance was at once an art form, a risk and a hidden narrative of current affairs. For a long time, the global radical left had its eyes on the development of these revolutionary and counterrevolutionary processes, and many protest events were influenced and inspired by the political situation as it occurred inside military dictatorships. Exiled artists, foreigner travelers, and inland artists composed the wide networks that resulted in an exchange of political, intellectual, and aesthetic affinities of the period.

The coup against Salvador Allende in 1973 had a particular symbolic impact on these cultural networks, and international theater artists denounced this historic event in many forms. Proudly known as the “first Fig. 2. Dario Fo, “Guerra di Popolo in Cile,” October 20, 1973, in Franca Rame Digital Archive.

socialist president democratically elected,” Allende was a favorite for leftist intellectuals who used the Chilean experience to prove that a revolution, defined by him sociologically as “the simple transfer of power from a

minority to a majority class,”6 could be performed without violence.

For example, a month after the coup, Communist playwright and director Dario Fo premiered Guerra di popolo in Cile (People’s War in Chile) in Urbino, Italy, while the Living Theatre performed an anarchist manifestation against the coup in front of the Embassy of New York. French director Ariene Mnouchkine also held debates for two days inside the warehouse turned theater and cultural center Cartoucherie, in the outskirts of Paris. A year later, and as a consequence of the 1968 demonstrations in Venice against the administrators of the Venice Biennale, the 1974 Biennale presented a series of events under the title Libertà al Cile.7 The new curator, Carlo Ripo di Mena, extended the Biennale outside of Giardini and into the city, with murals by Chilean brigadas (muralists) inhabiting Campo Marghera. Other initiatives such as a weekly newspaper for distribution served as an example to show how every media could function as an artistic and political statement simultaneously.8 As this global, cultural, and political context kept unfolding, nomadic theater troupes were experimenting with a praxis of civic engagement through leisure in specific places of conflict—their political agency and commitment varied according to location and context. Inland examples in Latin America are the development of “The Theater of The Oppressed” by Augusto Boal, who created participative, reflective plays in which the audience had a say in the ending; Enrique Buenaventura in Colombia who developed a body of original work

introduction

as early as 1955 with the Experimental Theater of Cali; in 1971, the Peruvian troupe Yuyachkani developed

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6 Salvador Allende interviewed by French Marxist philosopher Régis Debray, “Regis Debray Talks to President Allende,” The New York Times, October 15, 1971.

7 Raven Falquez Munsell, “Libertà al Cile: Alternative Media and Art Information at the 1974 Venice Biennale,” in Art Journal 74 v.2, 44 – 61.

8 IbId. Allende’s widow and other politicians from the former Popular Unity were interviewed.

a prominent local theater scene with a specific dramaturgy of collective creation and political performance.9 In Chile, the local reaction to dictatorship in the theater arts developed in three different stages of a theater of dissent; in 1974 the Surrealist theater of El Aleph created plays for theater houses and inside political prisoner camps; a more academic theater for smaller audiences but socially committed premiered plays of political content starting in 1976, and street theater began in 1980, seven years after the coup, initially with TEUCO (Urban Contemporary Theater). At the same time, from 1979 to 1985, a collective of performance artists named

Fig. 3. Campo Marghera, 1974. Ramona Parra Brigadas for Liberta al Cile Venice Biennale.

CADA also created an art of dissidence in the streets. The performance art of CADA was a characteristically intellectual, politically committed art group. However, the breach between radical design and theater here explored is similar from the one between contemporary art and theater: whereas the theater avant-garde was able to continuously work with popular audiences—arguably many times confusing them more than transmitting a clear political discourse, as is the case of the Living Theatre—, I focus on street theater as it is an art form of professional artists that only exists in dialogue with an unpredictable, popular audience.10 During the period between 1980 and 1985, street theater became a relevant art form in the city of Santiago—a period in which Chilean society was reorganizing to publicly condemn the military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet, and reached the derogation of dictatorship to reinstall democracy by 1990.

Intellectual and artistic exchange didn’t only occur in local terms, and the nomadic characteristic of many troupes helps to explain this factor. Rather, the virtuous exchanges and transformations of praxis and theory occurred mostly in the international relationships of theater performers of aesthetic and discursive affinities. Because the structure of street theater has a specific approach to public space and political context, to study these cases in relation to everyday life and everyday environments will bring to surface how the political agency of thespians performed in different contexts.

Although the detailed analysis of space and historic context of this thesis is Santiago de Chile, I will also look at plays performed by the Living Theatre and by the Théâtre du Soleil as they had an impact in the configuration of this art form and a direct impact on the Chilean troupes to be discussed. At the same platform in which theater arts functioned during the Cold War.

9 Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, “Yuyachkani,” accessed February, 2017.

10 Their work was curated by gallery curator Nelly Richard, and commended by art historian Milan Ivelic and other relevant figures of the Chilean circle of art critics. For a detailed description of the work of CADA and art criticism of the period, see Robert Neustadt, CADA DIA: la creación de un arte social (Santiago: Cuarto Propio Editorial, 2001).

morphology of street theater

time, the response of the cultural world to the Chilean dictatorship helps to show the international political

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Fig. 4. Ettore Sottsass, Every Morning my Fiancée Takes The Subway, 1979, in Barbara Radice (ed.), Ettore Sottsass: Design Metaphors (New York : Rizzoli, 1988).

I. Street Theater and Environmental Art: working on fields of open borders.

Ettore Sottsass’ Design Metaphors photography series starting from 1972 are mostly body-less photographs of an intervened landscape. The interventions set up a condition that brings forward design as an action of space organization, making the strategies of design visible beyond its materiality.

It is a series of staged photographs, yet the photograph is more of a document than an art form in itself— an evidence of how the environment as found was subtly inflected and instantly humanized.

When there is a body in this series, it is the naked body of his second wife Barbara Radice. This decision reinforces a condition of what seems to be an essentialist approach to aesthetics, as not to tarnish the metaphor being presented with a layer of clothing, i.e. of masking. It is the new conception of minimalism descendant from the Patio and Pavilion of the Independent Group: no longer would modernist white paint express the abstraction of space—a scientific observation of the color that will refract light in its most complete form—but introduction

rather the minimal available, the standard as it is found on the streets, or in the desert, taking into account

8

immediate realities and making use of the designers’ observations in everyday surroundings.

But this is not the only aesthetic function at work in this image. The introduction of the body in these interventions, by scaling nature at all times through a human-measurable item, is also the introduction of an increasing interest on the value of performance as a radical pedagogy, potential constituent of the design practice. The unpredictably moving body in space or moreover, the body as a necessary subject of the designed space is part of Sottssas’ proposition of metaphors: in this case, without Radice descending, the composition loses dynamism and direction.

The meaning of the word “performance” ranges in a wide variety of activities; the type of performance the image is concerned with is a ritual of urban everyday life displaced—it emphasizes the spatial condition and body behavior that allows this ritual as we come to recognize it in the city. This is the very definition that Schechner uses

Fig. 5. Alberto Carneiro, Tree for Playing in in Seven Reflected Images, 1976, Venice Biennale.

to explain theater: “a set of perceptual transformations and elaborations on behavior.”11 Yet the semantics of theater, and specifically of the theatrical have been signified differently in the realm of architecture in the past decades. A historic scission between the theater arts with art and design have kept these disciplines progress usually on its own paths.

Sottssas’ photographs are representative of a wider movement of designers interested in environment art: it was a conception of design that expanded its confines to belong to the visual arts—not as a matter of composition ideas as it had been before, but on the contrary exploring the strength of the concepts of design, untied from any particular technique or set of skills. One of the most telling examples of how the idea of architecture as environmental art was fruitful for architects was with the creation of the Venice Biennial of Architecture: in 1976, for the first time since its inauguration in 1894 it was an architect, Vittorio Gregotti,

Gregotti named 1976 Art Biennale Environment, Participation, Cultural Structures, and expanded this section to Visual Arts and Architecture, and held exhibitions in seven venues, of which five were dedicated to architecture and design. He presented architecture, design, and planning as “the technical means of defining

11 Richard Schechner, “Behavior, Performance, and Performance Space” in Perspecta, vol. 26: Theater, Theatricality and Architecture (1990), 97.

morphology of street theater

who was appointed as Art Director of the Visual Arts Section of the Biennale.

9

the physical environment,” relevant thus for the dialogue art had established with its holding space, and yet warning that “their specific contribution must be regarded with particular suspicion.”12 Environmental art requires the transformation of environment through an intervention, but this environment is usually of diffuse borders. With many examples of outdoor pieces of environmental art, the boundaries of the intervention are only perceptual but never measured. In an indoor situation, the boundaries of the room are measureable, but the relation of the piece to its context is bidirectional and thus as the room changes with the presence of spectators, so does this relationship get renewed limitlessly.

Gregotti’s focus on environmental art for the introduction of design at the Venice Biennale is only one of several exhibitions that focused on these examples on a broader artistic scene, particularly of the Italian radical design and its influences in this period. The idea of design completely embedded in an environment, producing a new surface of human interaction with landscape at any scale the designer wished to engage with, and could fit in a drawing, photo, or intervention, can be tracked to both the Venice Biennale and Milan Triennale of 1968, wich grappled with the idea of design as a narrative space for the spectator. The Milan Triennale of 1968 welcomed all artistic forms that could relate to an environmental approach, creating a “polyphony of visual languages (cinema, graphics, design, art, poetry, theater, television)” 13 to create this narrative for the spectator. 14 These ideas expanded their influence in the milestone exhibition curated by Emilio Ambazs (The New Domestic Landscape at MOMA, 1972), and later in Hans Hollein’s exhibit at Cooper Union, MANtransFORMS/Aspects of Design, in 1976—where Sottssas’ Design Metaphors were exhibited for the first time.

Street theater can be understood as an example of urban environmental art, even though the use of dramaturgical objects, costumes and ornaments differ from the aesthetics of a stripped materiality characteristic of environmental art.

It is as environment art that architecture was most similar to radical practices stemmed from traditional theater at the time. The difference between these experimental art forms must be clarified, as it may seem counterintuitive to relate the theatrical origin of street theater with the stripped aesthetics of radical design.

But if we look closely at the concept of the theatrical, as defined by its most prominent critic, Michael Fried,

introduction

we can see how these art forms actually share a condition of theatricality. Fried defined theatricality as

10

12 Vittorio Gregotti, “Introduction,” in General Catalogue, First Volume of La Biennale di Venezia 1976 : Environment, Participation, Cultural Structures (Venice : Alfieri Edizioni d’Arte, 1976), 10. For the first time architecture and design were presented as complementing the Visual Arts Section. Specifically, how communication could define the urban environment in Five Graphic Designers at Correr Museum in Piazza San Marco; how the environment had been shaped since the beginning of the century with The “Werkbund” 1907, the Origins of Design—considered by Gregotti as the most relevant for the subsequent Architecture Biennales—and how theory and practice in two urban geographies had shaped a confronting landscape: Europe-America, Historical Center - Suburbia. See also Aaron Levy and William Menking, “In conversation with Vittorio Gregotti,” in Architecture on Display: V.I, On the History of the Venice Biennale of Architecture (London: AA Publications, 2011), 26.

13 Paola Nicolin, “T68/B68” in Alex Coves and Catherine Rossi (Eds.), The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968-1976 (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013) 79 – 95.

14 Ib Idem

the condition of self-conscious presentation, and was widely cited in the realm of architecture—notably, for example, in Perspecta 26, Theater, Theatricality and Architecture, with the opening epigraph.

The success, even the survival, of the arts has come increasingly to depend on their ability to defeat theater.15

Reluctant to an artistic movement that he saw as unpreoccupied with the boundaries of each artistic discipline, Fried celebrated artworks that rather accepted these—he sought to value the condition of “presentness” of art, in which a work of art is complete and unchanged independently

Fig. 6. Sketch of Michael Fried’s observations.

Drawing by author.

from the presence of the spectator. Fried initially characterized the work of minimalist sculpture artists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris as theatrical, when the work was created in relation to the surroundings it was set in, and thus affected by the coming beholder—lacking a grace of [continuous] presentness and blurring the relationship between sculpture, spatial design, and theater. In his book Absorption and Theatricality, published 10 years later, Fried found in Diderot’s writings on art a preference for compositions with characters absorbed in their activities or in contemplation rather than those in a presentational attitude towards the spectator. Thus for example of Jacques-Louis David’s Belisarius

Fig. 7. Jacques Louis Davis, Belisarius Begging for Alms, 1784, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre.

Begging for Alms he commends the shift to a lateral perspective that would place the spectator away from the main characters of the scene, and the position of a flagpole that defines the limit of the painting and separation of the beholder.16 On the contrary, Fried found most difficult to get rid of the “inherent theatricality of the genre” from portraiture, as these cases “call for the exhibiting of the subject, the sitter, to the public gaze;” as “the basic action of a portrait is the sitter’s presentation of himself or herself to be beheld.”17 Fried’s arguments finds resonance in architecture with the rejection of postmodernism and its uses of styles of buildings as if to present themselves and the meaning of the designed space. But beyond (a more helpful image than one abstract public gaze). The social factor of design obliges this recognition.

Furthermore, it would be most artificial and detrimental to attempt for a public space redeemed from an apparent “vanity of self-presentation,” resulting in a space estranged in which all pedestrians passing by are absorbed only in each owns’ activities.

15 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 163.

16 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 145.

17 Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, 109.

morphology of street theater

postmodernist semiotics, public space is inherently theatrical, as it is constantly under a multiplicity of gazes

11

In sum, the idea of a work of art completed by the spectator was for Fried an objectionable, unpleasant characteristic of art too focused on presentation. But it is problematic to constrain this characteristic of the theatrical, negatively perceived but so accurately defined by Fried, as a fixed representation of exaggeration.

It is important to remember that theater architectural forms have had different configurations and social logics before and after the theater of the Renaissance, the theater of a hierarchized focal point as explained by Sebastiano Serlio, and the later experimentations of the illusion of depth of field and fugue in Baroque and Rococo. Therefore, the sum of characteristics that formally explain theater or theatricality are subject to great change, maintaining only the characteristic of co-presence and a relationship between beholder and actor, characterized by optical possibilities as experimented at different times. The ornamented spaces from the Rococo period: a central vanishing point that intensifies a hierarchized social structure, a false intensification of the depth of field, the visual strategies that produce an illusory inclusion of the spectator in the stage— these are not the only ways to think of theatricality, but these strategies allowed for the development of visual techniques which add complexity to the relationship of the spectator with space and light.18 Theater became once more in its history a source of international experimentation in the second half of the twentieth century; it evolved in the 1960s and 70s maintaining the condition of an art that is completed by the spectator, experimenting with this notion as the aesthetic of the theatrical was constantly put to the test: it was what Schechner coined “environmental theatre.” Theater historian Arnold Aronson emphasizes that the word environmental basically referred to a “staging that is not frontal.” 19 To understand the nonfrontal characteristic of different environmental play structures, Aronson proposed to emphasize on the specificity of the frame of the play: different modalities of environmental theater can be defined spatially by understanding their stage-audience differentiation characteristics.

The shared conceptualization of design and theater as “environmental” speaks of the impact the industrial transformation of landscape struck both artistic worlds as problematic, given urban transformations and global conflicts of the Cold War, as well as the shock of capitalistic power structures and values becoming a monopolist possibility of the Western world imposed to developing countries. This was consistent with Debord’s critique of the Spectacle, in particular addressed at the transformation of design as constantly “recuperated” by “the oldest of the technical specializations: that of power.”20 An answer was to create rapid constructions that evoked this desire to design tools that could alter a behavior, beyond the relevance of the

introduction

final result itself. As a temporal use of these object was acknowledged, the stripping of the object served to

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18 Karsten Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church, 73 – 85.

19 Arnold Aronson, “The Scenography of Environmental Performance” in The History and Theory of Environmental Scenography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981).

20 Guy Debord, “Chapter 1: Separation Perfected,” in The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red Books, 1977), Numerals 23 – 25.

detach from design a consumerist endeavor and focus exclusively on the experiment of performance with everyday life: these objects bared no reproducibility.21 Both art scenes found a way to escape, conceptually (if not as an economically sustainable practice and therefore, “culturally impossible”), the recuperation of capitalism of both design and commercial theater. In the Italian radical scene, design recoiled from industries and built its own encapsulated worlds of landscape interaction: Michele de Lucchi lead the creation of Cavart (quarry art), a design and academic group from the University of Florence that created seminars such as the Culturally Impossible Architecture experimental constructions near Monselice, Padua, in the summer of 1975 [fig. 6]. Sottssas experimented with the communication of design strategies “disssasociated from the machination of corporate design,” 22 while Gregotti presented in1976 design and architecture as part of the branches of the visual arts that deal with the environment most directly. The relationship with Arte Povera, and to Germano Celant’s curatorial work at this same Biennale was in line with this same artistic research.

Today’s frequent critique of the little permeability of the ideas of radical design of the time was at the time done by Flavio Domenico Mondello in Casabella. As Catherine Rossi summarizes, they were too removed from the ‘reality of things,’ the pastoral locations and playful nature of their activities too disconnected from the protests and occupations engulfing Italy’s streets in the mass mobilization of the late 1960s and early 1970s to have any real effect.23

This is where the potential of Street Theater comes to light in advantage to the aesthetics and practices of environmental art and design. With a similar spontaneity and irreproducibility of their “products”—plays in the streets were less predictable and reproducible than those in theater houses—the art form of street theater intended to transform the symbolism of the built environment, only momentarily, but in places of major interaction with audiences that could never be reached by the radical designers. Instead, for design to reach these audiences they had to go back to the industrial logics of the discipline and figure how to have an impact within the structural capitalism they criticized from the outside.

The essentialist approach to design, in which an aesthetic discourse obliges to recoil from the masses, in comparison to a politically engaged form of street theater is a relationship that we can also see in the exemplified the case of the Surrealist thespians from El Aleph troupe—prisoners of the Ritoque Prisoners Camp—in relation to a plot bought by the architects of the Catholic University of Valparaiso (Amereida) three miles away, where they created an avant-garde space of architectural experimentation, albeit separated 21 Catherine Rossi, “Between the Nomadic and the Impossible: Radical Architecture and the Cavart Group” in Coles and Rossi (Eds), The Italian Avant-Garde, 44 – 66.

22 Alison Clarke, “Ettore Sottsass: The Design Ethnologist,” in in Coles and Rossi (Eds), The Italian Avant-Garde, 69.

23 Flavio Domenico Mondello in Catherine Rossi, “Between the Nomadic and the Impossible,” in Coles and Rossi (Eds), The Italian Avant-Garde, 64.

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Chilean case of different cultural sectors during dictatorship. Architecture historian Ana María León has

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Fig. 8. CAVART, Structures in the quarry used for “Architetture Culturalmente Impossibili,” 1975, Archivio Michele de Lucchi.

Fig. 9. Architects of Ciudad Abierta, Water Tower at Ritoque, Valparaíso, 1970s.

José Vial Armstrong Historic Archive.

from the expected end users of their designs.24 León’s argument can be extended to the theater troupes who had an impact on the behavior of the Chilean masses of the busy streets of Santiago, disrupting the condition of hegemonic norms imposed by the dictatorship. Architects of Amereida developed a unique pedagogy and practice, with exemplary Chilean architects, nevertheless its poetics and practices—as with the case of Cavart—remained of arguably little impact until democracy returned.25 II. Dynamic Monuments: Relationship to the Built Environment Theater, as performance artist and theater director Richard Schechner emphasizes, is always a live art dependent on actors and spectators, both of them organized in a coordinated but ultimately unpredictable condition.26 Theater artists have maintained the art form after the proliferation of mass media devices that allow for evolving visual narratives, as they have maintained a faith in the relevance of co-presence; a condition shared in theater and urban public spaces in general. But when this art form is set in an urban outdoor space, it also encounters layers of history and signification of the built environment. The time period analyzed in relation to different forms of street theater internationally roughly intersect with the early projections in buildings that the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko created in the ‘80s. With moving images on the façades of buildings, carefully planned according to the political history of the places intervened, Wodiczko’ projections share a similar strategy of signification transformations that street theater attempts in public space. What the actors of street theater can

introduction

perform in between buildings, Wodiczko performed directly on the surfaces of concrete. The tactical media artist

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24 Ana María León, “Prisoners of Ritoque: The Open City and the Ritoque Concentration Camp,” in Journal of Architectural Education (2012) 66:1, 84-97.

25 For information on the Valparaiso School of Architecture see Rodrigo Pérez de Arce and Fernando Pérez Oyarzún, Valparaiso School: Open City Group (Boston: Birkhäuser, 2003).

26 Schechner, “Behavior, Performance, and Performance Space,” 99.

was convinced of the relevance of temporal transformation of public space structures. This was particularly evident under the political circumstances of his work in Derry, Ireland, where his installations were supervised by a military entourage, revealing the fragility of liberty of action, and the symbolic importance and risk of working with monuments in sites of political tension. The artist writes, It was so much more frightening [to perform projections] in Ireland than in Poland because there the situation has such a long history.

People are born who don’t remember anything else. To remember something else might be the reason for public art.27

In multiple built environments of cities, we are faced at risk with what art historian Alois Riegl calls commemorative value, i.e. the present state of the art in relation to the present audience for remembrance.

28

Fig. 10. Krysztof Wodiczco, Projections, 1985.

Guildall, Derry, Northern Ireland. In Perspecta 26, “Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture,” (1990), 288.

Wodiczko’s projections prove that the temporal interventions

can address and even have an impact on the signification and use of spaces even if it is not designed for permanence. Not only “walls that have been washed by the passing waves of humanity can be studied by urbanists to understand the current uses of a space;” not only “the stone torsos and objects that accompany bodies transform place as a spatial experience and mark a symbolic moment of history,”29 but also mere events, and in particular the documented ones. Both art forms present an observation on the commemorative value and problematic of monuments “homeless of history,” Wodiczko called the problem of monuments that would no longer speak to the communities that see them every day, as the relationship between society and local history is somewhat displaced. The artist discovered the relevance these events can have in a place with his own work: “even a short lived (in this case two hours) individual act against a strategic urban site at a precise moment, can carve itself into the memory of a city.”30 Street theater works in between buildings by doing a similar process of breaching this distanc, which Wodiczko achieved through events of projection in buildings to recreate meaning.

their bodies as objects of public art: The bodies of thespians contest and recreate the monuments of the city. This is how these plays are studied in the following chapters, as a series of images that in space recreate dynamic statues or automatons disrupting the organization of space, in terms of hierarchy and meaning, by 27 Kristoff Wodycsko, “Projections” in Perspecta 26, 285.

28 Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its and its Developments,” in Nicholas S. Price, M. Kirby Talley Jr., and Alessandra M. Vaccaro eds., Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 1996), 78.

29 John Ruskin, “The Lamp of Memory, I,” in Price, Kirby and Vaccaro eds., Historical and Philosophical Issues, 42.

30 Wodiczko, “Projections” in Perspecta 26, Theater, Theatricality and Architecture, 287.

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Actors chose to act as dynamic landmarks that reimagine the distribution and hierarchy of a place using

15

erasing the stage and becoming an active part of the landscape. The costumes of the body allow themselves to slightly morph from their human recognizable bodies into mythical or artificial beings. Street theater reverts the problem of monuments being separated from social life as it disrupts in the present the historic layers of the city. It challenges the appropriation of space by both corporations and institutions of power, because even though they do not have the power to contest the property of a space, they still have full domain of visual hierarchy for the moment they perform.

Location matters in art forms made for public space; the layers of history and event resonate differently according to the histories of place. The formal quality of architecture cannot always be positively integral to its social agency. This is because the process of creation of cities are different, and thus understanding the parallels between the aesthetic practice of street theater as a communicative practice in relation to the built environment sheds light on the site itself; the desires, potential, value and weaknesses of the creation of places and their expressions.

III. The Frame of Street Theater The frame is the spatial configuration that defines the actor – spectator relationship, which in environmental theater is non-frontal and not defined by the proscenium of an Italianate style theater house.

Because pictorial techniques have historically considered the position of the beholder, the development of these techniques as they have evolved from Brunelleschi’s use of perspective present a visual vocabulary of compositions which are helpful to understand and define theatrical spaces that are non-frontal as such. Two conditions define and limit the configuration of a theatrical space as has been traditionally understood: a uni-focal projection of perspectiva artificialis and the consequential singular, hierarchical gaze.

Thus although theater space is by nature a space of encounter of crowds, this crowds have been abstracted to one singular position: frontal staging represents this—nevertheless inaccurate for every seat in the theater— symbolically with only one directionality for the actors to address.

Philosopher Karsten Harries argues that the first spatial configuration that, being theatrical, presents a nonfrontal (environmental in Aronson’s terminology) rendering of the condition of incorporating the beholder in the artwork is the Bavarian rococo church, as the sky frescoes were incomplete without the architecture of the church. Natural light was used as part of the paintings, and the playful relationship between theater and reality was evidently a question of diffuse boundaries that could extend to the spectator’s life experience, rather than a direct intention of convincing the spectator of an illusion. It is worth quoting this explanation at large;

introduction

The rococo church can indeed be interpreted as a more effective realization of baroque theatricality than

16

the illusionism of a Pozzo [fresco painting]. That illusionism is limited by the necessity of assigning the spectator a specific point of view. Only for a moment do we wonder where reality ends and deception begins. A few steps and the illusion collapses; the quite different realities of architecture and fresco reassert

themselves. . . . as we move through this space, we reassert the primacy of architecture and reduce the fresco to an ornamental accessory—which yet refuses such subservient status, reasserts itself, and pictorializes the architecture. Ornament is the medium of this unending play or strife. 31

Again, and according to Fried’s definition, theatricality becomes a matter of diffuse borders, artworks that are conceived only within their immediate environment. In this case, the fixed positionality of the beholder is superseded by the reference to a larger space that can hold a multitude.

In the nineteenth century, this “expansion” of both Renaissance and Baroque illusionism in space was transformed with a new pictorial technique, more closely related to the way street theater works in its inclusion of multiple gazes. And in comparison to the Baroque church, the new pictorial devices that incorporated theatricality were created for a different crowd, under the new hegemonies of the industrial capitalist cities. One of these inventions was the panorama.

In the nineteenth century the name panorama referred to a specific architectural construction. It was a neologism that combined two Greek words (pan,- the whole of universe of mankind, and ὅραμα,’ that which is seen) referring to the invention of a painting technique patented by painter Robert Barker on which “the whole universe of mankind” was seen, where perspective was no longer constitute of a focal point but elongated throughout an enveloping curvature.

Largely considered as only a backdrop of pure spectacle, propaganda and mass entertainment, panoramas were also a new distinct pictorial technique, a composition of multiple perspectives merged together by softening fugue points together in arcs. In contrast to the uni-focal Renaissance perspectival configuration for both theater stages and paintings, panoramas were a product for popular entertainment that offered the illusion of “total control of the gaze” from any place inside the circular floor surrounded by painted curved walls. The paintings described many times the view of a city, thus surrogating the touristic experience of traveling to a different place.

Robert Barker, Irish painter located in London, registered this invention in 1792. Sir John Reynolds, repenting an initial mistrust on this invention, wrote to Barker, I was in error in supposing your invention would never succeed, for the present exhibition proves it is capable of producing effect and representing nature in a manner far superior to the limited scale of pictures in

The panorama technically intends to produce an all-encompassing view, with the premise of the continuity of gaze; the expansion of the canvas generating an enveloping coup d’oeil. The innovation is in relation to the illusion of a total control over that which is observed. The paradox of this visual control upon an urban landscape is that the viewer was trapped inside a limited space; the dominance of sight and 31 Karsten Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church, 138.

32 Reynolds cited in Stefan Oetterman, “The Panorama in England,” in The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 103.

morphology of street theater

general.32

17

introduction

Fig. 11. Robert (Architect), Section and Plan with observation form. Pencil drawing dated 26 April 1799. Institute National de la PropriĂŠtĂŠ Industrielle, Paris. Redrawing

by Author

18

morphology of street theater

Fig. 12. “Inverted Panoramas” of Street Theater. Drawing by Author.

19

continuous view required the renounce to an open space. In this sense, it is a disciplining type of touristic attraction. The panoramic building is exclusively a place where the body of the spectator is surrounded and easily watched over.

This cylindrical building with painted interior walls is a device that belongs to a modern capitalist society obsessed with the control of crowds. Indeed, the panopticon is virtually reproduced in the corralling circular surface where the spectator can step. The same desire to observe a city as a constrained object of clearly defined boundaries is what generated the boundaries of the observer.

Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and close in upon itself. It is the protected place of disciplinary monotony…. One must eliminate the effects of imprecise distributions, the uncontrolled disappearance of individuals, their diffuse circulation, their unusable and dangerous coagulation…33

In the perceived spatial experience of the city, spaces with a preponderance to horizontality, where public space is controlled upon the rotation of the gaze, coincides with an easily regulated, controlled space.

The importance of the pictorial logic of the panorama invention is that it allowed the inclusion of a multiplicity of focal points. This circular device and its painted internal walls is a similar observation device as the space that is composed by street theater; a permeable, diffuse frame where the crowds’ multiplicity of gazes in a frequently circular disposition surrounded by buildings that compose the diffuse, permeable “walls” of the theater. However, the inversion that occurs in street theater as an ephemeral device makes the beholder blend with the urban landscape, and the entertainment image becomes a morphing, moving center. As an inverted panorama, the aggregate of spectators become the multiplicity of focal points, part of the canvas of the representation of the city.

The Threat of The Masses The panorama allowed for a limited amount of people that could enjoy the space simultaneously. As a device for popular entertainment, it fragmented the most threatening invention of the nineteenth century cities: the masses.

With the advent of photography, two exemplary cases lead to an attempt to humanize the idea of the masses, traditionally linked to a threatening proletariat by a rather conservative group of sociologists of the Weimar Republic. Sociologists and social psychologists, heavily influenced by the writings of Gustave Le Bon, considered the crowds of the modern city as a group that desensitized the individual in lure of a homogenized introduction

group. Dwelling on the concept of masses and its visual relationship, sociologist Theodor Geiger coined the

20

33 Michael Foucault, “Discipline: Docile bodies” in Discipline and Punishment, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1995), 141–143.

term “optical masses,” to refer to the visual phenomenon specifically, in which the subject was “too far away to discern people individually; (therefore) they appear as masses in the field of vision.”34 In what today would be an ethnographic attempt to document the social spectrum of Weimar Germany, August Sander intended to photograph all professions, classes, and groups of the German society, in his words “from earthbound men to the highest peaks of culture in finest differentiation, and then downwards to the idiots.”35 The eye of this one man is a contrast, as a social-identifying visual representation, to the project of the magazine Der Arbreiter-Fotograf, in which workers were taught photography and thus compiled a sum of many eyes, spectators from the inside of the masses. This sum of eyes presented in the compilation of Der Arbreiter-Fotograf magazine is a step further from the definition Geiger, from one unified “optical mass”, to Sanders’ deconstruction of the mass, into a multiple view from the inside. Anthropologist Stefan Johnsson concludes on the possibilities of a crowd as a series of collective identifications, rather than the alienation of the individual; The importance of the masses represented here is not that they destroy a person’s individual identity but that they offer a social space where the human subject undergoes a concurrent socialization and individuation, sensing what it is like to shape one’s individual identity by adapting to, or deviating from, the norms and forms that the collective makes available. In this view, the masses signify not a fall from social organization to disorder, but an ongoing reorganization of social passions.36 These artistic experiments with crowds during the Weimar Republic are a precedent for the street theater plays of the 1960s and beyond, as the latter purposefully rebuilt that social space that concurrently socializes and individuates. Analyzed as a spatial device that alters the behavior of crowds in public spaces, street theater incorporates the features of the theatrical devices described above to configure an “inverted panorama” constituted by a multiplicity of gazes. Along with the urban setting, the crowd of spectators frame street theater with diffuse borders. These aesthetic forms are a choice for morphological comparisons because they share a problematic of modern cities as their audience is composed by the crowds of an evolving modern society. The following chapters

34 Stefan Johnsson, “Authority Versus Anarchy: Allegories of the Mass in Sociology and Literature,” in Crowds and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 85.

35 August Sander, “In der Photographie gibt es keine ungeklarten Schatten,” quoted in Johnsson, Crowds, 89.

36 Stefan Johnsson, “Authority Versus Anarchy: Allegories of the Mass in Sociology and Literature,” in Crowds and Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 171.

morphology of street theater

examine how these “inverted panoramas” operated in context.

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Fig. 13. Six Public Acts in Italy, 1975, The Living Theatre Archive at Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

Fig. 14. Alvaro Hoppe, The Trip of Maria and Jose to Belen [El Viaje de María y José a Belén], 1981, Santiago. Photogra-pher Personal Collection.

(First Page) Fig. 1. The Living Theatre, Denunciation Pamphlet for Demonstrations at the New York Embassy of Chile (Front and Back Cover), October 1973. Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

introduction

(Left) Fig. 15. Denunciation Pamphlet for Demonstrations at the Embassy of Chile, October, 1973. The Living Theatre Archives at Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

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morphology of street theater

Chapter 1.

A Geography of Street Performance The Living Theater performances towards street theater in context.

Avignon, Sao Paulo, Pittsburgh: 1968 - 1975.

Architecture does not create community, but it can provide a setting conducive for the playing out of collective values — Michael Sorkin1

On Christmas Eve 1970, the German-born actress and director Judith Malina, wrote of the first opening performances of The Legacy of Cain at Vila Buraco Frio (Cold Hole), “We move with excitement because it is the first of our street theatre. It is the entrance into the other side of the world. We have been warned of the dangers. It is “opening night” in the midday sun.”2 Malina, who founded The Living Theater with her husband Julian Beck, writes in anticipation of the performances of Buraco Frio which were to take place in a Sao Paulo favela. She writes with a passion and vision that harbingers how these unique experimental performances would later impact theater culture around the globe.

Beginning around 1968 up through the 1980s, troupes such as the Odin Theater, Bread and Puppet, Experimental Theater of Cali, and Augusto Boal, all contributed to the experience of theater as a distinct break from previous models of the commercial theater. As the theater historian Hans Thies-Lehmann has described this movement, these experimental groups formed an extended family committed to a post-dramatic theater which focused more and more on performance factors outside the script.3 The movement was composed of nomadic troupes which were committed to diverse new forms of acting and collective creation, and many of them, in particular Boal and The Bread and Puppet, underscored convictions for how theater could help inform political change through these methodologies.

Although each of these troupes contributed to innovations in the construction of alternative practices of theater in diverse cities, the Living Theater, founded in New York in 1947, is exemplar of a refoundation of the medieval form of street theater in the period, and its potential for operating politically and aesthetically in public space post-1968. The Living Theater’s history in relation to anarchist movements, and the way 1 Michael Sorkin, “When Good Architects Design Bad Buildings,” in All Over the Map: Writing on Buildings and Cities (Verso: New York, 2011), 144.

2 Malina’s diary, reactions of surprise and excitement after they were inside the bus ride home. Living Theatre Archives at the Beinecke Library.

3 Hans Thies-Lehmann, Post-dramatic Theater, trans. Karen Jürs-Munby (New York: Routledge, 2006).

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their performances disrupted the traditional uses of spaces throughout Europe, the United States and Latin America, is especially revelatory of the possibilities for street theater as a cultural discourse and new form of public communication. Many of The Living Theater’s plays serve as milestones in the history of avantgardist theater for the ways they establish key characteristics of the genre, and for the powerful influence these performances had on the local practices of theater when they were performed abroad—in eight different languages, in 28 countries on five continents.

The Living Theater’s performances held in the French city of Avignon in the summer of 1968 were especially legendary for shaking the premises of the foundation of the modern arts Festival held every summer in the courtyard of the Palais des Papes. Created by the director Jean Vilar in 1947, the summer arts Festival d’Avignon, was impacted by the anti-authoritarian student movement in Paris in 1968 resulting in a significant decrease in performances and virtually no French performances. These historical circumstances

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were especially conducive to shaping The Living Theater’s pivotal work.

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Fig. 16. Avignon. Castle of the Popes, Rocher des Domes, Celestine Cloister and main spaces used during the Festival du Avignon of 1968. Drawing by Author.

Two years later, the company’s experience in Brazil defied the homogenization of political discourse in public space within the reign of a dictatorship—The Living Theater’s performances in the 1970s in the prisons of Brazil can be seen as a direct precedent to the experiences of local artists ten years later working within the confines of the Chilean dictatorship. In 1974 The Living Theater landed in Pittsburgh in the steel mills, where they affiliated with the anarchist movement of the Wobblies (IWW, International Workers of the World). Here in Pittsburgh The Living Theater practiced street theater almost exclusively, refining the instruments they had created to disrupt space.

In this opening chapter, I will examine The Living Theater’s praxis in the cities of Avignon, Sao Paulo, and Pittsburgh. My argument is that a close examination of the troupe’s work in these cities is essential for it frames the theoretical grounds of street theater in the years to come. As each city became a different backdrop, audience, or even enemy, The Living Theater’s challenge and determination to disrupt the built environment became heightened as well. The built environment--city streets; favelas; schools; prisons; palace courtyards; steel mills—increasingly became for the Living Theater built representations of the oppressions of the State and Private Corporations. For this reason, a clear reading of the relationship between place and theater is intrinsic for an understanding of the power of street theater in the second half of the 20th century.

Avignon: Modern Festival in the Built Legacy of the French Popes From the height of Rocher des Doms gardens, planted in the nineteenth century, above the medieval city of Avignon, the layers of its history are made visible come to sight—from the papal enclave to the Rhône River to the gates of Saint Michel. The ruins of Pont Bénézet, constructed in the twelfth century, lay behind the Petit Palais, which encloses a system of public places to the south, and is organized so as to face the Palace of the Popes; Ceccano’s Livrée; hotels of the eighteenth century surrounding the Place de l’Horloge; and the Rue de la Republique, which then opens up to the modern city. The wall ramparts—carefully studied

by Viollet le Duc—enclose this only mirror city of Rome: a city of once luxurious papacies, condemned by Dante Allighieri as well as Petrarch. Nineteenth century alterations provide an orthogonal openness along the Rue de la République (former Rue Bonaparte), and narrow alleys and small corner openings lead along

Beginning in 1947, the space of the papal enclave gradually became the site for the annual theater festival that would take over each summer the medieval city of Avignon. What began as a series of performances in the court of the Palace of the Popes, later expanded eastward to the Carmelite Cloister in 1967, and then to the south of the city to the Celestine Cloister in 1968.4 This expansion of the festival increased significantly the scale of the experience of the audience extending from beyond the court of the Palace to the whole dimension of the medieval city; moving from court to court and making full advantage of the in-between spaces of the city’s medieval and entangled alleys.

4 Emmanuelle Loyer and Antoine de Baecque eds, Histoire du Festival d’Avignon (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 241–243.

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the kilometer-wide medieval city in its east-west axis.

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French theater director and actor Jean Vilar commenced what would become the Festival of Avignon in the early post-war years. It is still going on today: the direction of the Festival—a non-governmental organization— every summer transforms the medieval city and its environs into a forum of theater and debate, focusing on large audiences and with a curating process that brings together directors and artists from across Europe and the globe.5 The Living Theatre’s performances of 1968 at the Festival depicted a pivotal time not only for the festival of Avignon but for the rediscovery of an artform: one that is both deeply rooted in ancient forms, and is very much in response to contemporary socio-political events around the world. The Living Theater’s performances in 1968 are perhaps especially significant for Fig.17. Jean Vilar, c. 1947, Palace of the Popes (Photograph by Mario Atzinger. In Jean Vilar par lui-même. Edited by the Association for a Jean Vilar Foundation. Avignon: Maison Jean Vilar, 1991, 3.)

they marked the troupe’s earliest attempts to move beyond more traditional venues and to move to the streets. In Avignon, The Living Theater used the public street as an integral part of their performance. In so doing they began to shape as broad an audience as possible, using the integration of the physical

street in collaboration with the theater to create a new space for furthering social and political change.

The summer Festival of Avignon of 1968, in its 21st version that year, was a conflicted one—for some, a sequel to the volatile events that marked the civil unrest of May 1968. The Festival of Avignon had become a symbol of the creation of a modern Popular Theater, an ideal mostly developed by Vilar. In 1968 these established paradigms of the administration of the Avignon Festival came into conflict with the vision of the Artaudian Living Theater collective, as well as a young generation of Situationists, students who had traveled south after the demonstrations in Paris. The political alignments of this event were rather eclectic: the Marxist, rigorous Situationists did not precisely share the Anarchist sentiment regarding a vision of revolution.6 In turn, for the administrators and many local citizens, the Living Theatre transgressed the norms of behavior and public decorum which allowed for this urban festival to take place successfully in the first place.7 What is clear is that the outcome of the Festival in 1968 changed the way the medieval city was used during the following summers: increasingly, using the streets would become more of a priority, and the Festival expanded outside the walls of the historic enclave.

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The Living: Nomadic Theater Tribe

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5 “Le Festival d’Avignon: History: 2003–2013,” Festival d’Avignon, accessed April 15, 2016, http://www.festival-avignon.com/en/ history 6 This is the opinion of historians Emmanuelle Loyer and Antoine de Baecque when observing the paradoxical alliance between the universe of this American counter-culture collective and the French leftists student movement, including the 22 Mars Situationists. Loyer and Baecque write, “…it comes to our attention how foreign the pacifist, almost Christian rhetoric (of the Living Theatre) is from the martial language of the French extreme left and the politicized fringe of students, where the political mold is of a Marxist revision… their styles of revolt are opposed.” Histoire du Festival d’Avignon, 264.

7 Loyer and Baecque, Histoire de Festival, 271.

The protagonists of the dissent that year in Avignon were the German-born Judith Malina and the expressionist painter Julian Beck. The Living Theatre was the most long-lived tribe – troupe – cell – collective – company (as they distinctly called themselves along the years) of American avant-garde theater. Responding critically to a commercial identity of Broadway Theater, Malina and Beck started an artistic endeavor that grew from defying conventions onstage, to a reassessment of the relationship between actor and spectator. As described Arnold Aronson, in Avignon in the summer of 1968 an artistic scene was reborn where the spatial quality of performances became especially relevant, and a neoclassical and Renaissance model of dramaturgy was replaced. This new American neo-avant-garde theater differed in striking ways from previous thespian creations as it was “not fundamentally lineal, illusionistic, thematic, or psychological,”8 to define a new theater of relations and juxtapositions rather than one of narrative—the Living Theater grew into a form of theatrical performance that was grounded fundamentally and primordially in spatial terms.9 In 1968, when Paradise Now premiered in the Avignon festival, The Living Theater pushed forward two novelties beyond their previous creations; first, they

Fig. 18. Living Theatre presenting The Brig Dollar, summer 1968, Carmelite Cloister, Avignon (Photograph by Gianfranco Mantegna. In We, The Living Theater, by Aldo Rostagno. New York: Ballantine Books, 1970, 83.)

pursued a longstanding historical connection between performance and the streets; and secondly, they confronted the public directly—looking into the eyes of their spectator and asking the audience questions. Through these actions the actors of The Living Theater sought to provoke very directly the need for an active response from their audience towards political and social issues such as war, drugs, and cultural freedom.10 The Beginnings: Avignon, Southern Utopia It was by chance that Jean Vilar came across Avignon as a site for theatrical performance. Poet René Char and art critic-historian Christian Zervos put together an art exhibition in the Palace of the Popes, in 1947, 8 Arnold Aronson, “Origins of the Avant-Garde,” in American Avant-garde Theatre: a History (New York: Routledge, 2000), 5.

9 Gertrude Stein put forward the idea of a landscape play in which “as in a landscape, the observer is … free to look at specific elements within the landscape at leisure and in any sequence.” Artaud, translated to English in 1958, was interested in a ritual theater, where a spiritual transformation is possible during the play, not accountable only through text: “the new physical language that he proposed for the stage could not “be defined except by its possibilities for dynamic expression in space as opposed to the expressive possibilities of spoken dialogue.” Finally, it was John Cage who had given Artaud’s Theater and its’ Double to Mary Caroline Richardson for translation. His work for the restructuring of music “led to a radical reorganization and understanding of theater and dance.” See Aronson, “Theories and Foundations,” in American avant-garde, 27–31.

10 Paradise Now began with the actors exclaiming: “I don’t know how to stop the war; I can’t travel without a passport; I can’t take my clothes in public.” Their radical theater experiments gradually approximated the spectator with novel strategies of engagement, structuring plays as lived, physical experiences over narrative. In The Connection, (1949), the spectator would see the transformation of the body of a drug addict. In The Brig, (1951) the spectator would witness the violence of prison and torture in a military base. Further along the Becks would incurse creating plays that didn’t have a playwright, where the movements and relationships among the troupe’s members were an essential part of the play. Such is the case in Mysteries and Smaller Pieces (1954).

11 Loyer and Baecque, Histoire du Festival d’Avignon, 23–27.

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and invited Vilar to perform in the court as part of the exhibition’s events.11 Vilar chose three plays for the

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event, among them most famous Richard II by Shakespeare. As one of the leading young figures of a circle of theater makers highly critical to the comedy theater of the bourgeoisie—especially the ostentatious practices of its audiences—Vilar was pleased to perform far from what he saw as the nucleus of the problem: downtown Paris. It was for Vilar an act of decentralization, one of the fundamental practices to achieve a theater that is understood as public service12 rather than luxury.

The magazine Théâtre Populaire was founded in 1953, as an intellectual effort Fig. 19. Fragment of seventeenth century map. (Anonymous. “Carte du Contat d’Avignon et Venaisin,” Paris, Biblioteque National de France, Department of Maps and Plans.

parallel to that of Vilar’s activism for a theater cleansed from Parisian excesses. Part of the redaction committee included Guy Dumur, a theater critic who would write for the magazine for the ten years of its circulation, and who remained committed to the project of the Populaire after the publication was terminated in 1964. Roland Barthes, too, had an important role during the first years—he was an essential adviser to the main editor, Robert Voisin, in terms of contents, strategy and publishing of

the journal13— but a few years later would become disenchanted with the ideal of popular theater, although the theme of theater would remain important to him.14 Along with Vilar, and with him many practitioners involved previously in the Vieux-Colombier,15 the magazine Théâtre Populaire became an important arm for the investigation of the possibility and intellectual concerns of the popular theater.

In the first issue of Théatre Populaire [TP], TP editor Guy Dumur published an acclaiming review of the festival under the title “La revolution d’Avignon.” Through his descriptions of the early project of the Avignon Festival, the idea of the ville as the island of Utopia came to light; Dumur highlights the strong presence of the forces of nature in Avignon, a place he described as almost an abandoned land, where the city’s natural phenomenon appealed especially to the intellectual Parisian who saw in Avignon an alternative to Paris’ artificiality. 16 Avignon, as described by Dumur, is marked by the heat and the high sun, the tilting waters of the river Rhône, from color serpent at dawn to “blue as only on that day (of the summer)”.17 Dumur saw the

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town within its medieval walls as a project of unity: the city in its entirety resembles for him a cathedral of the

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12 Jean Vilar, Le Théâtre, service public (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 178.

13 Andy Stafford, “Constructing a Radical Popular Theatre: Roland Barthes, Brecht and Théâtre Populaire,” in French Cultural Studies 7, issue 19, 37n16.

14 Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1973).

15 The Vieux Colombier was an education center and playhouse established in 1917 by theater actor, director and critic Jacques Copeau. He was an essential figure in the reform of French theater in the turn of the century, adapting ideas from Gordon Craig and Adolphe Appia, who he met personally, and other modern theater artists such as Jacques Dalcroze, Danchenko and Meyerhold. Copeau’s reforms came from his critic of a theater driven by mercantilism rather than artistic concerns, as what he saw in Boulevard theaters; a constrained conformity of the French classics by the Comedie-Francaise state-supported theaters, and a bigger emphasis on literary work and dramaturgy than integral theater work in the Intependent Theaters of the naturalistic movement led by André Antoine. See Albert M. Katz, “The Genesis of the Vieux Colombier: The Aesthetic Background of Jacques Copeau,” in Educational Theatre Journal 19 (December 1967), 434-438.

16 Guy Dumur, «La Revolution d’Avignon,» in Théâtre Populaire 1 (1954), 30–39.

17 Dumur, Revolution, 31.

past, a “pyramidal allure,”18 especially as seen from a high point with its palace-and-walls layout. According to Dumur, Avignon’s allure in this manner shared characteristics with other historical urban cores such as Toledo, Sienne and Urbino.

Paul Puaux, part of Vilar’s directing team from 1963 and succeeding director, describes the yearly festivals in Avignon as constributing to the dream of utopia; “village—unity of place; summer—unity of time; theater—unity of action. The town plays. She has a role. Like the Big Priests, like the comedians, like the public.”19

Fig. 20. Court of the Palace of the Popes with seats and terraced benches, from 1954 to 1966 (Photograph

by Mario Atzinger. In Loyer and Baecque, Histoire du Festival, 136.)

The force of the popular theater project unifies an aesthetical turn with an ethical one in Avignon at this point, each one seemingly as exciting and novel as the other. The nude walls of the large midi gothique palace courtier, the open sky and simple light installations, evoke the scenario of Richard II as an enclosed theater could never achieve, merging simplicity and splendor. Dumur stressed on the Palace and its’ (so frequently cruel) history as the ultimate scenic arrangement within Avignon, “it was the ville that would dictate Vilar the choice of spectacles.”20 In a similar vein, Barthes describes the hopes that popular theater would fulfil.

After a visit to Avignon and its cold, muddy court of the Palace of the Popes in winter, he wrote “…before this neutral, available place, it seemed the better way to see this: Popular Theater is a theater that gives confidence to man. Old humanist infatuation? Very much so. For example, the open sky scene. What does it mean, but that the power to qualify the tragic place is confided to the spectator himself, and that it is at last man, and not the technician, that produces the spectacle?”21 The Festival of Avignon in the years to come was the product of a cohesive crew under the close direction of a single individual, Vilar. For 17 years, the festival’s program developed into a larger project for artistic

18 Ibid.

19 «Il y a la ville—unité de lieu. Il y a l’été—unité des temps. Il y a le théâtre—unité d’action. La ville joue. Elle tient son rôle. Comme le « grande prêtre », comme les comédiens, comme le public.» Paul Puaux, Avignon en festivals, ou, les utopies nécessaires (Paris : Hachette, 1983), 22.

20 Dumur, Revolution, 34.

21 «…c’est dans cette fin d’après-midi aigre, devant ce lieu disponible et neutre, qu’il m’a semblé le mieux voir ceci : le Théâtre populaire est un théâtre qui fait confiance à l’homme. Vieille enflure humaniste ? Plus tellement. Prenez la scène ouverte par exemple. Que signifie-t-elle, sinon qu’ici le pouvoir de qualifier le lieu tragique est confié au spectateur lui-même et que c’est enfin l’homme, et non le technicien qui fait son spectacle ?,» Roland Barthes, “Avignon, l’hiver” http://www.laparafe.fr/2013/01/ avignon-lhiver-roland-barthes/. In 1954, Barthes compared the emotion of contemporary sports to that of ancient tragedy in Théâtre Populaire 2, finding in both the exclusion of individual passion in favor of a collective passion, conveyed from actors and athletes alike through physical expression as symbols of emotion. Symbols of emotion were conveyed also by the audience as the protagonists of this collective passion. Yet for Barthes there was an important difference to be drawn with ancient tragedy where the message of “the true political emotion” could be conveyed. Ancient tragedy for Barthes was a powerful communicative experience where the sense of communitarianism could lead to the shedding of tears for issues such as “the entrapment of man in a tyranny of a barbarian religion, or of an inhumane civic place.” Since the loss of ancient tragedy we have cried in vain, Barthes claimed. See Roland Barthes, Pouvoir the la tragédie antique in Théâtre Populaire 2 (1953), 25.

22 Notable is the avant-premiere of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise. Agnès Varda was also official photographer of many events.

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disciplines, and thus live music presentations and premiered cinema projections were incorporated.22 Two

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venues were integrated as crowds grew and travelers settled for the summers in the ville: the Carmelite Cloister in 1967, and the Celestine Cloister for the summer of 1968. Vilar also established a theater in the suburbs of Paris that he directed during the year. 23 Yet, in the time span between 1947 and 1968, the success of Vilar’s project of a popular theater would become increasingly open to critiques. Among the growing diversity of voices and ideas debating the nature and future of popular theater, Barthes soon distanced himself from Vilar’s position. In turn, Barthes found in Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble the ultimate model for the success of popular theater: “to reach a mass public, to aim for a repertory drawn from high culture; and to be firmly located within the dramaturgy of the avant-garde.”24 Although the Théâtre Populaire magazine ceased publication in 1964,25 a number of theater collectives continued to delve into different projects for radical theater. Eventually, one of these radical collectives arrived to Avignon, coincidentally in the summer after May of 1968.

Differing kinds of Paradise The Living Theater arrived in Avignon on May 12. Paul Puaux, who was director of the Avignon Festival

from 1971-79, had seen the Living perform in Paris Mysteries and Smaller Pieces. While almost all French companies were unavailable to perform in the summer of 1968 due to the uprisings, the crew of the festival decided to focus on only two collectives of performing arts and cinema—The Living was the only troupe to represent theater that year. Their stage was prepared in the Carmelite Cloister. 26 They performed Mysteries and Smalles Pieces; Frankenstein; The Brig; and The Connection, and they premiered Paradise Now, recently created in Cefalu, Sicily. These performances by the Living would lead to the biggest source of conflict with the production of the festival since the festival’s beginnings in the 1940s.

Paradise Now was structured in eight chapters, each one composed of a rite, followed by a vision, leading to an action. This organization was mapped in a chart-poster which explains the play, with the phrases “the chart is the map,” “the essential trip is the voyage from the many to the one” and “the plot is the revolution” written at the bottom of the spread. This New Age Kabbalah/Tantric Buddhism chart intended to portray how by the end of the play, the audience could reach a “state of permanent revolution.” Each chapter was named after a type of revolution as steps (rungs) to get there. These steps were represented as the Revolution of Cultures, Revelation, Gathered Forces, the Sexual Revolution, the Revolution of Action, of Transformation,

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and of Being.

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23 As the Festival’s success grew in Avignon, Vilar was championed by the State Fine Arts Secretariat Jeanne Laurent to develop a project in the suburbs of Paris, which led to the Théâtre National Populaire in Chaillot in 1951. Much of what was written about Popular Theater referred to the Parisian theater. (http://www.festival-avignon.com/en/history) 24 See Andy Stafford, “Constructing a Radical Popular Theatre: Roland Barthes, Brecht and Théâtre Populaire,” in French Cultural Studies 7, issue 19, 38.

25 Mario Consolini explains how several of the writers felt frustrated with this decision and eventually were able to integrate their new ideas and critique of the intersection of theater and politics during the 70s in “Travail Théatral.” See Mario Consolini, “L’eredità di “Théâtre Populaire”: verso “Travail Théâtral,” in Théâtre Populaire, 1953–1964: Storia di una rivista militante (Roma: Bulzoni Editori, 2002), 402.

26 Adapted for performances for the first time by set designer Camille Demeangeat. Loyer and Baecque, Histoire de Festival, 241.

“The Street” In place of the last action is printed, broadly, “The Street,” colon and blank space. “There are no archangels at the door of this Paradise.”27 This is how the play ended for the first time performed in Avignon; outside the Carmelite Cloister, halfnude and spirited under the spell of the play, the actors and audience paraded the narrow medieval passages at 2 am. The use of disorder in the street was an intuitive one, albeit disorder opened the alleys for future street theater as it hadn’t before.

Fig. 21. The Living Theatre, Paradise Now Chart, 1968, varying dimension posters. Beinecke Library, New Haven.

The play incrementally recreated the Living’s own idea of paradise, and it was to prove a very different one from that of the defenders of popular theater. The Living’s eight-stage rite to Revolution was a sample of life that could occur after an assault of the established culture and a discovery of paradise in a non-violent Anarchism. “History repeats itself as caricature,”28 considered an offended Vilar, as this time it was not only the culture of the bourgeois that The Living wanted to abolish but rather that of Western History altogether. To set this forth, its members wore anodyne clothes in place of costumes; their actions actively blurred all cultural senses of “publicness,” and they made use only of their bodies to recreate the forms where their “Visions” could be housed.

In this performance, “the street” became an essential concept to undertake, inviting the spirited audience to inhabit this representative typology of public space. It is an initial approach in which the play is not yet street theater, but constitutes an origin for further exploration.

Bodies as Public Sculpture The first of these forms was composed of four grimacing faces gathered in a vertical Totem; arms helped as the Natural Man who serve as examples of tribal and communitarian alternatives.”29 They later portrayed a compass between four actors back-to-back and one on top; the compass spins in centrifugal force until they break off and stop at the edge of the stage. The actors fell in what seems like random positions across the stage, but when prompted to explain where the spectator and actor have arrived, their bodies suddenly become the lines of typography to spell “ANARCHISM:” one, two or three actors entwined in demanding postures to express each letter. And “what is Anarchism?” someone asks; the actors re-entwine to spell, “PARADISE.” 27 Pierre Biner, “The Map and the Territory,” in The Living Theatre (New York: Horizon Press, 1972), 213.

28 As he wrote in private notes on the Festival. Loyer and Boeque, Histoire du Festival, 263.

29 The Becks cited in Biner, The Living, 188.

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to gesticulate what stood for a Native American depiction of an animal: “…represented here by the Indians

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Fig. 22. Scene of Paradise Now, Rung 1, Vision of the Death and Resurrection of the American Indians.

(Pho-tograph by Gianfranco Mantegna in We, The Living Theater, by Aldo Rostagno. New York: Bal-lantine Books, 1970, 188.)

The construction of these visions as a tableau vivant enhance an independence from context, rejecting all edifices of the established culture. They had no need for costumes nor scenography—moreover, they rejected their physical surrounding when generating a scene. As Christine Boyer writes, So it has been claimed, the power of tableaux lay in their ability to move the spectator to associate the static fragment with an ideal scene drawn from the repertoire of an imaginary theater, and to arouse in the viewer the taste for history and biography, art and literature.30

What the actors presented was an alternative to what was stable and established. Two final forms in the production were constructed only by this technique of choreographic composition: a pentagon where the actors linked hands and represented an ambiguous bestiary, and later a revised image of the Garden of Eden, where “the actors represent the tree of knowledge without distinguishing it from the tree of life.”31 The production finishes with actors mingling with spectators and conducting the spectators to the streets. Among the youth, it was a success: “The enragés in the audience greeted Paradise Now with a spirit of jubilation, and the second performance ended at two in the morning with two hundred spectators marching and chanting on the streets with Le Living, as the group is called in French.”32 Independence from its historic backdrop characterizes the play, but a simple text inclusion localizes the play in Avignon: their calls to action during the third chapter (the “Revolution of Gathered Forces”) informs the audience of regional statistics: “600 prisoners, 36.000 policemen, 12.000 industry workers.”33 Their only

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physical connection with the walls of the Carmelite Cloister occured during the “Revolution of Being,” a

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30 Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), 371.

31 Biner, The Living, 213.

32 John Tytell, “The Events of May,” in The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 235.

33 “Le Théâtre est dans la Rue,” in Histoire du Festival d’Avignon, 262.

rather spiritual moment near the end of the play, when a section of ruined wall served the purpose of the phrases “Breathe, fly” and served as a site from where the actors would jump into the audience below.

The street inhabitation experience of the ending of Paradise Now within the medieval streets of Avignon closely relates to the medieval form of carnival, the original festive form of theater in Avignon, where people of the marketplace represented the transformation of the ville blurring the distance between festivity and everyday life. As Mikhail Bakhtin describes it, “The carnivalesque crowd in the marketplace or in the streets is not merely a crowd. It is the people as

Fig. 23. Living Theatre presenting The Brig Dollar, stage set by Camille Demeangeat, summer 1968, Carmel-ite Cloister, Avignon (Photograph by Gianfranco Mantegna. In We, The Living Theater, by Aldo Rostagno. New York: Ballantine Books, 1970, 82–3.)

a whole, but organized in their own way, the way of the people. It is outside of and contrary to all existing forms of the coercive socioeconomic and political organization, which is suspended for the time of the festivity.”34

In their street theater plays years later, the way public space was inhabited departed from its medieval origin as the role of the professional artist and spectator adopted clearly differentiated roles.

Social Repercussions in Avignon For Jean Vilar the attacks against the Avignon Festival by students and by the Living Theater in the summer of 1968 presented a confusing ideological scenario. Jean-Pierre Roux, a local conservative politician, took the opportunity to attack the collective to his advantage: “Who receives, who nurtures those bums, those Freudians of the Living Theatre whose immorality is an offense to our youth and our workers?”35 A Paris, would find in these events momentum for the “Off Avignon,” and Beaux-Arts students coming from Paris produced suggestive posters, which placed blame on the organization of the Festival for its compliance with the conservative government of Charles De Gaulle and his minister of culture at the time, André Malraux. When the Living was prohibited by the organizers of the Festival to perform for free in the Cité Louis-Grose district (workers’ district), leftist students made and distributed posters which called the festival administration a product of a consumerist, dominating culture. In this context appeared the collective 34 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Popular-Festive Forms,” in Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 256 35 Biner, “Avignon: Exit,” in The Living, 214.

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group of young theater makers, some of who were present at the manifestations in the Odeon Theater in

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Fig. 24. Marcel Jacno, Festival’s Three Keys iconic poster, 1954, Maison Jean Vilar, Avignon.

Fig. 25. Beaux- Arts student counterposters for the Festival, 1968, varying dimension posters. Vaucluse Department Archives, Franck Couvreur, Avignon.

chants of “Vilar-Béjart-Salazar,” referring to both the dance company scheduled to perform in the Court of the Palace of the Popes as well as the name of the Portuguese dictator; also distributed was the image of Vilar as an avaricious Pope of Avignon.

In the midst of multiple political uses of the Living’s performances, their prohibition to perform in the Cité Louis-Gros and a solicitation by the organization and the local municipality not to perform Paradise Now in the streets again, The Living Theater decided to leave Avignon with an eleven-point fervent statement in hand, concerning particularly the disinterest of the Festival to serve those who cannot pay. Paragraph number seven read; “Because the time has come for us at last to begin to refuse to serve those who do not want the knowledge and power of art to belong to any but those who can pay for it, who wish to keep the people in the dark, who work for the Power Elite, who wish to control the life of the artist and the lives of people.” 36 If the manifestations of May 1968 and the contestation to Vilar’s direction of the Festival shared any common ground, it was in their commitment to use the streets as a space to communicate their respective messages and discourse. In Avignon, multiple recreations of paradise inevitably came into conflict. The walled medieval ville composed of midi-gothique cloisters, a long abandoned symbol of Christian power, was to represent for Vilar the opportunity of a moral revision of theater; and for Paul Puaux, the medieval city was a symbol for an open house of culture; for The Living Theater, however, the city spoke only of the remnants of a culture that was meant to be abandoned. As the performing Arts critic Ferdinando Taviani stated, The

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Living Theatre essentially was a collective which stood up against the superficial constructed civility that

36

36 Aldo Rostagno, with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, We, the Living Theatre (New York: Ballantine, 1970 ), 222.

they saw in Avignon. 37 In its place The Living Theater produced an understanding of theater performance that was a very public statement against the very concept of the traditional city.

Ironically, in spite of The Living Theater’s stance against the traditional city (represented by Avignon), by expanding through their work the possibilities of behavior in Avignon, the Living also ended up expanding the Festival’s agency in the city. Immediately in the following year—with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Les Clowns—street theater became a formal part of the summer Festival. Mnouchkine’s street theater was a collective creation where the director worked as editor, with itinerant performances and what proved to be an inconveniently heavy stage and scenery to mount and dismount.38 The Living Theater subsequently performed Paradise Now in Geneva, and after four years of absence from their home country, performed it to great expectations in the US; first in Brooklyn, then in New Haven, and during 1968–1969 all over the United States in the American Tour, engaging with students of American universities nationwide to the discussions of the plot of the play, “reaching the permanent revolution.”39 The Living Theater’s Paradise Now was intended to be performed in theaters and gymnasiums—until the very last scene: it is only in its last scene an invitation for the audience to follow the actors outside and merrily parade in a public space. A few years later, with The Legacy of Cain in 1970, and its revised versions The Money Tower and Six Public Acts (premiered in 1974 and 1975 respectively) performing in the streets became in turn an essential condition of The Living Theater’s performances, and entirely composed for the streets in broad daylight.

Brazil: Legacy of Cain40 Buraco Frio, Sao Paulo. December 1970.

Judith Malina, Julian Beck, and a few of the previous crew from the Living Theatre had been in Brazil for six months. They were arriving from Paris, and met Jean Genet, Augusto Boal, and the members of Teatro Oficina among others during their stay in Sao Paulo. The country had been under military dictatorship for six years at the time, under the direction of the recently risen military leader Emílio Garrastazu Médici.

The local actors, particularly their initial hosts from Teatro Oficina, warned The Living Theater crew of the felt there was a climate of potential redemption in the artistic scenes they had encountered. So along with Beck, Mary Mary, Birgit, José Bento and Paulo Augusto, she presented The Legacy of Cain for the first time

37 Ferdinando Taviani, “1964–1980: da un osservatorio particolare,” in Fabrizio Cruciani and Clelia Falletti editors, Civiltà teatrale nel XX secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986) 352–353.

38 Helen Elizabeth Richardson, “The Théâtre du Soleil and the quest for popular theatre in the twentieth century,” PhD diss, (Berkeley: University of California Berkeley, 1990), ProQuest, 25.

39 See Renfrau Neff, The Living Theatre: USA (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1970) and John Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage (New York: Grove Press, 1995).

40 Their performance at the Paulist favela is mostly narrated from the draft of Malina’s diary at Beinecke. No images of this performance were found. Judith Malina, Beinecke Library of Archives and Manuscripts, Living Theatre Records, Box 185.

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dangers of realizing under the political regime any projects of theater with a social message. Malina, however,

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in a Paulistan favela known at the time as Buraco Frio.41 They visited the community before performing the play, and two of the troupe members had scouted out the place in order to find the needed physical spaces for the performance, specifically an unpaved plaza—quadrado— and an earth soccer field.

The attentive audience for The Legacy of Cain in the favela consisted at first mainly of children laughing at the entertaining images the Living provided them with amidst an otherwise ordinary day. Also on hand for the day-time performance was a small passive crowd, including women doing laundry with a visual access towards the play. Yet two moments of revelation in this performance perhaps synthesize the legacy of the Living’s performances in public space. While the plot and structure of this specific performance are not fully described, we know that it contains the basic structure of Six Public Acts, based upon the unusual world depicted by nineteenth-century writer Sacher-Masoch in his own book The Legacy of Cain. Sacher-Masoch’s work influenced the worldview the Becks were trying to express in the series of plays they were to write and perform in the 1970s. An element that was specific to this play, as with Paradise Now, in relation to place, was a huge cake frosted with a giant 10.000 cruzeiros bill that ends the play and invites the audience to celebrate.

The two simple open spaces of the favela were focal points among a multiplicity of activities performed communally and thus served as perfect places for the encounter of many spectators. Malina describes in her diary the first ‘terrific moment’: Jose Bento leaped up onto the box, and shouted, full of terror, confronting the king: “I demand a pair of shoes!”

Then a rich, heavy silence fell on the watchers. Our eyes moved around the circle of barefoot children: their black feet in the warm mud. And the six-year-olds knew suddenly: “this is a play about my feet.” I shuddered with the thrill of enlightenment that the theatre used to bring me as a child when I wept at the great lines (…)

But this was not the illusion of art. This was their dream – that they would ask to the king, and the king would give them shoes.

There was no sound among them under the hot sun. It seemed as if the whole favela was silent in the moment of the barefoot children.42

This moment of great tension for the actors and the audience—given the direct summon of the public’s reality, one that is different and hardly relatable to the actors—is a test of the actors’ relationship with the audience. Are they just cruelly showing them that they have no shoes? Malina is here actively applying a Brechtian idea; an intellectual engagement required from the audience on the neutral presentation of the king in order to assess his words. “Did you work for them, or are you lazy? You will be as rich as I am if you

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work hard enough…”43 says Julian as the king with a paper crown, rising slowly towards José Bento.

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41 Malina describes in her diaries this was an informal name the place received. I haven’t yet found this place in today’s maps.

Living Theatre Records, Box 185.

42 Malina’s diary Draft Part I, December 24, 1970. Beinecke Library of Archives and Manuscripts, Living Theatre Records, Box 185.

43 Ibid.

When Paulo Augusto narrated the end of the story and said: “And he gave him his blessing, but did he ever give him a pair of shoes?” the faith that the children had in the benevolence of the crowned head withered away and they knew that if they were ever to have shoes it would not be the king who would give them to them.44

This indirect satire of the king’s words was followed by the second moment of tension, which tested the relationship between audience and actors. The story of the king was one of a series of stories where the public had “laugh[ed] at love, cheer property, progress, the state and money, and they reject[ed] war and death.” By the end of the play, the actors would end tied up in ropes, part of their image of a holistic enslaving societal system.

Paulo asked if the people would untie us.

A pause followed during which the decisions were made. And I saw a woman and a man come forward out of the people, first timidly, then others, encouraged by their boldness, and then more bravely, began to undo the fetters. Two children are untying Julian, and a barefoot woman is loosening the ropes around Jimmy. Then a man comes towards me, and he unlocks the lock that secures my chains. As he unbinds me he leans over me and whispers: “Amanha o povo vai libertar todo o mundo.” (Tomorrow the people will liberate the whole world.)

Before this tying and untying ending act, the troupe presented the social contract of enslavement as a trance ritual.45 The ending was thus presented as a ritual of communion with the audience: the untying of the actors by the public, whom Malina referred to as their liberators, settled a balance between actors and audience, where the audience rescued the actors, and not the other way around—after which the communal cake of 10.000 cruzeiros lead to an inviting party.

The play had been a success not as an icon of political opposition. Instead of the symbolism it may contain for an international audience and drama criticism circles to perform a play charged with social content within an authoritarian government, as a clandestine performance, the decision to perform inside a favela is audience-oriented. The main challenge is the rapport they, foreigners belonging to a middle-high class families living in extreme poverty, and a prevailing Black population. This successful example of a crafted relationship of actors and audience presents a sensitive application of techniques from the arts of theater to an extreme situation of a specific audience. In an environment where the spaces of the audience are initially invaded by the troupe and one in which they are not required to engage as spectators, a successful rapport for the Living was how the social tension became part of the discourse of the play, and yet this discourse was beyond the social differences between actors and audience.

44 Ibid.

45 Part of the observations from Malina’s diary. A similar ritual is described in Claudio Vicentini, “The Living’s Six Public Acts,” in The Drama Review 19: Expressionism Issue (Sept. 1975), 80–93.

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arts scene, with a Latino and White crew for this show, can have with the specific audience of this favela;

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They had a second, less successful presentation of this play on a festive Sunday. Indeed, the Becks were actually mad at students who helped them with the play when they invited a theater director (Ademar Guerra) to their second performance. The need to transmit to favelados in that moment was more important

Fig. 26. Letter from Fernanda Pivano and Ettore Sottsass to Judith Malina and Julian Beck, sent to prison in Brazil, 1971. The Living Theatre Archives at the Beinecke Library

to The Living Theater than whether or not the play was viewed as successful by Brazilian art critics. Malina chapter 1

had a discussion with Ademar Guerra as they left the place. “Did you notice how it goes from Brechtian to

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Artaudian?” asked Judith. “Yes, but they did not understand that,” replied Ademar. But the descriptions of this first presentation implies the contrary. Being trained and taught on the techniques and ambitious

expectations of Brecht for a new theater with popular audiences, and having read early on Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty,46 the audience-actors relationship as crafted by the Becks contain the intensity of audience rapport that required an intellectual engagement with the audience, and yet it didn’t require a recognition of the specific techniques at play.

As described in Judith’s diaries, The Living Theatre produced ways to incrementally engage with the audience, in this play first through a tense critical intellectual engagement and subsequently with the invitation to “solve” the play as such. Possibly also influenced by Boal and the Theater of the Oppressed with this open end that depends on the audience, but reminiscent of the Paradise Now finale, the Living Theater settles a relationship with spectators in which they gradually gain confidence to participate. Wrapping the experience in this case with a cake, the performance becomes an invitation to induce a communal use of the streets, now transforming the celebratory experience in a clearer message towards shared information and art.

It was a later performance in Ouro Preto that led to their three month imprisonment, which required the intervention of a wide international community of artists to achieve their release.

Radical Theater in the topography of Pittsburgh Malina, Beck, and the troupe that followed and integrated the Living in this period arrived in Pittsburgh in 1974. The city had been transformed by one of the earliest urban renewal processes of the US, and so their work converses and enters in conflict with a Modern, ultimately capitalistic ideology where the center of the city represents the values of capital, whereas the residential districts they engaged with tell the story of immigration and the laborer history of steelworkers. Three places chosen for their performances represent relevant aspects of Pittsburgh’s history and urban transformation: the Gateway Center, the Golden Triangle, and East Carson in the South Side, where they also performed in front of Jones & Laughlin Steel Company.

The troupe lived in the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for over a year between 1974–1975. The city was in between the processes of a later stage of the ongoing urban renewal process, and the beginning of what would become a radical deindustrialization. The places chosen to perform downtown had only recently taken shape as the troupe encountered the city, and would continue to change well into the 80s as Pittsburgh went

46 Malina’s draft diary. Beinecke Library of Archives and Manuscripts, Living Theatre Records, Box 185.

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from a major blue collar city to a white collar services labor enclave.

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Fig. 27. Downtown Pittsburgh. Areas 1, 2, and 3 indicate Six Public Acts performances in May and September, 1975; Area 4 indicates a performance of The Money Tower in front of the Jones & Laughlin Steel Mill, which closed down a few years later. According to drawn maps in The Living Theatre Archives at Beinecke Library.

Notes recalling the life in Pittsburgh in the archives of Judith Malina reveal their intentions to understand the social structures of the city and be involved within the diverse labor communities.47 In turn, playwright, rehersal, set design working files, and distribution material shows their unprecedented aim to perform in the streets of Pittsburgh and reach the workers as their main audience. Their affiliation in February of 1975 to the Anarchist-Labor movement of the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) stands out as part of their will to blend in with the worker communities they reached out to, although their identification with Anarchism ideology had consolidated years before. Their decision to work in Pittsburgh, city of the steelworker in the mid-70s, was intrinscally connected with the desire to pursue a crowd that identified shattering capitalism

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as a common enemy.48

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47 The reports on Pittsburgh separate 25 “class structures,” indicating identity categories that were represented in these social groups when the social group was not a specific ethnic or gender category in itself (she marks if these include black and/or white, women and/or men). Although partly social categories that seek to explain Pittsburgh from the eyes of a foreigner, they are mostly a categorization of their desired audience, for the groups defined do not include a dominating class or identity. The 25 categories sometimes include the marks (B/W–W/M) indicating race and gender. These categories are: “Marginal lumpen street people, Welfare unemployed workers, Poorest-paid workers, Median paid workers, Better paid workers, Minor officials (technicians, social workers etc), Low paid professionals (teachers, nurses, etc), Pre-school children, School children, High school children, College students, Student-age marginal, drop outs, Young workers, Ethnic groups (African Americans, Chicano, others), Special groups (co-ops, communes, sports clubs), Police, Municipal employees, Political groups (& peace groups, etc), Religious groups, Women’s groups, Gay liberation and other equals and life-style liberation groups, Ex-prisoners and prisoner support groups, Veterans, Mental patients, Older people groups, Alas: theater and other artist friend groups.” Judith Malina, Beinecke Library of Archives and Manuscripts, Living Theatre Records, Box 167, Pittsburgh Campaign.

48 Aware that other troupes focused on diversity politics—for example, Chicano theater—could represent identity and civil rights demands in ways they could never achieve, the Living devoted their work to a universal search for Anarchism and freedom for the oppressed. Interview, Wetszteon*

Establishing in Pittsburgh: Finally, Public Space With a Carnegie Mellon grant, the Living Theatre was able to establish in 1974–5 for over a year and support the thirteen members of the company at the time, while doing workshops at Carnegie-Mellon University and reaching out to schools, sports clubs, and other social centers as part of their research.49 Part of their responsibilities also included performing in the Three Rivers Arts Festival, a festival organized by the Carnegie Institute and the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States.50 When the opportunity to perform in Pittsburgh came, the Renaissance City seemed like an obvious choice to put the political experiences of life abroad to the test in American soil. As Jack Gelber claims, “the Living Theatre was to bring home the evils of capitalism in smokestack America.”51 Ross Wetzteon from The Village Voice remarked The Becks like to stress their involvement in the community. Already they’ve started two food co-ops, Judith is the recording secretary of the community’s citizens’ police advisory council... and they’ll open a storefront soon. But why Pittsburgh? “After Brazil, we’re very much into metallurgical workers,” Judith answers, alas.

“Our entire civilization rests on the mining industry.”52

Six Public Acts in Three Public Places.

Following their ambition set in the earlier play Paradise Now, the Living presented alternative allegories of biblical passages in an attempt to re-write Western culture. The Living created two plays to be fully performed as street theater while in Pittsburgh: Six Public Acts [SPA] and The Money Tower. They were part of the Legacy of Cain “masterplan of plays” envisioned by the Becks, after the homonimus antology by Leopold SacherMasoch. 53 The idea was to perform a series of 150 plays that would take over public spaces of a city during a period of approximately two weeks.54 SPA consisted of six acts in six different locations, disrupting the built environment with a performance of counter-symbolism. It started with a Preamble that led to five different Acts in different places of a city, “Houses” that represented diverse institutions of the society they wished to abolish, and always ending in the “House of Love.” The five houses in between were the “House of Death,” “War,” “State,” “Property,” and “Money.” The order of these scenes didn’t necessarily matter, as it was defined

49 Tytell, The Living, 322.

50 “The Three Rivers Arts Festival,” in Carnegie Magazine (May 1975), 229. Other fairs they participated in as they worked to blend in the community were managed by grassroots organizations, or rather, as in East Carson, they simply decided to perform in public spaces for free. Also see Tytell, The Living, 194.

51 Jack Gelber, “Beck: Businessman,” in The Drama Review 30 (Summer, 1986), 25.

52 Ross Wetzsteon, “The Living Theatre at the Pittsburgh Station,” in Village Voice, 21 April 1975.

53 During the decade of the 1970s, maby of the creations of the Living would in some way stem from the literature world of Sacher-Mason. Judith Malina Diaries in Beinecke Manuscripts and Archives Library. Malina was directly referencing the also unfinished series of stories that author Leopold Sacher-Mason wrote in the late 1800s, a series of short stories inspired in folkloric tales, a peculiar complete worldview that interchangedly connected a pessimist view of love relationships to political relationships and encouraged a life detached from any social institution, a total anarchism, individual and political.

54 Judith Malina Diaries.

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according to the proximity of institutions where each “House” Act would be in relation with—a bank, a state

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department building, or a corporation—to establish a relationship and symbolic transformation of these unconventional places of performance.55 An outcry to a world they had come to completely distrust, Six Public Acts denounces with text, movement and temporary occupation the evident symbols of six institutions as they saw them embodied in Pittsburgh, a city they discovered to perfectly represent the object of their dismantling desires.

The Pittsburgh Renaissance: State-Corporation Alliance Monument They performed Six Public Acts twice in the Golden Triangle of Pittsburgh—at the Gateway Center sector and around Mellon Square Park—, unique city center marked by the topography of Allegheny County, where its homonymous river and Monogahela merge into the Ohio River.

In both locations of this transiting play they encountered a city marked by an early enterprise of Urban Renewal policies that had started in the 1940s. Unprecedented American urban development, Pittsburgh’s renewal was a managerial success with novel changes in political-administrative level of State-Corporation conjunct endeavor, and successful in environmental policies.56 The conjunct Government and private corporation enterprise of urban renewal of Pittsburgh was the perfectly built monument of where the Living could unfold their Anarchist worldview and critiques towards the institutions involved. If the Gateway Center represented a hygienist, state avant-garde urban vision, Mellon Square was a locus of core corporate constituency, symbol of the city’s industrial strength.

The release of industrial use downtown was received with enthusiasm by Pittsburghers as this project did not involve residential displacement, and was part of an environmental transformation that would cleanse the city center of pervasive smoke, characteristic of its former era.57 Architecture historian Martin Aurand in The Spectator and the Topographic City emphasizes the panoramic condition of the Pittsburgh city surrounded by hills.58 The highways that divide Point Park from government and corporate Business District intensify this panoramic perception of the Renaissance City, especially as the Point appears coming out by car of the Southern Tunnel. One of the successful design strategies of the downtown complex is that these connections to highways are articulated with a pedestrian passage to the park that alleviates the tension

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between high-speed cars and passersby.

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55 Claudio Vicentini, “The Living’s Six Public Acts,” in The Drama Review 19: Expressionism Issue (Sept. 1975), 80–93. Vicentini describes the procession in Ann Arbor Experimental Theatre Festival, two weeks before the Three Rivers Arts Festival presentation.

56 Interventions further away from Point Park were was less successful—a blatant example is the construction of the Civic Arena, which became not only an economic failure but left an imprint in the memory of massive community displacement that the period is known for, in this case over 1500 families, mostly African American. Roy Lubove, “The Pittsburgh Renaissance,” in Twentieth Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business and Environmental Change (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969), 130 – 139.

57 Franklin Toker, Buildings of Pittsburgh (Chicago: Society of Architectural Historians, 2004), 28, and Barringer Fifield, Seeing Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 3 – 13.

58 Martin Aurand, “Panorama Field,” in The Spectator and the Topographical City (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).

Indeed, the firm that designed the park, Mitchell and Ritchie, managed to generate an image for Point Park that not only responded to the technical problem of decontaminating the city but moved beyond to envision a park for civic culture, presenting Pittsburgh “75 years into the Future,” honoring investor Edgar Kaufmann and the 75 years of Kauffman’s Department Stores.59 The Point provided space for healthy air to pass, and retraced the foundational Duquesne Fort of the eighteenth century. Where the three rivers met was placed a fountain representing this pristine, hygienic renewed city.

In turn, the Mellon Square can be seen as a precursor of the skyscraper plaza that many cities would apply in the late 50s and early 60s, predominantly New York.60 Aurand observes how these plazas

Fig. 28. Julian Michele, Point State Park and Gateway Center, ca. 1953. Reprinted from Charette 1 (January 1955), back cover.

“sought to add open space to the city while providing economic and aesthetic benefits for their corporate parents.”61 Mellon Square highlighted the corporate skyscrapers as the jewels of the Mellon Empire. ALCOA to the north, Mellon Bank to the South, and other buildings also benefited from this new anchor point for the city included new programs for the life of white collar service patrons and employees; “a parking garage, fringe of retail stores, cascading fountain and an ample space for lunchtime.”62 Quickly Mellon Square became the iconic place of corporate power within Pittsburgh, and elevated real estate in the area.

The plans drawn by the Living Theater for SPA—the chosen image for this plays’ posters and pamphlets— are more than a simple location scheme, and rather clearly intend to express a relationship between the “Houses” of the play and the built environment. A lineweight differentiation expresses stronger hierarchy towards certain buildings, and there is careful attention to the surfaces that qualify pedestrian spaces as well as differentiate roads and sidewalk space. The emphasis on the composition of this space becomes part of a formal analysis—most likely by Julian Beck—63 of the topographic and sculptural quality of these modern

59 Martin Aurand, The Spectator and the Topographic City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 57.

60 Toker, The Buildings of Pittsburgh, 28. Mellon Square was financed by cousins Pail and Richard King Mellon.

61 Aurand, The Spectator and the Topographic City, 60.

62 Toker, The Buildings of Pittsburgh, 30.

63 In many cases, there was an organic distribution of roles in which Judith Malina had a stronger leadership in relation to text and direction whereas Julian Beck had a stronger responsibility on design. This was certainly the case for the Money Tower and most likely SPA: It was Malina who mentioned in her diary the readings of Sacher-Mason, whose eccentric take on Anarchism served as guide for the plays of this period. Although both developed a visual aesthetic corpus over the years, Beck’s initial formation as a painter had an imprint on his emphasis on the space of performance. He became gradually interested in architecture theory to use as references. An interesting finding from his desk in Paris after he died are some photocopies of the work of Ledoux and Boullée, a rather obscure pair of architects, who actively though of the role of bodies and volumes in space. Judith Malina’s Diary, Box 185, and Julian Beck’s desk in Paris, Box 325. The Money Tower sketches, Box 141. The Living Theater Archives, Beinecke Library.

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spaces in order to experiment the performance of bodies in relation to these objects.

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This relationship becomes even more obvious in the poster/pamphlet of the performance September 16, 1975, in which only the buildings that are in a symbolic relationship with the houses of SPA are delineated in a thicker lineweight.

Performance at the Gateway Center On May 29, 1975, the Living gathered at the Gateway Center between Pittsburgh Press (Post-Gazette) and Westinghouse buildings, beginning their transiting play for the Three Rivers Arts Festival. Sadly, and although no testimonies have been yet been found, they most likely performed alone in this run. We know from John Tytell’s comprehensive biography on the Becks that in the first of these documented secularanarchist pageants they performed in the pouring rain. As part of their Legacy of Cain performance series, “when it rained on the day of their performance, the administrators (of the Three Rivers Festival) threatened to break their contract because of “an act of god.” In order to get paid, the company performed in the pouring rain without an audience.”64 Their luck improved four months later. But they did perform, and it is worthwhile revisiting the countersymbolic mechanisms at the Gateway. They walked South-West and performed “The house of Death” in the southern public-open-private-space of Westinghouse Building. They followed the sidewalk east passing by two corporation buildings to arrive to “Gateway n°4.” As a public-private enterprise urban renewal project, symbol of the conjunction of power and money, the most counter-symbolic acts presented in this run were the Houses of Property, State, and War—the ones I will describe in further detail for this performance.

As they reached the first “House,” three performers sang accompanied by a guitar while they built a twotier structure that represented the “House of Property.” “How do we escape from the corporate enterprise of Gateway 4?” an actor asked while painting the word “Property” in this set. The troupe interpellate the audience, “Who built this building? Who built the pyramids? Who built the South? Who built Brazil? Who built the bank? Who built the tower? Who built San Quentin? Who built Berlin? Who built the Kremlin? Who built the White House? Who built the Pentagon? Who built the Bastille? What I want to know is who built this building? Who built my jail? Who built this world?”65

The Living used this set to enact the Spanish Revolution of 1936-7. The Living practiced non-representative acting. This meant the performance was subservient to the story portrayed, but often times they played as

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themselves. Enacting an anarchist revolution is also coming closer than merely showing, but burring the

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64 Tytell, “The Lucha and the Joy Cell,” The Living, 323.

65 Vicentini, “The Living’s Six Public Acts,” 89. The chants and the description of the play is taken from the descriptions of their previous performance three weeks before in the Experimental Theatre Festival of Ann Arbor, May 6, 1975. Because they usually changed some phrases as the site of performance varied, the songs may not be 100% accurate.

Fig. 30. Julian Beck, Poster for Six Public Acts with Map of Pittsburgh as Background, 1975. Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

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^ Fig. 29. Map of Six Public Acts at Gateway Park, September 1975.

Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

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distance between a representation and a transformative event. As they dismantle the two tier structure they had just conformed, they read a passage about the revolution “from a lost page in history.”

The liminal consciousness of their ritualistic street theater to a certain point explains their allegedly over-simplified, descriptive ideology—if it is possible to actively shift the symbolism of a place, the Living decides it is wort projecting new realities to its most radical, desirable possibilities. The emphasis of “who built [what we’re looking at]?” Stresses the point of inviting an audience to realize their power as masses.

From “The House of Property,” crossing north, they surrounded Gateway Three on its Eastern side and arrived to “The House of the State,” in between Gateways Two and Three, and the PPG Industries Building.

Three microphones and four floodlights marked the place.66 This location is marked by the center of the Gateway plaza, a Corbusian, “Radiant City” model with a fountain, shades of trees and colorful plantings in between the cross-form Gateway buildings.67 “The state is human sacrifice... the state upholds competitions and makes us into each other’s enemies,” they chanted in “The House of the State.” Julian Beck takes blood from his finger with a needle: “This is the blood of the people killed by the state when they tried to make sense out of the state’s disorder.”68 From “The House of State” they turned west to reach “The House of Money,” which they performed in the north-west end of Gateway n°3, in diagonal front from the Hilton Hotel and Gateway Towers. From “The House of Money” they made all their way back to the Bell Telephone Company Building in Stanwix and the Boulevard of the Allies, turned west and surrounded State Office to arrive to Act V: “House of War.” Likewise, they used the 16-storey building of State Office to represent “The House of War.” Designed by modern architects Altenhoff and Brown and built in 1957, the State Office was famous as Pittsburgh’s “first multistory skyscraper in color.” 69 Its wide façade faces Point Park to the west and Equitable Plaza to the East, sheathed in blue aluminum panels framed in natural aluminum. The hermetic image of its curtain wall may have worked well as an image where the Living intended to show where war was continuously plotted.

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They formed a pyramid with their bodies and sticks to represent a house of violence. Their chants in this

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66 Deducting they performed with the same setting here than in the Experimental Theatre in Ann Arbor three weeks before.

67 The Gateway Plaza was designed by Clark and Rapuano Landscape Architects and built in the early 1950s. Pittsburgh Landmarks and History Foundation, Downtown Pittsburgh Center Self-Guided Walking Tour Leaflet, pdf. November 2014, http://phlf.org/ education-department/self-guided-walking-tours/ 68 Vicentini, “The Living Theatre’s Six Public Acts”, 85. The Living Theatre was not especially favored by the critics for their dramatury—all of their plays after PN became arguably over-diagrammatic. And yet the American press and theater journals respected their trajectory and moreover, greeted them with the ever present possibility to be surprised. The Drama Review, for example, continuously covered their wanderer appearances; Yale/Theater also published and reflected on their radical experiments, especially after the performances in New Haven in 1968, and The Village Voice had a space to criticize or praise them with equal enthusiasm. For example, SPA included a chart that drew up a relationship between each of the houses: the words “Money rUlers pRoperty Death lovEnslaved waR” vertically spelled MURDER. “Good god, revolution as Scrabble! They haven’t changed in seven years—still fascinated with slogans...” noted reporter Ross Wetzsteon when covering and speculating on their upcoming time in Pittsburgh. Yet at the same time, he praised the conviction and fanatism that brought the Beck’s version of Frankenstein, which for Wetzsteon was “perhaps the greatest achievement in the theatre since Waiting for Godot. Ross Wetzsteon, “The Living Theatre at the Pittsburgh Station,” in Village Voice, 21 April 1975.

69 Pittsburgh Modern, A database of modern architecture built in Pittsburgh. http://www.pghmodern.org/content/pennsylvaniastate-office

location ended; “this is the house of our brothers / bound in the service to the myth / that this is the only choice / and what do we choose?” The actors then began to turn the pyramid, destroyed it and, quoting the IWW-organized Massachusetts textile strike of 1912, demanded dignity to the citizens and workers by leaving roses and loaves of bread that they left in front of the building.70 “The House of Love” concluded the long procession by crossing to the Park itself.

The many “Houses” The Living Theater created as enclosed forms generated by their own bodies stress their point of constructing an entirely new society, one where they didn’t need the existing structures. Be it a private space or a public one (the second one being essentially a space of the state), The Living considered it a place dominated by the wrong hegemonies. Their tenacity to perform this play in Pittsburgh is intertwined with their choice

Fig. 31. Cy Hungerford, How the Old Place Has Changed!

From Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 19, 1955. Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

to perform against the symbolic estates built to represent power.

Performance at Mellon Square Surroundings The Living performed Six Public Acts again in September 16, 1975. They gathered on a Tuesday, early afternoon in the Mellon Square for their first location scene, the Preamble.

Slowly and swiftly the moons wax and wayne / unevenly, and all the while / evil is growing, and now / the last light falls on the last root of Capital’s house. And when the rich falls, and when the state falls, and when the property falls, and when the militarists fall, then rise up the many.71

Mellon Square was also programmed for the last of the seven locations: “The House of Love.” Again, The Living would benefit from the symbolic sense of these public-open private spaces, either in state or corporate buildings, to create the tension of their tableaux with the buildings. Between building and sidewalk they used juxtapose their own sets and configurations transgressing the physical state of space.

70 This event was organized by the IWW. For a reflection on the centenary of this event see Andy Piascik, “Bread and Roses a Hundred Years On,” on IWW official website accessed February 15, 2017, http://www.iww.org/content/bread-and-roseshundred-years 71 Vicentini, “The Living Theatre’s Six Public Acts,” 82.

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the sheltered spaces to recreate their own “houses,” but didn’t completely inhabit them: rather, they would

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Fig. 32. Map of Six Public Acts at Mellon Square and Surroundings, September 1975. Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

After the Preamble in Mellon Square, they stopped in the Romanesque Revival Bell Telephone Penn Building.72 They continued north from Grant Street and turned into the Federal Building in Liberty and Grant. In the Liberty Corner they found again a sheltered public-open private spaces where to perform “The House of War,” returned to the point in between Grant and Liberty to perform “The House of the State,” and

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continued their way back Grant Avenue to the particularly iconic US Steel Building.73

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72 Built in 1890 and designed by Frederick Osterling. Eight stories high, made of steel and brick, Toker considers it one of the “earliest corporate buildings and might be the oldest telecommunications building.” Toker, Buildings of Pittsburgh, 38. They chose one of the oldest buildings in the area to represent The House of Death, where the ritual was a representation of Cain and Abel that intended to show violence was engendered in the myths of the dawn of Western civilization.

73 Designed by Harrison and Abramowitz with Abbe Architects, this triangular shaped building is made of eighteen exposed vertical steel columns, three feet outside the curtain wall, made of Cor-Ten steel, thus self-oxidizing and free of any other rust. It is the tallest structure in the city (841 feet). Toker, The Buildings of Pittsburgh, 37.

Fig. 33. Map of Six Public Acts at Southside, September 1975. Living Theatre Records, Beinecke Archives and Manuscripts Library.

East Carson Street. Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation, “Spotlight on Main Street.” www.phlf.org

Although they were able to perform this long, and allegedly in good weather, it is also not clear who

and how much audience they were followed by. Was it all white-collared workers of the corporate buildings in their lunch, coffee or cigarette breaks? Did they manage to invite other citizens to the symbolic “9 to 5 Filing cabinet”? But again something detained the play. When performing “The House of Property,” enacting the Anarchist Revolution of 1936 -7, the police intervened. “In front of the US Steel Building, the entire company was arrested when local police believed one of the actors was using a real gun.”74

As in many other cities, Pittsburgh after 1968 was familiar with public manifestations of Civil

Rights and riots, and the police was most likely used to restraining public manifestations in a place such as the Golden Triangle. Nevertheless, Pittsburgh had less downtown uprisings than other cities compared.

Heavy police patrol managed Civil Rights related riots by containing the boundaries between black and white neighborhoods, of a segregated nature.75 The Golden Triangle’s nature of an “office cabinet” holding such symbolic corporations would have been less of a public manifestation area and more like a contained, rights movement’s expansion of cultural expression in public spaces, and represented a growing number of artistic and theatrical groups who used public spaces as venues for spectacles of oppositional politics.”76 But the symbolic contestation at the US Steel came as an uncomfortable surprise among the calm surroundings of Mellon Square.

74 Tytell, The Living, 323.

75 Joe Trotter and Jared Day, “Pittsburgh’s Modern Black Freedom Movement,” in Race and Renaissance (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2010), 107.

76 Bradford Martin, “The Living Theatre: Paradise and Politics in the Streets,” in The Theater is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in 1960s America (Amherst, University of Massachussetts Press, 2004), 50.

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easily patrolled zone. Theater historian Branford Martin claims, “the Living Theatre benefited from the civil

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Performances at the Southside Three days later the Living planned to perform Six Public Acts once more, this time not in the symbolic center of the Pittsburgh Renaissance and the Radiant City, but rather in a traditional neighborhood that housed an immigrant mix dating back to the nineteenth century. It is hard to imagine the audience’s reaction in a family neighborhood. The most shocking act must have been “The House of Love,” infused by the premises of Masochism as part of Sacher-Masoch’s exentric worldview: nevertheless, the potential for the rapport between actors and the audience and the act of the untying of the ropes had been strongly proven in their work in Sao Paulo.

They presented one other play in South Side, in front of Laughlin & Jones Mill Company: The Money Tower. The Money Tower was a five-storey structure of steel and wood that represented the hierarchy of society: 24 to 30 actors were necessary to portray “The Poor; the Working People; the Establishment (represented by four puppets) with the Police and Military; and the Elite.”77 This tower would become the micro-world of simplified power structures, and was organized in three Acts: a “Micro-Opera of Class Identification,” “Nightmares and Visions” and “Revolution.”78 It is interesting to see that although the Living designed and wrote this play in Brooklyn, the steel structure resonated with the steel corporate buildings of Pittsburgh. Similarly, the workers could relate to The Living as the troupe managed to emulate some of their manual labor. Tytell mentions that the workers usually admired the setup of this play; “Working-class people admired the capability and skill of members of the company who were able to erect the scaffolding in fifteen minutes and bring it down in eight while singing.”79 Gelber, however, mentions the indifference of the workers towards the performances of Money Tower in front of steel mills as an important factor for leaving after September 1975, as much of a factor as the grant money running out.80 The fierce, few Wobblies of Pittsburgh The Living Theatre was welcomed to the Industrial Workers of the World [IWW] Anarchist organization in February 28th, 1975. They had connections with anarchist organizations from New York before parting to Pittsburgh, and they had connections with Chicago from their arrival on.81 There were virtually no wobblies in Pittsburgh when the Living was there. In a box where they kept the contacts of Pittsburgh, they categorize

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with “IWW” all community organizations where they might “engender the revolutionary spirit,” as Malina

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77 The Living Theatre Collective, “The Money Tower: Scenario. Winter 1974,” in The Drama Review: TDR 18 (June 1974) 20.

78 Living Theatre Records at the Beinecke Library. Box 141, findings on Technical Works of The Money Tower.

79 Tytell, The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, Outrage, Endnotes to “60: The Lucha and Joy Cells,” 414.

80 Gelber, “Beck: Businessman,” 27.

81 The Living Theatre Records at the Beinecke Library. Box 167, Letters, anarchist lectures in New York.

wrote of the objectives of her campaign, but none truly affiliated.82 The Living had to re-establish the branch of Pittsburgh Wobblies, after sixy years of absence in the city.83 The Wobbly organization, which held their national branch in Chicago, gave membership to the collective of 13 members, and aided the Becks to become a branch.

Mel tells me that you will be sending in shortly a petition for a Charter for a Pittsburgh General Membership Branch.

Then ditto we can send shop cards for each

Fig. 35. Photo by Judith Malina, Date Unknown. The Money Tower in the Pittsburgh Mills.

of the two theater groups. Yours for the One Big Union, Craig Ledford, General Secretary Treasurer.84

The fact that the Living Theatre wanted to affiliate to the IWW expands their identity as professional artists to that of workers, fitting within the categories of the Pittsburgh labor class. For the IWW, the objective was to become One: “The IWW is not a federation of industrial unions; it is One Big Union of the working class. The inter-relationships of modern industry make any other structure inadequate for the needs of labor.”85 The IWW considered service employees as workers as well as those associated with manual labour, and had a specific service category for theater and other “culture services,” as well as the service of education.

In the leaflet of The Money Tower, the Living declared: “by anarchism we mean a complex form of social organization in which all human needs are met by an interdependent network of cooperative associations

82 As the archives show, Judith named a series of reports “The Pittsburgh Anarchist Campaign.” Her methodology could have been conducted by the IWW contacts to which she was affiliated, or the several Anarchist contacts in New York and elsewhere.

Her reports were specific and the goals of the campaign, she writes, were to “bring maximal clarity to Anarchist and Pacifist Revolutionary progress.” Where there is no revolutionary spirit to engender it / Where there is a revolutionary effort to support it / where there is a revolutionary segment to present anarchist alternatives / where there are anarchist tendencies to strengthen them / where there are anarchist/revolutionary groups or tendencies to present non-violent alternatives. The Living Theatre Records at the Beinecke Library. Box 167, Judith Malina, Folder: Pittsburgh Campaign.

83 Historian Charles McKormick illustrates the pushback to develop an IWW branch in 1917, sabotaged by federal informants who sought to divide the Left and managed to weaken its most radical worker branches, causing “a big dissension among the Socialists of Allegheny County. Alleging a violation of the Espionage Act, the IWW suffered a national raid that put down the movement in Pittsburgh for good. Charles McKormick, “Taming the Steel City Wobblies: 1917–18,” in Seeing Reds (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 53.

84 The Living Theatre Records at the Beinecke Library. Box 167, letter by Craig Ledford.

85 The Living Theatre Records at the Beinecke Library. Box 34, One Big Union Booklet, red book, Wobbly. Chicago, IWW, 1970. 3-4.

86 Ibid.

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around the workplace and in the world.”86

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In Paradise Now, Six Public Acts and The Money Tower, literary content adapts as a sequence of chapters that lead towards a state of trance, a revelation to the audience, or a moment of engagement between public and actors where they are participants and enablers of moments of transition. Each has radical political propositions, however complexisized in an eclectic worldview that intwined political, romantic, erotic, and even metaphysical aspects in one. Six Public Acts is a sequence that reveals to the audience a holistic social contract, present in society in a form of masochism, involving all aspects of social life from war to love. The Money Tower is a dismantling sequence of a capitalistic system of castes associated to money and power.

Liminal Direct Action I have attempted in this chapter to reconstruct the memory of these ephemeral events that occurred in the public spaces of Avignon, Sao Paulo and Pittsburgh. By recreating these events through archived records, The Living Theater’s contribution in relation to the uses of physical spaces of these cities can be more readily assessed. This attention to the city’s physical structures helps to underscore the contributions of The Living Image and the focus on the city helps to put in place a missing image in reconstructing the troupe’s cultural importance. The radical theater performed in these cities during the late 1970s, 70s and 80s has become part of the history of these cities. It is a history that speaks of a distinct typology of street performance: a secular rite; a cultural performance that differs from institutional parades and civil rights protests. As a relevant part of the repertoire of a neo-avant-garde collective, the use of dramaturgy, composition, and playwrighting, addresses theatrical performances integration with a political and social intention, one in which the physicality of the city is integral to artistic practice.

An anarchist worldview seeps into the political realm from a particularly creative standpoint, as it proposes to push towards a life beyond the one possible among existing institutions. The enactment of this worldview coincides with the anarchist concept of Direct Action. As anthropologist David Graeber defines it by comparing to other forms of demonstration, Typically, one practicing civil disobedience is also willing to accept the legal consequences of his actions.

Direct action takes matters a step further. The direct actionist does not just refuse to pay taxes to support a militarized school system, she combines with others to try to create a new school system that operates on different principles. She proceeds as she would if the state did not exist and leaves it to the state’s representatives to decide whether to try to send armed men to stop her.87

Rousing events related to place define history and structures of governing systems. Could avant-garde performances have the same power? The Living Theatre’s praxis of street theater between 1968 and 1975 can be conceptualized in this desire as a liminal direct action, in which the action is performed at times pushing chapter 1

back against the city “as built,” but others as if the city was already molded to their utopias.

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87 David Graeber, Direct Action. Oakland: AK Press, 2009. Accessed May 9, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.

In the following chapter, zooming into a different political context—that of the Chilean dictatorship between 1973 and 1990—the praxis of street theater by a group of local artists demonstrates how street theater pervades as an political anarchist action that opens to diversity in public space, extending the political agency

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of the artform beyond the specific affiliations of a specific troupe.

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Chapter 2.

look up: creating extra-institutional space in a dictatorship Street theater appeared in the streets of Santiago in 1980, seven years after the military coup. By that time social behavior in the streets of Santiago had been radically altered after the Socialist system had been overthrown and militarization had been imposed in city life—and soon later, as a free market economy was carried out through a transversal liberalization of market policies.

The image of the Presidential Palace bombed, with soldiers ready to fire 100 feet away on the day of the coup is the iconic image of the radical transformation the Chilean nation went through after September 1973.

But looking at the military takeover process outside of the city center—a growing possibility as testimonies are compiled and as published research has begun to show after the turn of the century1—helps to envision the influence of ideological changes in the transformation of everyday life of citizens.

This chapter looks at a series of events that occurred in the streets that gradually constructed a vocabulary of historic symbols as public images—some photographed, others only described as memories—of which street theater came to represent but one of these. A space of representation among the urban arena, street theater operated politically as an active alternative that for fragments of time overcame the dictator’s discourse regarding the homogenization of public space. This discourse was, of course, temporal and constrained by its location: the public of the theater is limited by its physical presence, visibility and audibility. And it is because of these constrains that the exact location and the deployment of street theater throughout the city becomes especially relevant.

The following analysis of how events and the formal expressions of streets changed is influenced by what Kevin Lynch called the identity, structure and meaning of environmental images: “the product both of immediate sensation and of the memory of past experience,” as it can “furnish the raw material for the symbols and collective memories of group communication.”2 In relation to historic and political changes, meaning shifts associated by the visual elements found in streets and become thus inseparable in defining this vocabulary of public images in Santiago.

For the purposes of describing these environmental images, and street theater among them, a fluid association is considered in the conceptual differences between street and public space. Public spaces such 1 Publications by Quimantú, LOM, and a multiplicity of centers that gather these testimonies such as José Domingo Cañas Research Center.

2 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 5.

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as plazas and markets may be broadly differentiated from streets for they exhibit wider scaled areas with a multiplicity of directionality; but they necessarily open up from a street and are connected by them, or are used as streets when crossing from one corner to the other. The street, according to Joseph Rykwert, “denotes a delimited surface – part of an urban Fig. 36. Enrique Aracena, La Moneda Under Siege, September 11, 1973.

Foundation Televisa Collection

texture, characterized by an extended area lined with buildings on either side…but the manner in

which the notion of road or street is embedded in human experience suggests that it has reference to ideas and patterns of behavior more archaic than city building.”3 Unlike the road, streets are the constructed connections inside cities. A street can be the recipient of indistinct diverse programs as much as a plaza, depending on its width and crowd densities. The street differs mainly in its directionality: from main course of movement, to play, to its many aggregating complexities in contemporary form. It is thus used here closer to a social association of being “in the streets,” generally meaning being outside, or deprived of, privatized space. The extended social meaning of “street” as public space also applies to spaces that have not been consciously designed but rather are constituted as the improvised spaces in between constructions, and defined as spaces for gathering by communal use. In the Spanish term, Chilean artists referred not to teatro de calle but to teatro callejero: theater “of the streets.” In cases such as pedestrian avenues of the city center, the multiplicity of functions is most evident.

Many street types of Santiago are marked by dense crowd encounters. The streets portrayed in this study range from symbolic, structural to pedestrian avenues; from sidewalks for gathering after work in industrial sectors; the space outside warehouses of informal commerce, to the alleys of neighborhoods in the peripheries of the city.

The analysis of these places relies on the memories of those who experienced life in these types of streets, and who traveled around the city’s focal spaces of symbolic transformation. A relevant figure for these purposes—although not notoriously well known in the history of this period—is political leader Manuel Paiva, an industrial worker who believed and was benefited by the policies of the socialist government of Allende preceding the coup, a survivor of political imprisonment, and a resident of población Nueva Habana.

His political leadership both as poblador (the Chilean social class of housing demands) and worker connected him to many of the rousing events of the dictatorship, which he describes in his own testimonial book.4 chapter 2

Militant of the Radical Left Movement (MIR in Spanish), Paiva was imprisoned the day after the coup at the

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National Stadium. He managed to escape a few months later, and he searched for ways to fight the dictatorship 3 Joseph Rykwert, “The Street: The Use of its History,” in On Streets, ed. Stanford Anderson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 89.

4 Manuel Paiva, Rastros de mi Pueblo (Santiago: Quimantú, 2005).

by different means throughout the years, building up to the organization of National Protests that started in 1983. His descriptions of the city before and after the coup serve to imagine the different relationships among strangers through his experience of the socialist project in Santiago, versus the paradoxical city of authoritarianism soon to be transformed into a neoliberal city. Another singularity of Manuel Paiva among other radical political leaders is that he was himself a man of the theater—legacy of teatro poblacional, an amateur practice of theater in the poorer neighborhoods of the city and the country5—and as such was impressed by street theater when he encountered the actors of TEUCO (acronym for Teatro Urbano Contemporáneo, Contemporary Urban Theater) performing in the city center. Convinced of its political relevance, he invited the artists to his población, thus expanding the relationship between diverse residents of Santiago with this artform.

The series of symbolic uses of street life, incrementally established as the spectacle and stage of a dictator during autocracy, are presented in this chapter among emerging practices of resistance, dissidence, and divergence. Together these forces slowly managed to reconstruct the inherent multiplicity of a public space of democracy, transforming public spaces into a wider milieu for the presentations of social and cultural diversity.

Power Takeover A confusing speech has been recorded from an officer presenting the Military Board (Junta) in a neighborhood of the peripheries of the Chilean capital city, two weeks after the coup of September 11, 1973.

The new government will do what it can for you… not miracles… You must have knowledge of the assemblies, and all of that, you have worked a good amount, and so you know that things aren’t born out of thin air, but that the success of a country depends on you and us working, it depends on production. . . . As I heard, or as rumors say, that the armed forces will bomb the población! Is an affirmation that I qualify as ridiculous… cannot eliminate, you cannot send to the wall, although it has been done elsewhere, to that 30 or 40% of the population, you cannot send to the wall 3 million or 4 million of inhabitants, among which many of you would be, that is impossible that would be cruelty. . . . Those people that have acted in fact against the armed forces, that are shooting against the armed forces… if “x” person takes out a gun and shoots me, in that moment the soldiers (here present) have the order to execute you right here. . . . Other people acting below, against the forces of order… That still believe in the Marxist government, that say; “let us keep the organization, because in a few years… Marxist power will come back.” Those people will be detained and will be prosecuted, because Marxism in its general form has been declared out of the law, and the political parties at this time are not functioning. . . . I have a list of the military intelligence service in respect to activists that have, or have 5 Manuel Paiva (political leader, resident of poblacion Nuevo Amanecer) in Interview with author, July 2016. A form of community theater developed in Chile since the 1920s and with a stronger organization after the 1960s. For an account of teatro poblacional present at the time of dictatorship, see Diego Muñoz Campos, “Teatro Poblacional chileno (1978-1983),” in Araucaria de Chile 31 (1985).

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There is no doubt that the previous government had a support of 40, 50, 30%. There is no doubt that you

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been, let’s say, that are not with the order. . . . I will read this list now so we can look at each other’s faces, and so that people can be cautious as well [sic]…6

The coup against the socialist government of Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity (UP), also was a coup against the socialist city of Santiago, outspread along its extended territory over several Fig. 37. Helicopter overflying Nueva La Habana, September 1973. Photographer Unknown. Personal Ar-chives of architect René Urbina and resident Manuel Paiva, as labeled by historian Boris Cofré.

days. It required strong symbolic action as much as brutal physical

violence. Throughout the thousand days of Allende’s government there had been signs of a military turn against the political and institutional authorities of the time, and even a failed attempt two months earlier.

But still up to that day, many thought Chile could have been the exception to the series of autocratic power outbreaks that had become a characteristic trait of the region during the long Cold War years.7 In Santiago, repression was organized from the inside out. Massive imprisonments and killings occurred during the following days after the bombing of the presidential palace as the military strategies of the Junta unfolded. The message of the military was clear: it was against individuals associated in any way with Marxism, but unclear in who exactly was included in this group, and how many had thus become immediate enemies of the state. From the peripheries of Santiago, the first symbols of repression were helicopters that surveilled the poblaciones (consolidated neighborhoods created by the appropriation of a plot of land taken by families without homes). Violence ensued in poblaciones as military operations came in to search for the political leaders that hadn’t yet gone into hiding; the military raided the construction sites of social housing, and they roved the streets at night as curfew began.

This happened soon after the coup in Nueva Habana, a población where poverty had triggered a complex system of communal organization. The reference to the Cuban capital expresses its conformation in 1970 by an association of thousands of families living in extreme poverty throughout Chilean cities with MIR—the

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radical leftist political movement which remained outside the Popular Unity and who were interested in a

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6 Cited in Boris Cofré Schmeisser, “Campamento Ranquil,” Historia de los pobladores del campamento Nueva La Habana dirante la Unidad Popular (1970 - 1973), dissertation for Universidad Arcis (Santiago, 2007), 79.

7 For an examination of the right wing inventions of a violent Left, see Peter Winn, “The Furies of the Andes,” in Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence during Latin America’s Long Cold War (Duke University Press: Durham, 2010), 239 – 275. For an examination of the Latin American political situation as part of the system of the Cold War, see Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

revolutionary agenda that pushed further than the promise of a socialism “the Chilean way,” as Salvador Allende referred to his idea of a pacifist, democratic deployment of the Socialist ideals.

Immediately after the first weeks of dictatorship the military managed to dismantle the social fabric of a city that had been shaped over thirty years by a developing progressive project.8 Five years later, via constitutional and legislative changes, deep structural changes were put forward: social housing was privatized and urban planning was de-regularized to benefit investors, while forced displacement of lower class citizens reaffirmed and intensified class-based segregation. 9 Social behavior, discourse homogeneity, and symbolic hegemony, was instead immediately altered, and with it the experience of everyday life in public spaces.

Alamedas The words of Allende’s last speech resonated against an obliged silence over the following weeks.

Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great alamedas (malls) will open again where free men will walk to build a better society.10

On Tuesday morning of September 11, 1973, the Presidential Palace of Moneda was bombed during fifteen minutes at noon. As seen from the collection of photographs that portrayed the city under siege,11 it seems like the loud orders of the military and subsequent firearms were interrupted only by silence in the streets.

This was not necessarily expected—the lack of resistance surprised the military and the radical sectors of the Left alike. But as the president himself advised through various radio channels politically aligned with the government (before these, too, were raided) “the people must defend itself, but not sacrifice itself. The people mustn’t let itself be razed or shot, but it cannot let itself be humiliated either.”12 The Junta had planned an attack to confront a resistance from the Left, and General Pinochet later said in

8 Lois Hecht Oppenheim, “Political Implications of Development Strategies,” in Politics in Chile: Socialism, Authoritarianism, and Market Economy (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 200), 8 – 31.

9 For many academics, housing is representative of an important aspect of the social programs expunged in 1973. Ana Sugranyes, “La política habitacional en Chile, 1980 – 2000: un éxito liberal para dar techo a los pobres,” in Los Con Techo: Un desafío para la política de vivienda social (Santiago: Ediciones SUR, 2005), 25.

10 Salvador Allende, “Last Words to the Nation,” in The Marxist Internet Archive, accessed February 16, 2017, https://www.marxists. org/archive/allende/1973/september/11.htm. TMIA translates alamedas as avenues. Because Alameda is the name of the main avenue in Santiago, and partly a pedestrian alley that encounters the presidential palace in a perpendicular alley, a parallel with “the Mall” and its symbolisms of promenade, assembly, and representation of democracy is more specific as street type (the ubiquitous semantic appropriation by the shopping center being maybe especially ironic in this context).

11 The stories of photographers documenting life within dictatorship is compiled in “La Ciudad de Los Fotógrafos,” directed by Sebastián Moreno (2006; Santiago, Las Películas del Pez), DVD. Some of these photographers are Alvaro Hoppe, Segio Montecino, Horacio Villalobos, Oscar Navarro, and Diamela Eltit.

12 Salvador Allende, “Last Words to the Nation,” in The Marxist Internet Archive. I have kept the noun “people” as individual noun in this sentence, as it relates closer to its original meaning.

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an interview for newspaper El Mercurio that they thought five days would have been required for the power

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Fig. 38. Sergio Mura Rossi, La Moneda Days After, September 1973, Santiago. Photographer Personal Collec-tion.

takeover. In reality it only took twenty-four hours, the General said,13 and little to no resistance was posed, as there turned out to be no counterpart to the co-opted armed forces. Thus after Allende shot himself, and the presidential palace was bombed, it was a matter of covering the territory. From then on, power wasn’t only imposed with violence but with a symbolic-aesthetic operation in parallel at all scales: Among these, socialist monuments were taken down, walls with written messages and images were painted white, and men with long hair were ordered to cut it short, if not detained or shaved in public.14 Cordones Cordones industriales (industrial belts) of Santiago referred both to the location of industry cumulus of the capital, as to the political organizations of workers from these sectors. Before the coup, large and middle size industries gathered a large amount of workers along these avenues, where conversation was lively and cheerful in the afternoons.

In the evenings the bustle about of the workers would repeat as in the mornings, but in comparison to the chapter 2

mornings, exit from the industries was gradual and in sidewalks different groups of men and women would

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13 Augusto Pinochet, El Mercurio, September 18, 1973. El Mercurio became one of the supporting newspapers of dictatorship all throughout the regime.

14 Luis Hernán Errázuriz, “Dictadura militar en Chile: Antecedentes del golpe estético-cultural,” in LARR 44 No.2 (2009), 136 – 157.

Fig. 39. Alvaro Hoppe, Untitled, September 12, 1973. Santiago. Photographer Personal Collection.

gather and embroil in debates about different subjects. It was a time of vast social openness, where it wasn’t necessary to know someone too well to meet someone. It was enough to know that you worked in one of the companies of the area. The encounter would happen at a bus stop, you would start a conversation and a few minutes later you had a new friendship.15

The conviviality described with nostalgia by Manuel Paiva among strangers in the street was of course lost as the coup imposed its hegemony.

Industrial worker Manuel Paiva was working in the State-owned company IRT (Industry of Radio and Television) in Vicuña Mackenna Avenue, where he had worked for two and a half years. Paiva decided to stay inside the factory that day, along with other political leaders and workers who experienced the wrath of the military a day later.16 The factory administrators received orders to send their workers home at noon, and company buses were provided to send the staff away from trouble by 11:30 am. It was thus understood that those who stayed represented the resistance, many of which had the hope that a separate group of “loyal forces” to the government would provide backup eventually. This was the case throughout the different cordones of the city, and resistance backup was the hope of most of the radical militants, connected with a communications 15 Manuel Paiva, Rastros de Mi Pueblo (Santiago de Chile: Quimantú, 2005), 26 – 27.

16 Ibid., 36 – 142.

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At the cordones, the day of the coup, people were told by radio to stop working and go to their homes.

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quarter of CUT, Central Única de Trabajadores (Central Workers Union). It was in one of these industrial sectors, in fact—San Joaquin, the South-Eastern fraction—where allegedly the only resistance was held, in solidarity with población La Legua.17 But the institutions that represented the Left had little to no armed organization to counteract, and the military was confronted with wide open alamedas for the tanks to roam vigilantly during the rest of the day.

No soldiers arrived to cordon Vicuña-Mackenna throughout the evening. Helicopters, smoke cloud from the bombing of Moneda and the sound of gunshots at times was all the workers heard and saw from the outside. At night, some partisans went Fig. 40. Cordones Industriales as drafted by Ema and Armando de Ramón, 1992. Red dot: La Moneda.

Drawing by Author.

outside to try and make some damage to the military forces, as well as realize to what extent the military was in control.

Curfew was established that night and the military communicated a state of emergency and Civil War. It wasn’t until the next day that the cordon Vicuña-Mackenna encountered the military. Paiva recalls the arrival of hundreds of soldiers, “dressed in olive green uniforms and wearing an orange bracelet,” taking position in front of the factories, while police “exhibited their menacing tanks in the center of the avenue.” From the second floor of IRT, the few partisans that stayed inside the factory saw workers come out of a factory across the street with their hands behind their head and who were eventually beaten by police forces.

One by one, nearly four hundred men and some women came out in an Indian line, were checked from head to feet by the police forces and handed to the military officers, in charge of throwing the detainees to the pavement, while the workers kept their hands behind their head.18

Eventually it was the turn of the IRT workers, delivered to the military and laid out facing down as well.

Some men were shot as an example, and the rest transported to confinement. With these initial bodies of the resistance left in the pavement, trucks from the armed forces transported the male detainees to the National Stadium turned Political Prisoners Camp.

740 bodies admitted to the Medical Legal Service (SML) in Santiago between September and December

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of 1973 are proven cases of human rights abuse by the three Truth Commissions documents published since

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17 Gabriel Muñoz, “El Golpe en San Joaquín, Único Caso de Resistencia,” in Cordón San Joaquín: Organización y Resistencia, 1972 – 1973 (Santiago: Ediciones Museo Obrero Luis Emilio Recabarren, 2013), 32 – 42; Leiva, Sebastián and Mario Garcés, “Resistencia y represión el 11 de septiembre de 1973 en los cordones industriales San Joaquin y Santa Rosa” (Working paper, Centro de Estudios Miguel Enriquez, 2012).

18 Paiva, Rastros de mi Pueblo, 46.

the nineties, and a total of 890 is estimated.19 During these first days after the coup, the new relationship of oppression from soldier to civilian was forged in the midst of confusion, sometimes from the soldiers themselves. If loyal forces were expected from the parties that supported the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular— UP) and those further to the Left, it was because many believed the Chilean military to be a Constitutionalist institution.20 This only goes to show the distance that existed between the military and civilians, as the Chilean Army had been infused with anti-Marxism over the loyalty to national governance.

Fig. 41. Horacio Villalobos, Teatinos Street from Hotel Panamericano. September 11, 1973. The image is at La Moneda but resembles the process described by Manuel Paiva. Santiago.

As the small number of generals who did not participate in the coup affirm, the strong belief in an “internal enemy” of the nation grew out of the teachings that many soldiers received from the School of the Americas dictated by the stakes of the United States in the Cold War. 630 soldiers were sent to the SOA between 1970 and 1973, and 870 during the first two years of dictatorship.21 Contempt for civilians, their way of life and what soldiers considered was a laxer moral was taught early on to soldiers.22 The experience at poblaciones is one of the many examples of how the roaming vigilance of soldiers redefined Chilean society during those first days of dictatorship. Meanwhile, the public image of the new regime was constructed through media, protocol, and ceremonies.

Dictatorship was imposed through the brutality of what was structured as the National Department of Intelligence (DINA), but its supporting discourse had to be constructed gradually, weighing on the idea of 19 Pascale Bonnefoy and John Dinges, “Ejecuciones en Chile Septiembre-Diciembre 1973: El circuito burocrático de la muerte,” (Working paper, Centro de Estudios Miguel Enriquez, 2012) 2 – 3. The documents cited are the Rettig Commission, Rettig Report (Santiago: National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, February 11, 1991), Valech Commission, Valech Report I (Santiago: National Commission on Political Prison and Torture, 2004) and the Valech Commission, Valech Report II, 2011.

20 General Secretary of State Carlos Altamirano, UP representative Erik Schnake and MIR militants all had confidence in a retaliation from sectors of the military in case of a coup. A year before, in December 4th, 1972, the president said of the military in his Discourse for the UN General Assembly: “(I come from) a country where public life is organized in civil institutions, that counts with Armed Forces of proven professional formation and a deep democratic spirit…” quoted in Leiva and Garcés, “Resistencia y Represión…,” full speech in the Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/espanol/allende/1972/ diciembre04.htm.

21 Lesley Gill quoting General Carlos Prats, “Apoyo a los dictadores y guerra contra la revolución,” in La Escuela de las Américas (Santiago: LOM, 2005), 111 – 124.

22 Paiva, Rastros de mi Pueblo, 67.

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The Dictator’s Stage: Hegemony of a public discourse

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Fig. 42. Four Chileans light the “Eternal Flame of Liberty.” Published in political pamphlet “Chile: 11 de Sep-tiembre de 1975.”

Digital Library of Political Pamphlets of the National Congress of Chile.

what the regime called a ‘recovered unity’ in opposition to a divided society. The reasons for the coup and the reorganization of the recovered nation were initially delivered to the nation by fragments, through supporting and coopted media. The conservative newspapers assumed a protectionist role of junta and quickly learned to overlook human rights crimes committed by the state.23 The evening of the coup, the Junta presented its new leaders on national television. A series of bandos (edicts) were transmitted by radio mixed in the framework of what they defined as Civil War. Legitimacy was constructed with the creation of an image of a violent Left—false evidence was crafted to prove that the militarization of the country was violence to protect from violence.24 In this scenario, contradicting messages became the invisible cloth of the dictator. For example, Bando n°5, on the motives for the overthrow, proclaimed Allende’s government has incurred in grave illegitimacy, demonstrated by breaking the fundamental rights of expression, education freedom, right to free assembly, right to strike, right to petition, right to property and

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rights in general to a safe and dignified subsistence.25

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23 On the newspapers malpractice to provoke the coup and collaborate with the dictatorship, see Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, “The Culture of Fear” in A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991) 154 – 55.

24 Steve Stern, “Saving Chileans of Well-Placed Heart: 1973 – 1976” in Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 36 – 47.

25 Transmitted September 11 on the motives to overthrow Allende’s government, and printed in El Mercurio, September 13, 1973.

But through the series of edicts and declaration of a state of siege, the junta banned the existence of gatherings of any political nature, and to unionize.26 The social networks of Leftist political parties, as well as the legacy of communal organizations set up mostly during the progressive government of Frei Montalva were immediately fragmented and dissolved.

Pinochet’s dictatorship—first designed as a military board but quickly turned into his own autocracy—originated from militarist values and culture.27 Among the military values was the

Fig. 43. Dancers of Central Cueca celebrate September 11, 1975. Digital Library of Political Pamphlets of the National Congress of Chile.

consideration of any form of Marxism as a patriotic threat, even though the ideal government still consisted of a strong statist presence. Historian Steve Stern establishes how the power of Junta was built upon a rhetoric of an austere, protective and patriotic nation which would build a new Chile on an old foundation.28 Building on a nationalist discourse that exalted the historic figure of Diego Portales—early politician of the nation after its independence from Spain in 1810, himself a promoter of strong presidentialism above democracy—the years 1810 and 1973 came to represent two moments when the fatherland was returned to its proper owners: Independence from Spain in the nineteenth century, and from Marxism in the twentieth. As September 11 was seven days before September 18 and 19, the celebration of the first Government Assembly (also called junta) of 1810 was fittingly marked by a military parade for the “Day of the Glories of the Army”, a week of national pride came to consolidate this rhetoric.

commemoration became particularly symbolic the year of 1975, when a set of celebrations on the “liberation of the nation from Marxism” were programmed throughout the country. From North to South, crowds gathered to celebrate the past government overthrow. As historian Steve Stern notes, it is impossible to say that fear was the only factor to gather the massive amount of public who were willing to celebrate the new commemoration.

26 Communal farm cooperatives known as asentamientos were created to reform the former Agrarian Reform Law of 1962 by Frei Montalva. To mobilize the historic poor sector of city migrants, who had settled in undesirable parts of the city (creating many of the shanty-towns or poblaciones), Frei Montalva’s government introduced the Popular Promotion program, which involved neighborhood councils and mothers’ centers to encourage grassroots activity, pursuing a citizen pressure program rather than solely a top-down delivery of government policies. See, for example, Oppenheim, Politics in Chile, 22 – 26.

27 Heraldo Muñoz, “The Power to Dictate,” in The Dictator’s Shadow: Life Under Augusto Pinochet (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 68.

28 Steve Stern, “Saving Chileans of Well-Placed Heart: 1973 – 1976,” 58.

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Celebrations of September 11 express the value that the military gave to ceremony and protocol. This

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The military put special attention to the categorization of a new grain of Chilean identity in order to reinforce support in diverse sectors of society. Thus the celebrations were themed with events that differed from region to region. As can be seen from political pamphlets produced after these events, there is a careful integration of the Mapuche native nations, as well as elements of folklore that will reinforce the rhetoric of a nations’ recuperation: horse-riding huasos (men dressed in traditional costumes of the rural regions) holding a waving Chilean flag; people dancing cueca—soon to be decreed National Dance—and an overall campaign towards the exaltation and diffusion of any legacies of the nineteenth century of what it meant to be “Chilean.”29 Big crowds composed massive celebrations of a less folkloric nature, and the central piece of the celebration of 1975 was the creation of an “Eternal Flame,” a monument lit that spring night of 1975 and placed in front of Moneda and Alameda Avenue, next to the grave of Bernardo O’Higgins, one of the most representative nation’s heroes of Independence. The flame was lit by four representative people, The solemn instant has arrived, when a peasant, an urban worker, a student and a housewife light the torches with the fire of civility, the one their heart kept silent for three years.30

The press exaggerated the crowd numbers, but at least 300.000 people attended this event in downtown Santiago.31 By celebrating the bombing of Moneda and the recuperation of the nation, the definition of the enemy was publicly reaffirmed, and silenced.

Austerity and military culture on the top of a renewed nation’s values, uniform, standardization and discipline were preferred over civilian informality and culture. With this interest in mind, elements for a nationalist reinforcement such as folklore were subject to a new standardization of rules and infused with a history that differed from its original diffusion in bars, taverns and brothels.32 Likewise all impositions of public everyday life, from a sustained curfew, to the elimination of political gatherings, to an explicit preference for the use of short hair in men, educated the public on norms of behavior and a sustained vigilance. Writer Jorge Montealegre recalls, …we were sent to cut our hair, to go to bed early, to behave according to their orders. From the first day we were treated as a country-child that had misbehaved and was being grounded. The country had to be disciplined.33

The shadows of torture, repression and suspicion transformed the identities of crowds and transformed personal relationships. It was not only the measures of repressions that changed the identities and personality

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of the general public in the city. Sociologist Giselle Munizaga, through a semantic analysis of the dictator’s

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29 Patricio Abarca Castro, “Cuecas y Memorias: Construcciones políticas y de género en el baile nacional,” in Revista Hijuna: Pensamiento y Cultura Latinoamericana 1 (2005), 198 - 213.

30 “Chile: 11 de Septiembre de 1975,” Folder: Political Pamphlets, Archive of the Congress of Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.

31 In Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds: Memory Struggles in Pinochet’s Chile, 71 and 413.

32 Patricio Abarca Castro, “Cuecas y Memorias: Construcciones políticas y de género en el baile nacional,” 200.

33 Jorge Montealegre, Frazadas del Estadio Nacional (Santiago: LOM, 2003), 27.

speeches from 1973 to 1976, claims that Pinochet’s discourses defined the frame of “the possible” for public life. “All of us Chileans,” his usual audience subject, was constituted by “all of those who—by rejecting the previous Marxist government—had made ‘eleven’ (the coup) possible.” This abstract, homogenizing subject was “loyal to the nation,” and represented the values of “faith, hope, responsibility, honesty, patriotic love, cohesion, and sacrifice,” among others.34 The communication policies of the Military Junta were made possible through a declaration of state of emergency that allowed for direct prohibition of any kind of Leftist discourse—political parties were banned altogether. The objective of a capitalist modernization was to be achieved through a stabilization of political power, in which the explicit aim was the “psychological action against the Marxist-Leninist adversary.”35 An Economy of Austerity Very soon Pinochet was introduced to a group of right-wing intellectuals who planned the liberalization of Chilean economy to fix inflation and impose a system of free market for the country. The construction of this alliance was not obvious by the mid-seventies, and even contradicted some of the military morals.

The first reaction of the Junta was suspicion. When Pinochet asked about the assessment of the economic plan—today known as the brick—presented by businessman Roberto Kelly and his colleagues trained at University of Chicago, finance minister Lorenzo Gotuzzo at first didn’t think it aligned to the “ideals” of a militarized nation; “I had not bothered to tell you about it, my general, because it is the most free-market and Manchesterian capitalism plan that has ever been written.” 36 Pinochet, however, allowed this collaboration with the economists, who in turn were experimentally putting to practice Nobel laureate Milton Friedman’s ideas. The country became the symbol of two controversial images, contributing to the complexities of the map of the Cold War: a poster child of Imperialist practices imposed by the United States, that of the “Chilean economic miracle,” through the imposition of an authoritarian regime—a neoliberal dictatorship.

Among the authoritarian outbreaks of the region throughout the twentieth century, an important sector of the Latin American Church became the only institutional counterweight in the presence of state violence, and Chile was not the exception. The Liberation Church, as the movement has come to be known locally, became a fundamental, if not the only institution that managed to offer solace and helped survive many of the targets of the regime. From October 1973 to 1975, Catholic priests founded the Committee for the Cooperation of Peace, and offered legal and social assistance to the victims of human right violations.

34 Giselle Munizaga, El discurso público de Pinochet (1973 - 1976), [The Public Speeches of Pinochet (1973 - 1976), preceded by the essay “Politics of communication under authoritarian regimes”], (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 1983), 21.

35 Munizaga published Public Speeches of Pinochet… in 1983, still during dictatorship, through the Council of Latin American Social Sciences. For these quotes she cites “a confidential document of September, 1975.” Munizaga, Public Speeches of Pinochet, 33.

36 Ib Idem. Heraldo Muñoz wrote this testimony and analysis of life under dictatorship as an expatriate, although he has served in political positions for the center-left conglomerate after the return to democracy and today is Minister of International Relations.

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Liberation Church

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Pinochet ordered the dissolution of this first enterprise, but by 1976, Cardinal Silva Henriquez managed to create the Vicariate of Solidarity, an institution established with more resources and protection from the militaries, with its main office established in Plaza de Armas, behind the Cathedral of Santiago. The Vicariate didn’t only provide protection but archived many cases of human rights violations: it became a fundamental source for the Truth Commissions established by the governments of the transition to democracy that began after 1991, providing information with a larger archive than the Commissions could have gathered. The role of the Vicariate and many sectors of the Church became fundamental as the last social institution for assembly. Historian Viviana Bravo writes, When assemblies were prohibited in dictatorship, the hallways of the Vicariate and local churches became the only shelter to recompose the organic and communal links.37

Other instances of Christian resistance to the state complemented the role of the Vicariate. Liberation Theology, a Christian praxis theology created in Latin America, was infused by Marxist thought and as such did not see a contradiction with the Socialist project and the premises of this sector of the clergy.

Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel defends the creation of Liberation Theology in association with only “certain kinds of Marxism”—that of Marx, Gramsci, and the late work of Marcuse—and excluding other kinds, created as a praxis in strict relation with the Latin American reality as a Christian response to serve the poor.38 The Liberation Theology intellectual priests maintained their movement despite being extremely polemical for the global Church institution, and Pope Benedict XVI even advised against it in 1990. The practice of Theology of Liberation drew the working class and the poor closer to sectors of the Church, and many priests came to be known as the “worker priests.” At least 32 cases of death of priests are known from the first days of dictatorship, and 385 cases of exile after imprisonment and torture were reported.39 In 1984, famous worker-priest Andre Jarlan was in his office by forces of the state at población La Legua, proving again that the Socialist Christians were not exempt of state violence.

Because of the extended social and political realms, the Church covered in Chile, the Bible became a text of transversal communication throughout classes and views. Dramaturgs extensively resorted to biblical allegories as part of a universal asset for communication, open to multiple interpretations. Examples are the

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work of Juan Radrigán, David Benavente, and as we will see, many plays of street theater.

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37 Viviana Bravo Vargas, “Iglesia Liberadora, rearticulación de la política y protesta social en Chile (1973 – 1989) in Historia Crítica 62 (Oct – Dec 2016), 83.

38 See Enrique Dussel, “Teología de la liberación y marxismo.” Mysterius liberationis, Conceptos fundamentales de la teología de la liberación 1 (1990), 138 - 159. See also the publication of the Princeton thesis by Rubem Alves, Theology of Human Hope (Washington: Corpus Books, 1969). See the demurs of Pope Benedict XVI in Joseph Ratzinger, “Instrucción sobre algunos aspectos de la Teología de la Liberación” (Roma: Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, 1984).

39 Mario Amorós, “La Iglesia que nace del pueblo: relevancia histórica del movimiento Cristianos por el socialismo”, in Julio Pinto ed., Cuando hicimos historia: La experiencia de la Unidad Popular (Santiago de Chile: LOM, 2005), 124.

The Periphery of Santiago: Landscapes of Social Housing The built environment of much of Santiago is constituted by the result of social housing policies, starting from the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1960, the “peripheral city” of poblaciones constituted two thirds of the metropolitan area.40 While the higher classes expanded the city towards the north-east sector of Santiago, the rest of the expansion away from downtown was developed by both government policies of social housing (changing according to each presidency) and independent social organizations.41 The most productive period of the expansion of Santiago was the government of President Frei Montalva in 1964 – 1970, as this was the first government that approved the transference of government-owned lands taken over by informal developments. It also established a massive public policy of social housing. To a less extent, Allende’s government was also able to complete an important number of social housing projects, but had great difficulties implementing their housing policies in the first year, which prompted a critical mass of these initiatives to move independently to pressure the government.42 Historian Mario Garcés proposes that rather than a social history of a working class versus the elites, it is more accurate in Santiago to speak of the specific class of the peripheries: pobladores, and the transition of their lives in public scrutiny as well as the history towards the legitimation of their place of residency. For Garcés, the identity formation of organized conglomerations of families can be told from the appropriation and demand of dignified housing.43 Before the coup, sociologist Manuel Castells—who followed the Chilean social project closely—was skeptical of this social categorization, as it could be easily considered a depoliticized mass separated from the classic demands of the working class.

Considered alternatively as “an ultra-leftist broth” or electoral clientele, by the Left, and both demeaned as lumpen and craved as patronized plebs by the right, the movement of pobladores seems provided with a

He acknowledged, nevertheless, that when only the organizational base was considered, the relevance of this group was clear, as by 1972 the organization network developed for demands related to dignified 40 Armando de Ramón, “La Ciudad de Masas,” in Santiago de Chile (Santiago: Mapfre, 1992), 237, 270 – 280.

41 Castells mentions DESA. Garcés mentions the social workers trying to decipher the social composition of callampas. I use the term “peripheral” given that Santiago was expanded surrounding the historic center, in the search for space and cheaper territory, rather than as clusters of suburbs, (as most of the northern American experiences). The high class of Santiago residents “fled” from the center as well (towards the mountain range) but this expansion is not labeled in the same way by either residents or academics, denoting a social condition to the “periphery” and the “marginal.” This is originally an unfair categorization, although it can be argued that in such a segregated city, it is the higher class that defines everything “peripheral” around them. I will keep the term to define the geographic characteristic of the expansion of Santiago, but, as the city progresses, I argue the specificity and heritage of poblaciones should break that initial, homogenizing categorization.

42 Luis Bravo Heitmann and Carlos Martínez Corbella, Chile: 50 años de vivienda social (Valparaíso: Universidad de Valparaíso, Facultad de Arquitectura, 1993).

43 Mario Garcés, Tomando Su Sitio (Santiago: LOM Ediciones, 2002), 6 – 7.

44 Manuel Castells, “Movimiento de Pobladores y Lucha de Clases en Chile,” in EURE III (April, 1973), 1.

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fluidity and ambivalence that defy Marxist analysis and traditional political strategies.44

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housing tenement would come up to 800.000 Chileans, “more than all rural and urban unionized workers in the productive sphere.”45 All throughout the borders of the city, combative names flooded a new city of Santiago; Nueva La Habana, Guerrillero Heróico, Asalto al Cuartel Moncada, Inti Peredo, Elmo Catalán… were part of a number of these family organizations which took unused lots of land in 1971 throughout the capital city during the years of the Popular Unity.46 In the whole period (1970-1973), historian Boris Cofré has come to conclude a total of 166 Fig. 45. Mapping of the eradication of pobladores according to communes of origin and destination, 1979 – 1985. Santiago, CED (Centro de Estudios del Desarrollo de Chile), 1990.

tomas happened in Santiago.47 One distinctive aspect of these poblaciones was the system of communal organization that allowed to provide

for the services that the State hadn’t been able to extend to them: these included up to a point committees for vigilance, labor and construction, culture, health, and other areas of self-organization.48 Nueva Habana: Internal Enemy Nueva Habana is an example of a población founded in the Allende period (in 1970), by taking over a sub utilized plot in the south-east of the city. Popular Unity initially had a conflictive relationship between pobladores, as MIR originally organized pobladores and land take overs to pressure the Socialist government into fulfilling the historic housing demands of this social class. The political affiliation of all pobladores however, as Castells maintained, was not fixated.49 It was characteristically a bottom-up organization that pressured the socialist government of Allende towards permanent, dignified solutions of social housing whilst creating a system of communal organization

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that allowed families services they hadn’t had access to before.

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45 Castells,”Movimiento de Pobladores,” 1.

46 Boris Cofré S, “La nueva experiencia rebautizó la ciudad,” 61.

47 Boris Cofré S, “El Movimiento de Pobladores en el Gran Santiago: Las Tomas de Sitios y Organizaciones en los Campamentos.

1970 – 1973,” in Tiempo Histórico 2 (2011), 135.

48 Boris Cofré S, “La nueva experiencia rebautizó la ciudad,” 104 – 111.

49 Although MIR was one of the dissident Leftist parties during UP because they believed in armed revolution, in practice, pobladores led a popular revolution because of their communal system rather than armed militia. But this didn’t leave pobladores outside of the military targets. Some dwellers gave testimony of how many times they didn’t understand completely the political situation, what were the terms being used, but as they were collectively organized they understood this participation as a commitment that responded to some of the basic needs better provided in Nueva Habana than as individuals, and gradually understood this organization as a political belief. Cofré, “Campamento Ranquil,” 75 – 84

The future residents of Nueva Habana occupied a site guided by MIR, in lands owned by the Church.

1200 families, around 6000 pobladores, among them “unemployed, laundresses, widows, single mothers and workers… the common bondage between them was poverty and the lack of a roof.” 50 The first ones to help were the priests whose land was being taken over. After the first month, as they became a collective unity, many of the residents of the camp went along with protests downtown, usually to the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism (MINVU).

Fig. 45. Clay House for the celebration of the First Congress of Pobladores at Nueva La Habana. Santiago, February 1972 (In Boris Cofré, Nueva La Habana, 184).

Nueva Habana’s association with MIR and the communal system had been set up so as to address the poverty and lack of social services categorized by this población as a Marxist residential area. The construction of the identity of Nueva Habana was bound up with Leftist ideals and stood in direct opposition to the regime—its inescapable name requiring little further explanation—that the adaptation to the new reality of the country could only be foreseen as radically violent.

Ideological and cultural identity intertwined, only a “doctrine of shock” could recuperate its population into the new system of the nation.51 This identity had been, however, the inhabitants’ creative and effective outlet for addressing the basic necessities that neither the government nor their economic situation were able to overturn.52 Testimonies of the Collective Memoria Histórica Corporación José Domingo Cañas (CJDC) say that during the whole year of 1973 after the coup, every night as curfew started the military patrols would drive through the streets and passageways of Nuevo Amanecer and shoot bullets to the sky to keep the residents

50 Boris Cofré, “Campamento Ranquil,” 75.

51 This is a term used by historian Naomi Klein to explain the way capitalism was forcefully infused with examples across the globe, including Chile. See Naomi Klein, Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York : Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt , 2007).

52 Suspicions from the right wing against pobladores, especially those constituted with the help of MIR, was particularly embedded in the fact that this radical party did present the necessity to conform “popular militias” out of this social group.

However, the experience and archives reviewed by historians on the matter display that most of the tactics expected by MIR to constitute a militia were used as a system of protection against eviction in the early days of a site occupation. See Mario Garcés, Tomando Su Sitio, 414, and Boris Cofré, Nueva Habana, 58. The militias rather served, according to Garcés and Cofré, to a system similar to that of ronderos-- Civilian guards organized to protect agricultural societies, originally from Cajamarca, Andean Peru—where the community accepted a system of civilian guards to mediate various internal conflicts and control access to the población.

53 Colectivo de Memoria Histórica Corporación José Domingo Cañas (CJDC), Tortura en poblaciones del Gran Santiago (Santiago: CJDC Edition, 2005), 133.

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in fear.53 After a chilling, ambiguous speech on the soldiers’ intentions to spear residents not involved in

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politics, they demanded a new name. The change in the name of the población was the first act of domination towards Nueva Habana.

During this time, many political leaders were murdered or disappeared. The housing policies and construction system changed, from housing guarantees to a collection of minimal payments that the families had to provide in order to obtain a house.54 The name chosen was Nuevo Amanecer (New Dawn). New people arrived to the población as a result of a new privatized system of social housing, further fragmenting a former cohesive, trusting community, as informants to the government were not easily unmasked.55 Street Theater in Nuevo Amanecer In the summer evening of December 24, 1981, the street theater troupe TEUCO (Contemporary Urban Theater) performed Bienaventuranzas in población Nuevo Amanecer. TEUCO was a theater troupe of young professional artists who had by ‘81 been performing for a year in the streets of downtown Santiago: ten actors, two of them director-choreographers, one designer and one musician participated in this creative experiment of Bienaventuranzas. It was a short-lived troupe that performed adapting texts to their plays, from modern authors to biblical passages. Andrés Pérez and Juan Edmundo González co-directed the company,which was recognized by several theater practitioners as the first troupe to perform what came to be known as teatro callejero (street theater) in Chile.56 From the beginning their work was perceived by the regime as disruptive, but there was no evidence in their texts for this suspicion to be any more than just an interpretation. On the contrary, by the 1980s and as we will see in Chapter 3, publicly repressing a cultural activity was a cost the regime could no longer afford.

Manuel Paiva ran into these recently graduated students performing what he called “Thunder Plays,” for their quickness and transformative quality in the streets, and he decided to invite them to perform in Nuevo Amanecer. Paiva was participating at the time in the Bolsas de Trabajadores (Stocks of Laborers), an organization of unemployed, former industrial workers who had lost their jobs after the coup. They held weekly meetings downtown, and coming out from one of these meetings he met the performers.57 The Stocks of Laborers were preparing for demonstrations in the streets to ensue in 1983, after ten years of the

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virtual banish of political movements in public spaces. When Paiva saw these theatrical interventions, he

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54 Boris Cofré, Nueva Habana, 203 – 208.

55 Diego Pinto, Estado y Pobladores en la Configuración del Territorio: Del Campamento Nueva Habana a Población Nuevo Amanecer, dissertation for Universidad de Chile (Santiago, 2012), 71.

56 Ignacio Cáceres Pinto mentions TEUCO as the first well-known one from 1980; Teatro La Calle founded by Manuel Sánchez in 1982, and Teatro Callejero de Santiago (TECASA) founded in 1984 by Juan Carlos Cáceres. These are three main groups from Santiago. In the documentary “Más Allá de la Luz: Teatro Callejero” by Miguel Farías theater performer Roberto Pablo also acknowledges TEUCO as the first group of street theater performers, although closely followed by Teatro La Feria (from Temuco, South of Chile), Teatro de la Calle (Santiago), and Teatro Urbano Experimental (TUE, from Concepción, South of Chile), in the years 81-82.

[3:50–4:20]. Ignacio Cáceres Pinto, “Teatro callejero en Santiago de Chile durante la década de 1980,” in VIII Sociology Sessions of the UNLP (National University of La Plata, 2014) and “Más cerca de la luz: Teatro callejero,” directed by Miguel Farías (2014; Santiago de Chile: Green Productions), DVD. 57 Manuel Paiva in discussion with the author (July, 2016).

Fig. 48 and 49. Second phase of inhabitation: (Interrupted) project of 1.768 state-sponsored houses, organized by CORVI (Corporación de la Vivienda, Housing Corporation). Santiago, 1971.

Fig. 47. Self-Constructed Houses at Nueva La Habana and residents. In Boris Cofré, Nueva La Habana, 112.

creating extra-institutional space in dictatorship

Fig. 46. Self-Construction: Instalation of pobladores at Nueva La Habana. In Boris Cofré, Nueva La Habana, 110.

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considered them to be of obvious political militancy. He was allured both by the political message and the imagery the actors generated: the simple but effective body transformations of actors on stilts, masks and props. These subtle theatrical incorporations in performances outside theater houses were a surprising novelty, especially in a city with little to no carnival expressions.58 As

universities

had

been coopted as well by the military—24.000 dismissals and expulsions among faculty, staff, and students were replaced by the conservative sector59—this young generation of actors had been subjected to a censored education.

Fig. 50. In red are the places of performance of Bienaventuranzas.

Dots in mustard represent tomas available by 1982.

Darker mustard areas represent poblaciones available by 1982.

Map base from Leopoldo Benavides, for the Latin American Social Sciences Institute. Drawing by author.

The actors of TEUCO thus were educated with limited political resources nor did they have any experience with alternative

practices of theater outside of Chile. In this context, street theater was born more out of a pragmatic reason than a political one: the necessity to find a voice, the limited access to theater houses, and a simple will to make theater beyond economic constraints. To these ends Juan Edmundo González rented a kiosk in 1980 in the boundaries of downtown, in Puente Street, where he made friends with peddlers and other characters of the street. Soon, the lessons of these characters’ everyday life became part of his strategies and techniques

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of performance. 60

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58 Folkloric expressions of celebration in the strees exist in the form of “Chinchineros,” man or woman wearing percussion instruments while dancing and playing, and “Organilleros,” who play a music box on weekends to have children come out and play (and sell items or get tips). But there is no Carnival.

59 Stern, “Saving Chileans of Well-Placed Heart: 1973 – 1976,” 61.

60 Andrés Pérez interview by María de la Luz Hurtado in Hurtado, Andrés Pérez Tiene la Palabra, 50.

Between December 22 and January 16, 1981, Gonzalez’s troupe performed Bienaventuranzas twenty-two times. Most of the performances took place downtown, where the police came by three times. This was the only performance this troupe did in a población, as their original aim had been the historic center of the city where commercial, pedestrian arteries gathered busy crowds ideal for the search of a spontaneous audience that street theater requires. They were able to perform this play throughout the city using Christmas as the celebratory excuse—as had done the Living Theatre at Buraco Frio.

Bienaventuranzas was a play loosely based on the biblical passage of The Blessed Ones. According to one of the actresses, the play could last up to 45 minutes, but duration was relative as it could also be performed quickly passing through the number of images that explained the conflict and resolution of the play. The choreographic setup defined the shape of interaction between actors and public, organically inviting the spectator to stay outside a circular surface which defined the required distance

of the audiences.

Director Andrés Pérez explained the theme as follows; In a society ruled by inequality, divided between workers and Pharisees and controlled by evil, a man arrives: Christ, and his message of Bienaventuranzas. In the play, this message irrupts in a fight between Circus gladiators and the Roman Circus, however, Christ, just like the gladiators, must die. All men who die are Christ. Yet their death will turn into resurrection and an eternally present, renovated force that will defeat Power and Evil.61

The comedy featured Cesar the tyrant, Death, Minions, Christ and the Blessed Ones. Cesar, Life and Death were on stilts. The play had a simple arch of conflict to resolution, with ballet choreographies that collaborated to create a climax. From humiliation and torture to “the death of Death itself,” to the triumph of The Blessed Ones. As we can see from the images, not only stilts but aerial choreographies marked a vertical axis in the play that aided visibility for the audiences.

Fig. 51. Ivanna Ramírez. “TEUCO performs Bienaventuranzas back in the city center.” Santiago, December 1981.

Newspaper clip, unknown, María de la Luz Hurtado Personal Archives.

61 Bienaventuranzas Folder, Personal Archives of actress Paulina Hunt.

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Fig. 51 and 52. Bienaventuranzas in Nuevo Amanecer. Santiago, December 1981. Photographer unknown, Maya Mora and Paulina Hunt personal documents.

Catholic Text and Dissidence Recalling the transversal role of the Church and Catholic ideology throughout dictatorship, where both resistance to the regime and the junta rhetoric of a traditional foundation had a stake; where theology of liberation had infused a possibility of a Marxist Catholicism, an anarchist reading of its history is also possible.

The text refers ironically to the obvious relationship between Parabolas of the bible and the reality of the country. As James Scott proposes in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts,

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these “arts of resistance” can be found in the behavior of subordinates within places and texts usually understood as conventions of the dominant hegemony. This is true of the appropriation of institutional hegemonies such as the Church. As Scott argues with feudal Catholicism;

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Catholicism, for example, is the logical candidate for the hegemonic ideology of feudalism. But it is abundantly clear that the folk Catholicism of the European peasants, for example… rather than being a “general anesthesia,” [it] was a provocation—one that, together with the adherents in the lower clergy,

[provided] the ideological underpinning for countless rebellions against seigneurial authority.62

The analogies of the tyrant and the blessed ones in relation to the dictator and all of those who had been banned from the public sphere was very obvious, and yet a biblical text still infused the play of a protective veil. Maya Mora recalls, Now if you think of the choice of text… it was all well thought of so that it was a critique that the policeman could find himself a little put off by. I mean, it was The Blessed Ones… who could be against this biblical passage? (Laughs). This was the tone. 63

Space of Street Theater Street theater works as a celebratory magnet that draws audiences by curiosity. Actress Paulina Hunt observed that in the city center people would walk with their heads tilted down, looking too closely at the floor, perhaps burdened with silenced truths; by using stilts, height generates an immediate change of attitude and posture on the spectator as they engage in the verticality of TEUCO’s configurations. The use of

stilts and aerial choreographies physically altered the disposition of the bodies of the crowd, beyond the dramaturgy of the play.

Precisely what we wanted to do with Andrés was to re-signify the street. In a time when people walked with their head down… we wanted to give people through theater a changing experience. And so the goal was to not be taken by the police, unlike other groups later that looked to augment conflict. Our thesis was based I would say in Non Violence, something Andrés and I especially shared.64

Street theater invites a shared experience among strangers; a text, a play, achieving a new connection among individuals and becoming a public—a new unity built on the complicity of an apparently uncompromising subject matter, albeit visible, and extra-institutional. Generating the same extra-institutional Standing at the same level as actors and creating a spatial device with their bodies to meet the needs of their performances, spectators too became active entities within the play.

Although the kind of street theater that the artistic collectives began in 1980 in Santiago were of an artistic and pragmatic origin, a factor of militancy grew as they had more contact with people in the streets, and especially demonstrators. As we saw in the different cities we analyzed in chapter 1, the place of representation of the play changes its symbolic meaning, even with no change to its dramatic structure. Likewise, traveling across the city performing an extra-institutional discourse was revealed as a political action.

62 James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 68.

63 Maya Mora (mask and props designer in Bienaventuranzas) in discussion with author, July 2016.

64 Paulina Hunt, actress on Bienaventuranzas, in discussion with author, July 2016.

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space that the Living Theatre had created, TEUCO installed a space for spontaneity and popular interaction.

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Fig. 54. Bienaventuranzas in Nuevo Amanecer. Santiago, December 1981. Photographer unknown, Paulina Hunt personal documents.

The experience in Nuevo Amanecer The invitation to Nuevo Amanecer was important as it allowed for a symbolic integration of two cultural worlds. This is not to say the presence of theater was a novelty in poblaciones. As Paiva argues, the cultural scene in poblaciones maintained an important presence throughout the dictatorship, even beyond the socalled “cultural blackout” of the first years of the dictatorship.65 However, the novelty of the invitation of this professional artist troupe to a población was that it broke a professional artist/poblador distance. This along with the nature of the theater event itself, in which public space was also re-symbolized after years of strictly sheltered cultural events, marks the historical significance of TEUCO’s contribution to Chile’s cultural and social heritage.

As the construction for a place of comfort and solidarity was a failed enterprise for the leaders of Nuevo Amanecer over the years, Manuel Paiva saw in the candid strategies of the performances of TEUCO a

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possibility for public celebration. Indeed, in the pictures the public looks as if it rejoiced at the comical style

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65 Paiva, Rastros, 162. I interviewed political leader and neighbor of Calle Doce Mrs. Ubelina and her husband, who led me to Manuel Paiva (August 2016). They all recalled the performance of The Man Who Turned into a Dog, a play usually represented in teatro poblacional and written in Uruguay, in which Manuel Paiva participated as actor. Ubelina did not remember seeing Bienaventuranzas, unfortunately.

of drama of the troupe: this was not a trivial situation in the community, where a celebration in Calle Doce (central street of Nuevo Amanecer) hadn’t been the norm for the last eight years.66 Street Theater as Dissidence The troupe wrote the following statement to explain the mission behind street theater, both as artists and as dissident citizens: To do Street theater. To be in the streets. To have the possibility to learn deeply what is happening [in Chile], who we are. To live the conflict. To join the rest [the people, Chileans]. To make a celebration out of this union. As we played in carnivals that are no longer performed, since discotheques have been imported . . . to see unaccustomed eyes, hands that don’t clap because of an unlearnt convention. To surprise, to be surprised. To communicate. To eat! The street belongs to everybody. The world belongs to everybody. . . . To leave our accepted ghettos and take life with a courageous, constant, dignified decision using street theater as our tool.67

The first period of repression tactics unabashedly used terror to inhibit political opposition through fear.

As years went by, however, global scrutiny became more pressing: human rights violations became more and more evident, and so the regime had to counterweigh these repression tactics over an aggregation of evidence leading to the further deterioration of its reputation, especially under such a visible realm as the street in broad daylight. Street theater thus fell under this debate: to “protect” the stage of dominance, or allow this type of cultural activity. Forbidding a cultural activity with a low audience range as theater came to be understood, led to street theater as a form of publicity which was reinforced by the political connotations of the plays. Presented as naive entertainment amidst busy crowds, street theater thus became both a test and threat to the regime.

Five years after the coup, the government instituted new policies that resulted in very different kind between communities as they originated from the different housing policies and citizen initiatives began to mark places and leaderships in distinct ways. Whereas eradication resulted in uprooted communities, the heritage of neighborhoods created within the legacy of progressive ideals was relevant to many communities that were able to stay in their original territories to this day: the communal bond between neighbors resulted in a specific community that carries a different heritage from post-coup eradicated communities, as well as post-coup privately subsidized social housing projects. Thus, the visit of TEUCO to Nuevo Amanecer/ Former Nueva Habana, enabled by some of its original political leaders, is significant for its abilities to bring

66 Interviews to Mrs. Ubelina and Manuela Paiva, August 2016.

67 Andrés Pérez and TEUCO troupe. Play folder in personal documents of Paulina Hunt.

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of neighborhoods—particularly in terms of social engagement with the place of residency. The difference

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back the possibility of a communal, open celebration and its value as a form of intangible heritage.68 The Return of the Opposition By 1983, the relevance of street theater as an expression of the hidden transcript within public space gradually decreased, as the opposition was finally able to organize and express their dissent in the streets again: for nearly two Fig. 55. Unknown, National Protests: In this case the motive is the funeral of “worker priest” André Jarlan. September 1984, Santiago.

years, a series of eleven organized protests assembled a transversal group of Chileans that marched

the streets, demonstrating that opposition could be represented publicly once again. The original organizers of these protests were the copper miners, a powerful union among syndical movements as copper was and continues to be the most influential productive area of the Chilean economy.69 However, the movement gained momentum with the participation of diverse sectors, and of a particularly massive contribution were pobladores.70 The National Protests were the first event of resistance in the streets on a national scale. The demonstrators gathered cells of different social background towards their fight against dictatorship. This series of protests organized by the opposition came to show that there was less fear after ten years of dictatorship. They began in March, 1993, and continued every month, with different sectors of the opposition coming together to break through the veil of a righteous nation that the military, conservative sectors and media had managed to maintain.

Among the modes of protest in the city center were demonstrations violently repressed by the police;

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honking; beating pans to make noise; funeral processions for deaths associated with the state and, as the

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68 A contemporary example of the value of the legacy the residents see in their pre-coup poblaciones is the organization of local, touristic visits to Lo Hermida (a large neighborhood that shares a similar history and not far away from Nueva Habana) for Heritage Day since 2014, where twelve territory occupations and camps were founded between 1970 and 1972—see Grupo de Investigación de Historia Lo Hermida, “Avance de la Investigación Población Lo Hermida, Los Orígenes: Juntos Haciendo Historia” (Santiago, CIHLH Edition, 2013), 10. The visits for Heritage Day are advertised in the commune’s website, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.chimkowe.cl/en-lo-hermida-se-celebrara-el-dia-del-patrimonio-cultural/. There is a legacy of cultural and historical value in these poblaciones that the youth believes in and intends to preserve.

69 Mario Garcés and Gonzalo de la Maza, La Explosión de las Mayorías (Santiago: ECO Educación y Comunicaciones, 1985), 17 – 18.

70 In La Explosión de las Mayorías, historians Mario Garcés and Gonzalo de la Maza analyze this societal turn and describe the details of each protest; who summoned, who participated, forms of protest, forms of repression and succeeding organization.

economy went to recession, manifestations calling out hunger of the population. Poblaciones, barricades, light blackouts, and festive manifestations often ended with frequent violence.

The community supportive of the regime reacted against the protests as well as the police: counter-protests were mobilized and joined the battle of hegemonies. Protesters called to play cuecas and traditional music to full volume with speakers facing the streets as a symbol of support for the regime. Nonetheless, this antagonistic cacophony of oppositional support and representation revitalized

“Fig. 56. Rechace los Ruidos Molestos Poniendo Musica Chilena,” (Reject the Annoying Noises by Playing Chilean Music), Digital Library of Political Pamphlets of the National Congress of Chile..

the role of public space: the dictator had lost ground.

In the coming years the representation of the opposition escalated to reach the plebiscite of 1989, when “NO” to the continuation of the regime finally overturned the dictator out of power.

Concluding remarks It is not my contention that street theater had a direct escalating effect on the protests, but rather that street theater had a different representative political effect. The strategy of direct action that street theater presented served as a cleavage within the hegemonic public discourse in Chile as it was maintained by the dictator. Seven years after the imposition of the Junta Militar and subsequent Pinochet dictatorship, street theater showed the public a possibility for the return of non-hegemonic political representations in public space. Street thespians injected through their joyous games a blast of courage into the streets. Their main dominance and the values of a capitalist society had produced an imposed homogenization on social and cultural life.

As we will see in chapter 3, the underground story beneath the dictators’ stage, underscored by media and veiled by the regime—state-sponsored crimes against human rights—was experienced by theater artists in relation to the early creations of dissidence theater. Street theater became a possibility as a product of decreasing vigilance and oppression towards theater artists over the years. Street theater was too a stone in the regime’s shoe, but as the bigger demonstrations of dissidence of the opposition proved, there was less fear to face from the government after ten years, and the strategies of repression had changed.

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political agency was simply to reclaim public space, in a situation where the hegemony of the military

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Significantly, the artists involved with these events whom I interviewed didn’t remember which población they had performed in.71 Street theater performed by professional artists in poblaciones, or in the poorer urban landscapes of Santiago has been, until now, archived without any acknowledging of the precise places of the performances. The landscape of social housing is mostly perceived by Chileans and the outsider as a ubiquitous spatial condition. Yet the layers of political history of the city show otherwise.

In the case of Nueva Habana, for example, the process of tomas (the process of informally taking a place for inhabitation), self-construction, subsequent state aid and construction, and later private real estate projects shaped the neighborhood’s specificity between 1970 and 1985. Both as a communal and historic constitution, the tomas is treasured by many of its residents. Today, there is a legacy of cultural and historical value in these poblaciones that groups of the youth residents believe in and intend to preserve.72 It is in the specificity of location that the event can be understood in its full significance and potential. The caught pedestrians and invited neighbors acquired an active role both as public and local residents. As their presence in the streets became prevalent, the theater troupes were able to explore dramaturgies that further explored an intellectual engagement with the audience and pushed a politically compromising message.

Although the theater troupes’ visits to Nuevo Amanecer allowed for the expansion of theater performance’s meaning as a political event, it was also downtown where creative development acquired more complexity.

In Chapter 3 we will see how street theater we will analyze in further detail the aesthetic premises of the performers who sought to carry out their work courageously by performing in broad daylight, their dialogue with former creators of this artform, as well as inquire the specificity of some examples of these plays among popular theater historically.

TEUCO produced a simple action that cuts through the conventions of constituency of the city, which can be fully understood only with the presentation of the forms of order that it disrupts. In TEUCO’s case, they managed to manipulate the systems of repression of the state in public space, turning everyday rituals of public domination to their advantage, with the use of a Christian passage as the defense mechanism against

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a presentation of themselves as rebels.

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71 I interviewed actress Paulina Hunt and designer Maya Mora; Andrés Pérez died many years ago, and the musician couldn’t be reached. Others I couldn’t contact, but this place was never mentioned in the institutional archives. The pervasive issue of an irrelevance given to location is clear as none of the archives available on this play (or other street theater done in poblaciones) mentions the distinct space or the audience involved. I maintain this is a problem as it presents the poblaciones of Santiago as anonymous, heterogeneous places, whereas the story of the city demonstrates otherwise. The archive that holds most information on Chilean street theater companies is Chile Escena, www.chilescena.cl 72 I contacted a community in Nuevo Amanecer through the group Centro Cultural Casita Periférica, whom I originally found on Facebook. One of the organizers told me he was disappointed at the way the cultural center had been built by the current state, and that he appreciated better the original aesthetics of Nueva Habana as something to preserve. Political theater is today one of the major organizations in Nuevo Amanecer in conjunction with the adjacent Población Los Copihues. Casita Periférica organizers in conversation with author, August 2016.

^ Fig. 58. Dancers of Southern Cueca celebrate September 11, 1975 in Chiloé. Digital Library of Political Pam-phlets of the National Congress of Chile.

Fig. 59. Bienaventuranzas in Nuevo Amanecer. Santiago, December 1981. Photographer unknown, Paulina Hunt personal documents.

creating extra-institutional space in dictatorship

^ Fig. 57. Cultural Activity in Nueva La Habana, 1971. Archives of architect René Urbina and resident Manuel Paiva, as labeled by historian Boris Cofré.

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Chapter 3

expansion of popular theater vocabularies Precedents of Theaters of Dissent before Street Theater: El Aleph and David Benavente

The violence with which the military regime censored and reprehended cultural manifestations of dissent was, in the beginning, careless of any global scrutiny. In addition to the repression of people directly associated to politics, the regime was responsible for the killing of famous musician Victor Jara in Estadio Chile; it dismantled the production of Chilean cinema, and television was strictly under control. These were the realms of culture, which the regime considered higher risks of the transmission of a political message through mass consumption.

Theater, to a certain point a media of lesser mass consumption, was not as scrutinized as these cultural realms. However, the development of theater within the dictatorship commenced with a similar story of repression. El Aleph was the first theater company that engaged in contemporary politics, as early as 1974.

Thirty-one plays premiered between 1974 and 1981 that belonged to independent professional theater.1 These were presented in small downtown theaters, and their audience was a small, intellectual circle of people who attended theater houses regularly—a petty bourgeois; a type of audience that could be somewhat ignored by the regime in comparison to the broader audience of popular culture.

Catherine Boyle, Andrés Piña and Oscar Lepeley, among other theater historians, have surveyed the series of plays that came out of the previous theater circles developed in Chile during dictatorship; within university, commercial and independent theaters.2 Of all of these plays, three companies marked the transition of the strategies of dissent that theater artists were capable of publicly claiming in the discourse of their plays, influenced both by the level of state repression as much as civilian organization and contestation: El Aleph, T.I.T (Taller de Investigación Teatral, “Theater Research Workshop”) with dramaturg David Benavente, and TEUCO. They experimented with directorial and dramaturgical strategies that could present a contestatory expression to address repression.

1 María de la Luz Hurtado and Carlos Ochsenius, Transformación del teatro chileno en la década del 70 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Latin American Series – CENECA, 1982).

2 Catherine Boyle, Chilean Theater, 1973 – 1985 (New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1992); Juan Andrés Piña, Contingencia, poesía y experimentación: teatro chileno 1976 – 2002 (Santiago de Chile: RIL Editores, 2010); Oscar Lepeley, Teatro chileno y dictadura: cuatro obras contestatarias (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 2009).

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A double use of language, direct and encoded was used both in the dramaturgy and performance for these plays. The three pivotal types of theater I review below share a use of a simple language to express ideas, with the frequent use of biblical passages in a revolutionary sense: the audience and/or the characters of the play demanded this simplicity—the use of images that a broad spectrum of people were acquainted with.

This double use of language became at times specific to place of performance, with the intention to alter the norms of behavior of spaces outside theater houses.

Teatro El Aleph Imprisonment Whereas university theaters went into a “boom of the classics,” performing for example Spanish Golden Age plays by Calderón de la Barca or Lope de Vega,3 the independent professional theater troupe El Aleph performed a play they wrote collectively in the small downtown theater house called El Angel. Al Principio existía la Vida [In the Beginning There Was Life] premiered in October, 1974. Director Oscar Castro explains, There were two important scenes in that play: the story of the captain of the ship, who urges to continue to fight while the ship capsizes—and would come to represent our point of view of the last moment of the Popular Government—and the ending, when the prophet is killed while he promises his fight will continue, and that truth does not die with him. These two things we consciously decided we wanted to say. On top of that we constructed, ornamented, digressed, deviated elsewhere: on friendship, on miscommunication, on problems of human relationships which are also a product of fascism.4

Theater scholars agree that El Aleph inaugurated with this play a cycle of professional independent theater with a critical point of view on contemporary society and politics. A month after In the Beginning… premiered, the troupe was invited to perform in Universidad Católica. Oscar Castro (director and actor) believes that someone among the conservative professors notified the authorities of a political edge of the play—before this, whenever the audience would come to the dressing rooms after the play and ask, “the captain was Allende, right?” the actors would deny it or say it was a story of their troupe, “of how their theater company would fall and start over time and time again.”5 The night after their performance at Católica, inspectors came to Oscar Castro’s house and asked him to go with them. They drove to his sister’s house (also

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an actress of El Aleph), and took them both to the political prisoner camp Tres Álamos, where women and

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3 Not a gratuitous decision in itself, as Andrés Piña and Catherine Boyle would remark.

4 Oscar Castro interviewed by Ariel Dorfmann, “Teatro en los Campos de Concentracion Chilenos. Conversación con Oscar Castro del Aleph,” in Conjunto 37, Jul-sept 1978.

5 Ibid.

men were separated. He was kept in three political prisoner camps: Tres Álamos, Ritoque, and Puchuncaví for two years.6 What happened next inside and outside political prisoner camps portrays an example of the power of theater, representation, and language in the multiple layers of the public realm. Within the walls of the camps, the “hidden transcript” of his plays stopped being threatening, and thus Oscar Castro and the prisoners realized that with minor adjustments, they could present almost any play. It was surprising and humorous for Castro that what originally led to his imprisonment was later performed in prison and approved by the guards. Another remarkable example of the cultural life inside prison as controled by the guards was when in order to allow to perform Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, he only had to change mentions of the color red when the character Jerry describes a dog’s forepaw.

Outside, during 1975, there is no record of professional independent theater with a critical point of view.7 There was a common use of the term “cultural blackout” to express the cease of cultural activities of a certain noticeability during the first years of the military regime. Fear of censorship, or repression, led the world of the arts—mostly connected with the Left and progressive ideas—either to go into exile, political prisoner camps, or decide to stay quiet and calm, waiting for state violence to decrease, or at least, understand how censorship would work in Chile. Outside noticeable circles in places such as theater houses, music concert venues, or the cinema, however, culture continued to develop as a form inherited from community organizations: “teatro poblacional” [shanty-town Theater], for example, was an amateur mode of social cultural work that continued throughout dictatorship. Although police raids would enter with violence into these poblaciones, these areas were outside of the public eye, away from downtown, and symbolic spaces of power in Santiago.

Thus the segregation that kept poblaciones away from urban services, served as a semipermeable shelter to continue with grassroots cultural projects.

Inside the camps, Oscar Castro started performing theater 15 days after he came in. The prisoners would Culture, Sports and Craftwork.8 His inaugurating monologue was his own Life, Passion and Death of Casimiro Cuchufleta. Castro recalls,

6 María Antonieta Castro’s husband Juan McLeod, their mother María Julieta, and Oscar’s wife went to visit them one week after their imprisonment, in November 30, 1974. Oscar and María Antonia lived in a house in Santiago where they hid many radical leftists, although they weren’t militants. Julieta was bringing her daughter’s make up. Because of a series of unfortunate events, a lipstick had hidden inside a microfilm with leftist propaganda. Mrs. Julieta Ramírez was imprisoned and taken to Cuatro Álamos, and then Villa Grimaldi (a center for torture). Julieta, who lived in the country in the South, became a rare case of a woman imprisoned and killed despite her political views were center-right and more conservative. Yael Mandler, “Julieta Ramírez, la prisionera de derecha de Villa Grimaldi,” The Clinic, November 11, 2013, http://www.theclinic.cl/2013/11/11/julieta-ramirez-la-prisionera-de-derecha-de-villa-grimaldi/ 7 María de la Luz Hurtado and Carlos Ochsenius, Transformación del teatro chileno en la década del 70 (Minneapolis: Minnesota Latin American Series – CENECA, 1982).

8 Castro and Dorfmann, “Conversación,” in Conjunto 37.

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work together to make days more manageable, and were divided in four branches: Solidarity (Welfare),

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Fig. 60. “The Gospel According to Us” drawing by Miguel Lawner (Ritoque, 30 March 1975).

Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Fondo Miguel Lawner.

We were pretty screwed in prison; sleeping in the hallways, sleeping in the floor. Tres Álamos was full, there were 200 people cramped in places for 50, herded after having been tortured. The newcomers would arrive exhausted… the family visits would last 10 minutes… but here we were and we had to keep going [living, fighting?]. The play was about a petit bourgeois, a journalist, who lives by himself. An arriviste who dies alone. In this play he doesn’t change or redeem himself. In the next one, Casimiro Peñafleta Political Prisoner, which I did later, I make him change. 9

Presenting plays cheered the fellow prisoners. He worked with a larger crew, who would prepare the scenery and lights during the week and make do with creative solutions to be found in prison; nevertheless, there were engineers and other enthusiastic men, who would come up with any request. A community developed surrounding the life of the theater. People started to expect performances by the end of the week.

They called these events the “Cultural Fridays,” where even the first year soldiers would stay and watch.

Casimiro Cuchufleta, Mayor of Ritoque Oscar Castro was transferred to Ritoque. Castro speaks of the struggles of starting over each time he was transferred, and the strain of seeing people leave when he would stay for a long period. But he managed to create a character that superimposed the already delusional life of imprisonment: the Mayor of Ritoque.

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The director explains, And then one of the most beautiful follies that has ever happened to me occurred. It was all like a big theater play. We were living farther away from each other, so we decided to name the streets. One would be Seaside 9 Ib Idem.

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Street, another one Macondo, the Post Street (where one of the fellow prisoners was in charge of the mail), Plaza de Armas (the soccer court), and so on. At the same time we invented a society, the Town Hall. There was a mayor, firefighters, a priest... all you could have in a town, and on that base, giving roles to each fellow, we built our lives... it turned out to be something of a happening, because everyone would participate among the camp.

This mix of Surrealism—possibly also influenced by Augusto Boal and Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator and philosopher advocator of critical pedagogy—that El Aleph integrated in the everyday politics of the camp are discussed by architect-historian Ana María León as a foil to the Open City developed by the architects of Universidad de Valparaíso. Just three miles south of the prisoners’ camp, the architects worked on isolation to develop architecture without a direct association to the political circumstances, neither the socialist presidency of Allende nor the Pinochet dictatorship.

As for outside the walls of Ritoque, it is telling that there were no independent plays during 1975. The message had been clearly stated for the theater community. But in 1976 there was a new attempt to produce theater with a critical point of view: David Benavente and a group of actors presented Pedro, Juan y Diego: a story of three men working to build a small wall, that they know will be torn down shortly. The play tells of the Americanization of the country, of the disruptive change of values that the working class was enforced to adapt to, and the necessity of making sense of the individual experience even in a state of absurdity. Although the characters know the wall will be destroyed, they learn how to build it and give a meaning to it beyond its useless destiny. The floor of the set was covered with dirt, spalled stones and larger, heavy stones, which the actors would carry in the beginning of the play from the audience aisles into the stage.

The relevance of this play is not so much its critical point of view towards the regime as much as its careful construction of the “popular characters” of the play, particularly in terms of the use of language.

Again, a simple language is carefully used, this time a carefully reproduced local language. Benavente was a sociologist, and this play served as a prelude for what some scholars would later call “Testimony Theater” experience with In the Beginning there was Life, people were expecting this play to be shut down, but it wasn’t.

“You should go and see it before they close it down,” was a frequent comment, partly because it was managed by independent theater.

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in the years to come, where social research has a direct translation to the stage. Because of the frustrated

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Fig. 61. Ramón López (photograph and set designer), Three Maries and a Rose production, 1979 at Teatro El Ángel, Santiago.

Chilescena Archives.

Three Maries and a Rose Three years later, in July, 1979, this method of sociological research led to a second play where the life of clase poblacional was staged: Three Maries and a Rose. The play tells the story of four women living in a shanty-town with unemployed husbands, who make a living by sewing figurative compositions of patchwork in burlaps that illustrate stories of their lives. In the beginning frame, María Ester helps put the stools in place, while she grunts about her husband hitting her and stealing money to get a haircut; Maruja speaks of her own household problems. María Luisa arrives late and says she has to go back in a hurry, because she left her children locked from the outside in her house all alone—she then tells a gruesome story of beating a cat to death and bursting his interiors when a group of five cats had broken in her kitchen the night before. Along comes Rosa later to see if she can join the workshop. María Luisa had informed her of this work possibility, chapter 3

María Ester is not pleased with letting in someone new.

The burlap artwork, commonly known as “arpilleras,” was a project sponsored by the catholic human rights organization Vicariate of Solidarity, created in 1976 and which stood against arbitrary persecution of Chilean citizens. Among their programs, they organized these workshops and sold the patchworks outside

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of the country, ameliorating the financial problems of the women, as well as making people come together for the workshops. The unemployment of men during dictatorship was a direct cause of the closure of the “industrial chords” of the city, portrayed in this play through the absence of men.

Another important aspect of the dismantling of the social fabric of the Chilean impoverished sector was the prohibition to organize. Social participation had been a main aspect of the government of Frei Montalva, and many types of organizations were created beyond unionizing: “centers of mothers,” collective organizations for agrarian work and for housing plots. Without the possibility of this type of organization, the burlap workshops also served as a novel reason for social gathering.

As the play develops, we learn many specifics of the work: how arpilleras are formatted 40 by 60 centimeters [16 by 23 inches], how they typically require a landscape, a scene, and small figures to situate it in the Chilean context, and some traits of the job for sewing figures. The creative method is comically depicted: María Ester industrially sews Andes Mountain Ranges before choosing the scenes, while María Luisa goes through a dark process of artistic struggle for each one. She has an obsessive interest in the biblical passage of the Revelation. After this description of the work within the play, the next scenes take a less realistic approach: a priest asks for the women to construct a fifteen square meter [seventeen square yards] arpillera to place behind his altar, and offers good money. The passage of the Revelation turns into the theme of this altarpiece, with an apparent or relatable double use of language as a call for justice: Con empanás, !ay, sí!

[With empanadas2]

Pa’ regodearse.

[to gloat]

Porque el Juicio Chileno

[because the Chilean Revelation]

tiene que darse.

[has to begin]

!Huifa ayayay!

Juicio Final, ¡ay sí!

The passage above is a song in the rhyme of cueca folkloric dance and composition style. Benavente constantly restrained from hard, direct critiques to the government, so as to present a theater play that wouldn’t be closed down. According to his version, he wrote these lines without an intention to provoke the government. Even though both plays have been considered as “inaugural plays for Contestation Theater,”10 Benavente seemed more interested in a way of doing theater that can say something new, without being closed down. Newspaper La Segunda—owned by the press corporation of El Mercurio and supportive of Pinochet—wrote the following note in the section TOP SECRET:

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Juicio del Bueno.1

10 Oscar Lepeley, “Pedro, Juan y Diego: obra fundacional del teatro contestatario chileno,” in Latin American Theatre Review 35, no.

2 (2001), 21 – 36.

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The mis-en-scène, which premiered last week Thursday in the theater house El Angel, pursues only to untie hatred among social classes and to divide the workers and public opinion in light of certain recent events. It is structured in the sadly celebrated arpilleras that the Vicariate of Solidarity would send abroad with scenes of closed factories, mass shootings and other themes, with the only purpose of discrediting the process that Chile is going through at these times.11

Benavente constantly refrained from hard, direct critiques of the government so as to present a theater play that wouldn’t be closed down—the underlying necessity to do theater and test what could be said gradually. According to his version, he wrote these lines without an intention to provoke the military, but the “Revelation with empanadas” was taken by many as a defense of Allende’s government—in relation to Socialism “the Chilean way,” also called “Socialism with empanadas.” In 1977, a symbolic event had occurred shortly after the performances of his earlier play, Pedro, Juan y Diego, in the realm of independent professional theater. Teatro La Feria, led by actors Jaime Vadell and José Manuel Salcedo, set up a tent in Providencia, upper class downtown area. They created the play Hojas de Parra based on Nicanor Parra’s poetry and metaphors of the political state of the country, all structured as a circus spectacle. The play premiered in February, and in March, the following excerpt was written in La Segunda: “a play of pure political content and with a clear critical message to the current government is being presented these days in a neuralgic center of Santiago.”12 The tent was burnt a few days after this article came out. David Benavente commented: We never thought of leaving our small theaters, El Angel and La Comedia, because they were hard to impeach.

The soldiers had to come in, go down the ladders… they just cared less about this. Our friends Vadell and Salcedo had this idea of the tent. By that time, I was studying screenwriting in the American Film Institute.

Had I been in Chile, I would have strongly advised them not to mount a play in a tent! It was so easy to burn it down. So easy! It was a total provocation. They didn’t realize this. What kind of protection does this have?

Three guys from DINA [Direction of National Intelligence] can just come one night, and set it on fire, without even arresting them—this is precisely what happened. A lot of people came to see this, it became a symbol of theater repression, but it didn’t allow them to continue this kind of spectacle.13

The article in La Segunda led the dramaturg and Raúl Osorio, the director, to an appointment in the Ministry of Defense, where the decision of closing down the play or not was to be analyzed. In an interview with Benavente in 2016, he states that his experience inside the office in the Ministry was radically different from Osorio’s testimony of what happened to him, and that maybe because of unexpected family connections

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and a shared history with the interviewer, the conversation soothed the tensions, the officer considered the

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11 Translation of excerpt in the newspaper article, La Segunda, July 31st, 1979, 7. Found in Yael Zaliasnik, “Re/Posición? De “Tres Marías y una Rosa”: Tres Décadas para A/Bordar la Resistencia,” Revista Chilena de Literatura 77 (nov. 2010): 202.

12 Translated from press quote. In Sebastián Pérez, “A 43 años del golpe: la censure de la dictadura al teatro chileno,” Hiedra, September 11, 2016, http://revistahiedra.cl/opinion/la-censura-de-la-dictadura-al-teatro-chileno/ 13 Benavente in discussion with the author, August 2016.

play harmless, and Benavente was free to go and keep up the performances.14 The play later toured abroad and throughout Chile.

This permissive outcome gave Benavente the impression that theater was not harshly censored after Oscar Castro’s experience, and that Castro had been imprisoned more likely for being close to the MIR radical political party than because of his theater creations.

But as it turns out, Three Maries and a Rose was presented in a turning point of the strategy the military regime used against independent theater. The ultimate message taken from the Bible injected into the semihidden transcripts of theater was that of Justice. The Christian concept of Justice as seen in The Blessed Ones passages (especially that of Lucas) is about the victory of the suffering beyond the oppressions of the tyrant.

It was presented in a joyous, infantile aesthetic and as a religious interpretation in festive seasons, but the message was clear. Benavente’s play pivoted on the relationship of state repression and theater. One month after its premiere, CNI (National Center of Intelligence) produced a document for the Ministry of Internal Affairs entitled Memorandum on Chilean Theater. Numeral 1 stated “Three Maries and a Rose constitutes a new motive for worry in reference to attacks against the military government, perpetrated through artistic activities.” Numeral 5 concluded that “repressive action, be it the close down of Three Maries… or force measures inflicted to its producers are highly counterproductive, as… internal and external campaigns on the “cultural blackout” and “fascistoid” measures of the Chilean regime would be fueled.” Finally, it concluded that “indirect pressure” be conducted to lessen the “development, proliferation and expression of artistic groups such as the one that motivated this presentation.” 15 Inside small, downtown theaters, the stage acted as the only transmitter of symbolism and source of double language; inside the political prisoner’s camps, the ‘suspension of disbelief’ seeped from “cultural Fridays” into a Surrealist code for the everyday life of confinement.

Foreign Vigil expressed their concern with growing strength. In this context, French theater director Ariene Mnouchkine and film director Claude Lelouch visited Chile, an extension of this global vigil and a particular concern of Mnouchkine, whose practice was increasingly marked with the global political contex. Interviewed by APSI (Agencia de Prensa de Servicios Internacionales, Press Agency of International Services), the first independent magazine of opposition, Mnouchkine explained: We belong to an association of intellectuals and artists that believes its duty to make each voice be recorded 14 Benavente and the officer used to vacation in the same place together in their youths, Pelluhue beach. The officer was friends with Benavente’s older cousins. David Benavente in discussion with the author, August 2016.

15 CNI, Memorándum sobre el Teatro Chileno, translated from press quote. In Pérez, “A 43 años del golpe,” Hiedra, September 11, 2016.

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Given the continuity of censorship and repression over the years, both local artists and foreigners

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Fig. 62. Alvaro Hoppe, Paseo Ahumada, 1988, Santiago. Photographer Personal Collection.

throughout expression values. We know in Chile there exists a situation of prohibition towards a theater group… we cannot say that this concerns only Chileans. It concerns all of us.16

This was the situation that the theater artistic scene of the country was in when in 1980 actors and directors Andrés Pérez with Juan Edmundo González formed TEUCO, Spanish acronym for Urban Contemporary Theater. A generation younger than Benavente and Castro, as students they felt the theater scene was depressed, University theaters couldn’t grant the liberties they were looking for, and independent theaters didn’t have an interesting audience. This is how they decide to start doing street theater, a theater that could reach new audiences, that required different technical strategies for “staging” their plays, where they had to experiment in place. Many street theater groups proliferated in the 80s, but Andrés Pérez was one of the names that trespassed the boundaries of theater media, that we know experimented with street theater in diverse settings of Santiago, and one of the important talented actor-directors of the time.

With street theater, the transmission of a hidden transcript within the public sphere governed by state

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vigilance encouraged a leisure form that could creatively reorganize the social encounters in public space,

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as a tool for a non-violent form of resistance, and lurking rebellion. Santiago provided the room for street theater to occur. TEUCO performed mainly in the historic city center and surroundings. The busy, diverse 16 Ariene Mnouchkine and Claude Lelouch interview, “La Imaginación es un Músculo que se Entrena,” (Imagination is a Muscle to Train), APSI July 16 – 31, 1979.

pedestrian arteries of the city was the obvious place to search for a spontaneous audience: the pedestrian streets such as Ahumada were particularly interesting to experiment with the potential transformations of these busy crowds.

I found street theater in Chile during dictatorship mostly in the form of manifestos, records of meetings, explanations of the play (transcripts were more rare), and images. The Chilean troupes that performed in the streets of Santiago seven years after the military coup of 1973 echo Scott’s “hidden transcripts as an art of resistance,” while at the same time create a specific kind of public, thus presenting an alternative identity to the pedestrian of the city of Santiago. Constituted through mere attention among strangers, these selforganized circles defined a social space that Warner has called “public as poetic world making,” albeit for non-spatial media. I would like to extend the

Fig. 63. Map of downtown Santiago in a tourist guide of 1970. The blue paths represent downtown galleries; the right blue shape is Santa Lucía hill, and to the north of these is Museum of Bellas Artes in Forestal Park. In Guía de Turismo: Santiago, Editorial Contemporánea, 1970.

definition to these counterpublics in the midst of an authoritarian regime.

Performing Theater in the Historic Center Directors-choreographers Andrés Pérez and Juan Edmundo González formed TEUCO in 1980. They belonged to a younger generation from the first set of directors that created a theater of dissidence during military dictatorship, and as they set out to perform in the streets, a different frame of censorship was already in place, after the darker years from 1973 to 1979. As recently graduated students, they were coming out to houses while University theaters couldn’t grant too many artistic liberties—the repertoire continued to present classics and no new or national pieces. The idea of street theater was attractive as it was simple, it didn’t require big productions, and the money, if it came, would be immediate. Pérez and González congregated a group of actor friends and decided to use the streets as instantaneous stages, where there would be no need to fight for a space in the current institutions of their time. Among these was Alvaro Hoppe, young artist deciding whether to continue a career as photographer or actor, and thanks to whom there is a better visual record of these instances.

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a theater scene which they felt was depressed, in which it was hard to find a space in independent theater

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Fig. 64 and 65. Alvaro Hoppe, The Trip of Mary and Joseph and What Happened in the Way, 1988, Santiago.

Photographer Personal Collection.

Many street theater groups proliferated in the 80s, but Andrés Pérez, one of the names that trespassed the boundaries of theater in local media, experimented with street theater in diverse settings of Santiago early

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on. Most contemporary theater artists mention him as the first director to propel these collective creations. 17

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17 Ignacio Cáceres Pinto mentions TEUCO as the first well-known one from 1980; Teatro La Calle founded by Manuel Sánchez in 1982, and Teatro Callejero de Santiago (TECASA) founded in 1984 by Juan Carlos Cáceres. These are three main groups from Santiago.

In the documentary “Más Allá de la Luz: Teatro Callejero” by Miguel Farías theater performer Roberto Pablo also acknowledges TEUCO as the first group of street theater performers, although closely followed by Teatro La Feria (Temuco, South of Chile), Teatro de la Calle (Santiago, from a popular theater origin), and Teatro Urbano Experimental (TUE, from Concepción, South of Chile), in the years 81-82. [3:50–4:20]. Ignacio Cáceres Pinto, “Teatro callejero en Santiago de Chile durante la década de 1980,” in VIII Sociology Sessions of the UNLP (National University of La Plata, 2014) and “Más cerca de la luz: Teatro callejero,” directed by Miguel Farías (2014; Santiago de Chile: Green Productions), DVD.

TEUCO performed mainly in the historic city center and its surroundings. The Hispanic foundational

grid of Santiago is laid out between río Mapocho, an East-West river (following the mountains-to-ocean geography of the country), and a stemming riverbed with fluctuating torrents, both of which met behind the hill of Santa Lucía, a formal beaux-arts park which graciously interrupts the grid. Running southparallel to river Mapocho and connecting diagonally to the original grid through “Poplar Trees Avenue” (Alameda) is the green corridor Forestal Park, connecting the main projects of the late nineteenth century in a pedestrianized park system. Like in European nineteenth century models, it provided a site for the urban elite to promenade, see, and be seen. The plays were set in diverse places of this green system: public spaces preceding the National Museum of Bellas Artes, the flat plaza next to hill of Santa Lucía, or the intersection of a parkway south from the river in a triangular meeting of the main alleys of the historic grid, all presented ideal conditions to surprise a crowd. In the inner grid itself, in turn, inner galleries and pedestrian commercial alleys filled these spaces with a depersonalized, amorphous crowd.

The first performances of street theater was in the Christmas of 1980, in the pedestrian street of Ahumada, near the Alameda intersection: The Trip of Mary and Joseph to Belen and What Happened in the Way. Again, as with the Living Theatre in Brazil, Christmas was a useful excuse for a civic celebration. The play was structured as a Parabola—as with Bienaventuranzas (performed a year later) the troupe expected the religious theme in the context of Christmas to protect them from the authorities’ dictum of social order.18 The premise of The Trip… was that Mary and Joseph were looking for someone who would shelter them, by calling in to different sectors of society. This simple proposition turned the official political paradigm of individualism against the Christian icons. It incited the moral, and simple proposition of reconstructing trust after seven years of repression, torture, and constant suspicion. For those whose families had been in many ways disrupted by the “soldiers of the shadows,” this was not an obvious moral position, nor the priority for an even symbolic restitution of justice. But TEUCO was speaking rather to a demoralized mass subject, searching new reactions from the random crowd of a commercial downtown alley. Rosa Ramírez and Sandro

It was about talking and stripping to the nude the feeling of distrust we were living in as a country: I’m talking of the 80s, mid-military dictatorship—there was a lot of distrust and a lot of fear, and therefore you just didn’t open your door to anybody. Well, María was precisely looking for someone who would open the door and let her in.19 It was very special. They were pobladores (shanty-town dwellers): El José, y la María… and they were running away, running away from something… And they were out there asking for help to representatives of the Chilean society of the moment. To the poor, the rich. The young, the old. Merchants, financiers, Bank owners,

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Larenas, actors of the troupe, remember the hidden transcripts of their premise:

18 Horacio Videla Montero, “De la calle al cielo: Andrés Pérez,” in Apuntes 122 [Especial Andrés Pérez (1951-2002)], 30.

19 Actress Rosa Ramírez [5:12–5:30], in “Más cerca de la luz: Teatro callejero,” Miguel Farías, 2014.

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hahaha! There was a clear relationship to what was contemporaneous in that moment...20

The police didn’t agree that the Christmas theme was unpolitical and found this play to disrupt public order. They spent the night of December 24, 1980 in jail, but discovered this possibility, and motivated other theater collectives to do the same. Andrés Pérez remembers,

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Fig. 66. Alvaro Hoppe. TEUCO performs The Trip of Mary and Joseph and What Happened in the Way in the Ahumada/Alameda intersection. December, 1980. Andrés Pérez as Joseph on a platform held by actors covered in nylon.

Fig. 67. Alvaro Hoppe. TEUCO performs Act Without Words at the Balmaceda warehouses and weekend markets. Santiago, 1980.

20 Actor Sandro Larenas [5:40–6:40], in Más cerca de la luz: Teatro callejero, Miguel Farías, 2014.

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We all ended up in jail in this first presentation. Lessons learned: guitar music isn’t heard in the streets, the plays should have little text, you should have journalist friends to write that you’ve been imprisoned, and have friends release you from jail.21

Towards the margins of the center A few blocks from this neuralgic business, government and commercial district of Santiago, the performers found a different crowd dynamic where historically the lower classes would settle: a busy district of popular commerce, a crowd of a lower class segment to the west of the city. The near West was historically the place for the marginalized, as the natural incline of the city and closeness to the river frequently flooded the area, and presented hygienic problems.22 Where the structure of the city historically burdened the neighborhood to the first suburban poverty, from Calle Puente to the now inexistent Balmaceda warehouses, a complex commercial culture of flea markets and busier street vendors became the workshop spaces of TEUCO. Juan Edmundo González kiosk in Puente Street helped the troupe become part for the urban landscape; Pérez recalls that “we began to be from that neighborhood… we started to belong.”23 They performed weekly a few blocks East in the commercial warehouses; large brick flea markets, originally train workshop facilities of the state. This was a place of continuous experimentation and performances: Alvaro Hoppe’s photography shows records of more than four different plays performed there (Tolstoi’s Ivan the Idiot, Exupery’s Little Prince, Beckett’s Act Without Words, among others) and a Colombian theater group also presenting a show.24 They learned by trial and error: to use stilts for visibility, to make spectacles that could last as little as fifteen minutes—“precise time for a snitch to tell a cop, and a cop to tell another one: in fifteen minutes the police is arriving and you’re already done.”25 To produce allegoric theater and work with images, and to prioritize these over dialog.

The troupe developed their own guidelines to create theater for the streets. Interviewed by APSI two years after they began, they mentioned how this practice was something they had to bring back to the Chilean

We had been told in school of this genre as a historic anecdote… we knew little of its characteristics and norms.” They researched and developed a street theater code translated in a series of rules such as: the height of the stage must be higher than people around it; costume should include basic colors and an element that draws immediate attraction; it is advised not to exceed 20 minutes. The characters must be 21 Andrés Pérez interview, undated, by María de la Luz Hurtado in Hurtado, Andrés Pérez Tiene la Palabra (Santiago de Chile: Ocho Libros, 2016), 50.

22 Rodrigo Hidalgo, “Cien años de política de vivienda social, cien años de expulsión de los pobres a la periferia de Santiago,” in “1906/2006: 100 Años de Política de Vivienda en Chile (Santiago: Ediciones UNAB, 2007), 51 – 63.

Armando de Ramón, “La Ciudad de Masas,” in Santiago de Chile (Santiago: Mapfre, 1992), 243.

23 Andrés Pérez Interview in Hurtado, Andrés Pérez tiene la Palabra, 51.

24 Alvaro Hoppe (photographer) in discussion with author, July 2016.

25 Andrés Pérez Interview in Hurtado, Andrés Pérez tiene la Palabra, 50.

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contemporary society, and a historicized practice in actors’ education:

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simple and defined, and the dramatic structure must rely more in the gests than in psychology.26

Actress Paulina Hunt also mentions “the only book” she used to research contemporary theater practices: Nuevos Rumbos del Teatro, a Spanish publication from 1974 by Salvat Press that discussed vanguard tendencies of the second half of the twentieth century, while tracing the influences of earlier twentieth century figures, like Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. At the School of Drama, these were rare and overlooked sources.27

By the following Christmas, their performances had acquired all the lessons of a year of practice. This

was the context that industrial worker and población leader Manuel Paiva found the troupe when running into them, with this encounter extending their trace across the city well into the so-called peripheries of Santiago, as we saw in Chapter 2. Bienaventuranzas had a smarter, simpler strategy of implantation in space.

If the first year they were quickly imprisoned, this year they had techniques for diverting and convincing the police, for attracting audiences faster and better, for communicating their message among the multiple stimuli and programs found in public space, and an adaptable configuration that allowed for more visibility and flexibility of performance in diverse public settings. The police arrived three times for this play, but didn’t resort to imprisoning actors.

Visual Discourse As in every form of theater, the audience-stage geometries have specific visual qualities, in direct relation with the perspectival possibilities of the public space where the play is presented. What was described both by actress Paulina Hunt and designer Maya Mora in Bienaventuranzas was the constitution of a circle, an invisible cylinder for the audience to keep out from through choreography; the actors/dancers would demarcate boundaries of what is only to be seen and not stepped on. It is the inverted geometry of the mass entertainment device of the nineteenth century industrial city; here we see the panoramic, curved canvas that surrounds the theater is formed by citizens, where all the city can gather to see. This temporary cylinder that street spectacles provide becomes a magnetic entertainment device in which as long as there is either a visual angle or an audible distance for integration, passersby become potential spectators/audience. Designer Maya Mora described it as follows, The exposition was circular, and as an element, circles described by the choreography would define a prudent distance for you [the audience] to could look up, like this, upward. Otherwise you’d only see the feet of the dances. It was quite simple.28

Theater designer and visual artist Maya Mora believes the circular disposition had a clear precedent. In

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Universidad Católica, set designer Ramón López and director Raúl Osorio—who worked closely to the Living

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Theatre while working in the United States—directed The Great Theater of the World by Calderón de la Barca 26 Eliana Donoso and quote from interview to Andrés Pérez, “Cuando el Teatro Sale a la Calle,” (When Theater Goes out to the Street), APSI June 22 – July 5, 1982.

27 Actress Paulina Hunt interviewed by author, August 2016.

28 Maya Mora (mask and props designer in Bienaventuranzas) in discussion with author, July 2016.

in the university theater. Some of the masks used in Bienaventuranzas were originally made by Mora for the Calderón play. This is a frequently expensive play with a big cast: many of the actors participated with minor roles. She recalls, It was a big bet for the university theater, formally speaking… I’m realizing what vanguard things we did back then, maybe more than now! Because this play, directed by Osorio, was done with things he had seen abroad. The Bread and Puppet... and the… Living Theatre.

So, he put me in charge of all wardrobe and masking. We did workin-progress sessions in which the actors took anything they wanted from the theater storage, and I would photograph these rehearsals.

Then, I would design according to these photographs, finish, edit, cut and paste, wrap up from what had emerged from rehearsals…

Fig. 68. Maya Mora. Photographer and date Unknown, from Mora’s personal documents.

And another important thing that happened then is something I attribute to Ramón López [set designer]. He dismantled the whole theater, he took the orchestra, and liberated a big square, and placed the seats around it—stage included. Don’t you think it must have been Osorio’s idea to make a circular stage? It was… very bold I would say.29

All materials and props used had to be fit for mobility. Mora’s masks—some of which had been originally made for Osorio’s staging of Calderón de la Barca—were made of Celastic, which she read was what the Bread and Puppet used to construct their masks; a light material that could fall without damage. The technical development of masks and costume by Maya Mora was recognized throughout different

Fig. 69. Cast and theater house arrangement for The Great theater of the World by Calderón de la Barca, directed by Raúl Osorio, set design by Ramón López. Photographer Ramón López, teatro Universidad Católica, Santiago de Chile, 1981. Chile Escena Online Archive.

new materials that she used in higher end productions, for the street.

Maya Mora cultivated an aesthetic of obscure, monstrous characters throughout theater and art. Some years after her collaboration with TEUCO, sharing a studio with architects, she was introduced to the technique of heliography; a positive-to-positive type of engraving with light, for which she used mixed media that would leave traces in the final result without material residues.

Her collaboration with street theater performances became a major part of her own artistic oeuvre. These large heliographies pasted in walls anonymously would gradually disappear, as the light of the sun slowly erased the engravings. This gesture, a natural condition of theater, is a peculiar approach for a visual artist, as

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generations of theater creators, and this intergenerational connection was relevant as it allowed the use of

29 Maya Mora in discussion with author, July 2016.

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works can tend to permanency. Her work reinforces the idea of eventual performance in public space having an impact in the beholders—and possibly beyond, through stories and photography.

In 1982, Pérez was invited to Paris by the Cultural Delegate Claire Duhamel, where he worked with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil for a few years. This ended TEUCO’s work in Santiago. But street theater had gained a space in the streets and a positive expectation from their spontaneous audiences, and other groups proliferated and continued performing in the following years.

Ana la Criada In December, 1983, APSI (Agencia de Prensa de Servicios Internacionales, “Agency of International Press Services”) magazine published the following note: “Street Theater Again” Tired of running from “civilians” [informants] and being treated as peddlers, street theater had almost disappeared of the centric streets. A few days ago TEP, led by Pachi Torreblanca, premiered Ana y la Criada in Paseo Ahumada, a novel play based in Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, and adapted to the specific demands of street theater staging. It is hard to specify time, but new presentations are to be announced.30

This play was also designed by Maya Mora, but the techniques provoked an intensely different experience.

Using chiffon as a velum to cover faces, Mora created body-masks that enlarged the human bodies of the actors, thus gaining verticality beyond stilts—which were used for the figure of the Judge.

Transformations of the body become, in this case, relevant to analyze the alterations of public space configuration as offered by the play—as mobile public artwork. The actors distanced themselves from their personal features to become mysterious characters. The director, Pachi Torreblanca, had experience as a mime, and was in this sense interested in the physical detachment from the identity of the actor. When performing in daylight, costumes were one of the few aspects that could be used to build a supernatural quality to plays.

As the story of the chalk circle that inspired Brecht’s play comes from an ancient Chinese legend, the distance provided by the theatrical costumes served a similar purpose of abstraction from particular identities.

The high moving creatures reconfiguring space constitute a similar role than public sculpture, indicating points of tension and direction in the overall layout of a plaza. Thus when the body becomes a monument, it goes on to signify within the vocabulary of the built environment. This was probably the most successful aspect of the conjunct efforts of the directors and Mora’s designs: with few differentiating elements, she

chapter 3

managed to connect the urban landscape with the actors. The scalar dimensions of the body were a great

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problem of accuracy for Mora.31 The transformation had to be subtle: the relatable tension with “mobile 30 “Teatro Callejero de Nuevo,” (Street Theater Again), in APSI, December 13 – 26, 1983.

31 When interviewed, Mora also mentioned a long process to discover how wooden masks of South Asian origin could fit the body of the actors without distorting proportions. After a few attempts she discovered the masks eliminate 1 or 2 centimeters to counterweigh the face offset when using a thick material. Maya Mora interviewed by author, August 2016.

Fig. 70. Photographer Unknown, Ana La Criada, 1984, Santiago.

Maya Mora Personal Documents.

monuments” is stronger when their transformation maintains disturbingly human characteristics. Before the culture of mimes disguised as statues, whose artform resides in the desire of the public for a sculpture to become alive, these bodies taking part of a reconfiguration of space rather than accepting a passive place as the designed public space offers. An inversion of Galatea: the real body becomes a statue to participate of the silent disposition of space.

A clip from an unknown opposition magazine explained the plot and context of the play: Successful, but with complications, was the premiere of Pachi Torreblanca’s street theater.

The premiere of Ana La Criada (Ana The Maid) suffered an unexpected change of scenery. The piece, street theater, was to be shown yesterday at Plaza de Armas at 13:30 hours. But the police interrupted the show claiming the young cast lacked authorization. The problem was solved when the artists moved, followed procession was spectacular as Carlos Osorio, the narrator, walked on enormous stilts announcing the show, followed by many people. Obstacles solved, two actresses in the midst of bells, cowbells and other artisanal percussion instruments, announced with a canvas that the play to be presented was Ana La Criada.

And the story began. Ana was the maid of a rich matrimony. Her life elapsed between housekeeping and the couple’s little son. Suddenly, the neighbor country declared war and the couple decided to save everything of value. They left, abandoning their child. And so we saw poor Ana—Blanca Cárdenas—running with the child in her arms and avoid the dangers of war until she arrived to her hometown. She started sowing and reaping the land and raising the child. Everything was good until, after a few years, in a big carriage the true mother of the child came and stole it from her. Ana was desperate, she sought help in vain. She became extremely sad.

expansion of popular theater vocabularies

by hundreds of spectators, to Paseo Ahumada, where at the time there was no vigilance. The effect of the

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Until a very just judge came to town. He instructed a chalk circle to be traced in the floor; to put the child in the middle, and each woman to pull one of his arms. In that moment many spectators, who never thought to run into a theater performance in the middle of Paseo Ahumada, began to speculate on the ending of the play.

Ana could not pull. Three times she tried, with no success (the strange mask infused a surplus of tenderness).

The judge from his stilts gazed over at the public, looked at Ana, and knew she could not harm the boy.

He called the guards and had them deliver the child to Ana, the veritable mother, for she was the one that obviously loved him more. The audience applauded the act of justice enthusiastically and then dropped money on the hats the actors passed around. The play, based in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, was presented in the plain streets in order to turn mimotechnia into an expression of easy access to the masses.32

It was based on a later play of Brecht’s repertoire, of what he called the period of “Complex Seeing,” in which a situation was posed and examined, proposing different alternatives to invest the audience in the discussion.33 This element of complexity adds something new to the plays, to the dramaturgical possibilities of street theater analyzed thus. In the plays by TEUCO there was mostly a humor constructed on what was “obviously-not-being-said,” of the ridiculous silence. Fear had reached its turning point, and the exaggerated choreographies of the veiled truth couldn’t hold up against the government opposition, in this case overcome by way of laughing at it. Humor was triggered in public space as an act of resistance, in closer relation to popular comedy. Torreblanca’s version of The Caucasian Chalk Circle is rather a presentation to the own inhabitants to make decisions, advocating for the possible changes in the deliberations that each observant could have to go through. In comparison to this strategy, The Caucasian Chalk Circle was not a parable—as Brecht declared, but rather “merely displays a particular kind of wisdom, a potentially model attitude for the argument in question… the prologue becomes a background which situates the practicability and also the evolution of such a wisdom in a historic setting.”34 “To reach a mass public, to aim for a repertory drawn from high culture, and to be firmly located within the dramaturgy of the avant-garde,” were the aspects of popular theater that Barthes praised in the Brecht and the Berliner Ensemble.35 Although not all of these plays drew repertories from “high culture,” when biblical passages were used, these were read in a way to provoke thought and represent a dissenting voice.

The active search for mass publics and the use of hidden transcripts or, in Torreblanca’s case, the activation of discussion (although a simplified version), all pushed forward the possibilities of discourse in the public realm, as well as expanded the vocabulary of popular theater as locally known and practiced.

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The Dissolution of Street Theater Troupes

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32 Source unknown, newspaper clip from personal documents of Maya Mora.

33 Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989), 91.

34 Bertolt Brecht quoted in Sean Carney, “Dialectical Images” in Brecht and Critical Theory,” (London: Routledge, 205), 56.

35 Andy Stafford, “Constructing a Radical Popular Theatre: Roland Barthes, Brecht and Théâtre Populaire,” in French Cultural Studies 7, issue 19, 38.

In 1985, in another of the few opposition newspapers that circulated after the coup, Fortin Mapocho— starting from 1984 and publishing every Monday—actor Alejandro Trejo hints that five years after the beginning of street theater, the use of public space, and in particular a corner of Paseo Ahumada (likely the corner where Ana y la Criada was presented) when demanded the freedom to pursue the gained right to perform in public spaces. . . . with the motto “All spaces are legitimate to do Theater,” the Santiago Street Theater Artists Group [Agrupacion de Teatro Callejero] seeks to regain their lost space: streets Ahumada and Huerfanos. . . . It is not the colorful culture what bothered the authorities, but the tone of the plays presented (and widely applauded). “The Little Red Riding Hood” stands out, free version by “Grupo de Teatro Callejero.” For actor Alejandro Trejo, “it is an inalienable right to maintain our theater in the streets, since according to the law, there is no article that would impede so.”36

Gradually, and just as in other spaces that partook a strong relationship between theater and the city (for example with the Festival of Avignon), the city of Santiago gradually became a frequent space for intervention. As this art form was detonated by Pérez, Chile joined a network of politically engaged theater performers of the time from these early performances. Today, all forms of theater flood the city during the first month of the summer (Festival Santiago a Mil in January), an enterprise founded by the same theater manager that originally worked with Pérez’ troupe of the 90s, Gran Circo Teatro.37 However, the specificity of scale, independence and playful dramaturgy of street theater is lost when the city as a whole can become a series of ongoing spectacles, as happens now every year in January. The interventions of public space have been returned to institutional representations, and the uses of street theater to disrupt a society with a higher availability to public celebration acquires new problematics. The dissolution of street theater as it occurred in Santiago by local artists between 1980 and 1985 speaks by itself of a temporal specificity to context—each periods of history seems to demand its own ideas.

36 Alejandro Trejo, “Let Theater Return To The Streets,” Fortin Mapocho, Monday, December 9, 1985.

37 Carmen Romero, executive director of Santiago a Mil Festival. http://www.fundacionteatroamil.cl/en/la-fundacion/historia/

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conclusions The Creation of Publics The word “public” can be used interchangeably for a wide spectrum of semantics, as Michael Warner reminds us: for the national, political, official, common, impersonal, for being in physical view of others, or outside the home… even though since Kant’s What is Enlightenment “public” and “political” have been conceptually separated, as they have after modernity since Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (and revised again in relation to the power representation shifts in Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere),1 we say “public” encompassing this wide semantic range.

Warner is among the critics who see an over-rationalized discourse in Habermas’ envision of the Public Sphere: he claims representation in the public realm comes about not only nor in its purest form as an intellectual discussion, and the social conflicts that tend to fixate diverse identities in the contested public realm can be valuable even if they do not represent an intellectually rationalized discourse. For this to be possible, there must be an acknowledgement of multiculturalism in this contest of representation in public.

He perceives Arendt’s vision of publicness falls in an “unfortunate faithfulness to the metaphor of the polis.”2 Although Warner’s conceptual expansion does go beyond the necessity of public space for publicness, the physical, architectural dimension of that which is public is not “fairly antiquated” but rather continuously evolving, and does require updating analysis as public space is transformed in time. In other words, Arendt’s analysis of publicness as active speech, in opposition to normative expectations of behavior, still finds exemplar manifestations in contemporary space, where civility and civil action remain in tension.

Similarly, In Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, James Scott’s analysis brings a material and yet ephemeral issue of culture to the realm of political history: those resistant types of performance which don’t rely on institutional representation. It is a type of performance that generally leaves no physical, permanent trace, for the condition of mobility and dynamic exchange is part of its constituent characteristics. The ephemerality of these events might have left them out of material studies for a long time, but Scott finds them in the form of dramaturgy. It is relevant that Scott uses the word “transcript,” which requires the translation of an event within the public sphere (be it officially presented or encoded) to an archival mode.

1 See Michael Warner, “Private and Public” in Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 21–63, esp. 29.

2 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 62.

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The formal and political analysis of the performances and their locations examined in this thesis are an attempt to describe the event of “thunder plays,” “street theater,” or processional staging as it had an immediate impact in the audience. When the beholder decided to stay, to look, and to collectively conform part of the spatial device that street theater required, a new entity is conformed from passersby to public.

That which strangers in the street suddenly share presents the pervading opportunity to present difference.

This experience was a creation of publics in-space, a form of “counterpublic” to hegemonic regimes as well as normative behavior, an opportunity for “public as poetic worldmaking,” as Warner refers to groups of associated discourse. Although this experience dissolves, the possibility for a responsive intellectual engagement was a valuable part of the artists’ experimentation.

Interdisciplinary Experiments on Politics and Spatial Dispositions I found very few evidence of direct connections between the artform of street theater specifically, as has been defined in this thesis, and architects. Among this was the relationship between the beat generation and a series of Italian radical designers, in which Ferdinanda Pivano had a strong influence. Known as the translator and champion of the beat literature movement within Italy, Nanda was married to Ettore Sottssas while working in translations from Allen Gillespie, Kerouac, and others, as she published their whereabouts in their experimental magazine, Pianetta Fresco. In the three volumes of this magazine, unprecedented connections merged: Pianeta Fresco was a graphic experimentation, a place to communicate American avant-garde literature and ideas of Orientalist mysticism, together with conceptualizations and experiments of radical Italian architects.

The group Archizoom published a series of playful axonometric drawings under the title of Teatro Impossibile. Premonitory of an “Architecture for an Impossible Culture” as CAVART group named their environmental design experimentations in 1974, Teatro Impossibile examined ideas outside of their current reality through spatial drawings, that could express concepts beyond space. A mute theater by the name of Teatro d’Incontro Ideologico published in Volume 1, 1967, expresses ambiguities of a problematic in formation. An updated version of the theater, that pushes the street inside the theater house, and the fall of ideologies a was experienced by societies at large after the 1960s. The megaphones, a black curtain and an abyss separating two points of view, conform a nihilist, deriding take on the impossibility of communication from the trenches—simultaneously, it invites for the conformation of a different stage.

The troupes examined in the thesis represent only a few of the diverse ways in which street theater could

conclusions

communicate political militancy in public space, from the eclectic Anarchism of the The Living Theatre,

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to aesthetics of a playful foolishness of TEUCO, to the mystical bodies of TEP. Their praxis I believe put to the test these impossibilities through the active creation of public engagement, and whimsical recreated imaginaries.

Fig. 71. Theater of Political Encounter by Archizoom, 1967. In Pianetta Fresco, Ettore Sottsass and Fernanda Pivano eds, 1967.

Beinecke Library Archives.

A Shared Inclination for Disorder Nine years after the publication of Jane Jacob’s 1961 book Life and Death of the American Cities (1961), Richard Sennett published The Uses of Disorder; Jan Gehl published Life Between Buildings, and Bernard Rudofsky, after his polemic and successful exhibition Architecture Without Architects, published in 1969 Streets for People: A Primer for Americans.

The concern of these relevant authors of the world of Environmental Studies, Planning and Urbanism, seems to converge. To what point can the architect reproduce the amenities of congregation, the ones we can see in ancient cities—seeing how much of it had been lost after Europe’s IIWW reconstruction, and the expansion of Suburbia in the US? How were these urban values present in the urban design and architecture of the 1970s? And more specifically, these authors comment on the characteristics of urban fragments of the city, usually the products of higher density housing (literally the life between the buildings) rather than urbanism at master plan scale.

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They dwell on the value and characteristics of outdoor social interaction, which became a rich debate rather in the late pre-internet era: years before communication technology led to the Information Age, there was a lapse of time in which urban thinkers could devote to the problem of a more analogic, rudimentary kind of interaction than what would come in the early nineties and evolve at the pressing speed we see today.

This rather primitive quality of physical co-presence, however, remains an issue in a world governed by complex database and communication technological parameters. Co-presence as a result of spatial qualities remains one of the irreplaceable architectural experiences of a place. As Rykwert responds to McLuhan’s idea of an “information megalopolis,” in which people would come to live in a “continuous quasi-rurality where they would not have to leave their homes:” Urban problems cannot expect automatic solutions… We remain bound to location. We will still be the creatures of our senses… the idea that IT will perform the functions of the tangible public space realms must remain chimerical.3

Sennett backlashed against identities of suburbs in what he sees as a ritual of purification, a decision to organize and develop a closed community, where an open social group in which the otherness and randomness of the unknown pedestrian is not possible. Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder advocates for cities as pacifist anarchic systems, in societies where a basic affluence has been set so the life of routine is no longer the expression of dignity to set through times of scarcity, but presents to the younger generation as no more than a life destined for perpetual boredom. It is within this generational gap that the multiplication of possibilities given by living within walking proximity of others is a liberating factor, and more so the possibility of individual expression within public space.

Jan Gehl focused on a novel characterization of the activities that could be found within buildings. He differentiated between necessary, optional and social activities, i.e. to walk, sit and talk. Gehl’s approach, however, by focusing in activities that occur by chance with a conscious design of the pedestrian proximities and co-presence, leaves out entirely from his categorization those activities that require artistic deliberation for its occurrence, and that generate a specific kind of crowd—an audience.

With a manifest dissent for the state of American streets in comparison to the old continent, Rudofsky dedicates a chapter to the events that are likely to happen in mostly European’s streets—in particular the Italian street, “echo chamber of human passions.”4 The chapter The Street is Where the Action Is explicates what Rudofsky considers both good and less interesting ways of taking over the streets; improvised stages, conclusions

musicians, itinerant bards and quacks would enrich the streets in a compliance with the pedestrians that

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requires a more complex quotidian use of space than what is required, for example, for an institutional parade 3 Joseph Rykwert, “Flight From the City: Virtual Space and Lived Space,” in The Seduction of Place (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000), 158.

4 Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 137.

that takes over the complete street, thus reducing the street multiplicity to one activity. Having lived in Naples in the nineteen thirties, Rudofsky compares the melodically precise musical phrases that local street vendors used to “Wagnerian Leitmotiv,” maybe an evidence of his commitment and love for the enriched street life.

All of these concerns and theoretical reflections on the contemporary state of the cities in 1970 matched the concerns and objectives of street theater artists and their praxis. A point of convergence between most street theater troupes was a rather anarchist approach to the uses of the city: no permits, no institutional representation, but the immediate presentation of art in a space of multiplicity. For many artists this theater was as much a political act as it was theater, yet in a time of frequent political demonstrations as the sixties had set in the city, it was also simply doing theater in the frontlines: to surprise an audience and to present the pedestrian with art in his and her own ground, further fluidizing the barriers between quotidian space and artistic programs, as is not the case with museums and theater houses.

“The city is a milieu where strangers are likely to meet,”5 Sennett would write nine years later in 1977.

Some strangers are defined by a social group that is foreign to others, as the members of the Living Theatre were to many Avignonese. A second type of stranger, rather than defined as aliens to certain social groups, function more as an unknown, and thus have the potentiality of “arousing belief by how they behave in a situation where no one is really sure what appropriate standards for a given sort of person are.”6 Spatial Dispositions of Street Theater The particularity of theater is that it brings about the audience as an essential part of the art being presented, a reason why many theater studies involves deconstructing the different relationships between actors and audience, performer and observant – the integration of bodies in space as part of the live art that is theater. Street theater proposes an intense experimentation pushing the ethnographic uses of the plaza. How much can the physical structure of the city be contradicted? Can it be transgressed? Setha Low, pulling from theory works of semiotics and environmental behavior by Miles Richardson, Roy Rapapport and James Duncan, defines an interdisciplinary perspective to read the meanings of the built environment and non-verbal behavior: This interdisciplinary perspective suggests that urban public space reflects the cultural order, not through a one-to-one correspondence between spatial arrangements and meaning, but through a complex “culturemaking” process in which cultural representations are produced, manipulated, and understood by designers, politicians, users and commentators within changing historical, economic, and sociopolitical contexts.7

5 Richard Sennett, “The Audience: A Gathering of Strangers,” in Fall of Public Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 48.

6 Sennett, Fall of Public Man, 49.

7 Setha Low, “Urban Public Spaces as Culture” in Environment and Behavior (January, 1997), 5-6.

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The Living’s parade-like distribution in public space in Pittsburgh, for example, intended to counterdefine the meanings that the culture of Pittsburgh has defined in the built environment. The choice of their locations in Pittsburgh represent a Foucauldian critique of institutions and disciplinary imposition, whose symbolic power is stored in their built representations. As Diana Taylor suggests, “the diffusion of disciplinary power from one institution to another as well as its various transformations into an ever more productive and pervasive modality of power… (culminate in) the extension of Panoptic architectural features.”8 But the Panorama as a spatial disposition, the set of composition rules in relation to optics that inspired the conception of the Panoptic, might be what characterizes public spaces in cities after the nineteenth century and to come. In reverse to the Panoptic, the open panoramas constructed by the actors surrounded by spectators, with the backdrop of the city behind them, propose interesting temporal reconfigurations of space, where city and citizens can symbolically re-appropriate, and re-identify spaces.

A momentary transformation can have a pervasive impact on its audience: by proposing a critical view of the modes of communication of public space and its monuments, and by proposing an alteration in the behavior within civic spaces. Aesthetic practices in the built environment, no matter their level of permanence, contribute to the critical discourse between the inhabitants and the environment. The practice of street theater works enhancing, imagining or reinventing the existing symbols of the built environment.

In counterpoint to rituals of purification and homogenization, street theater was a form of disrupting the urban public realm as it disrupted order without a claim for institutional power. Temporal interventions do not require ownership of place, and the acknowledgement of this ephemerality served as a powerful tool for thespians to have a voice within not only the public realm, but physical, public space.

The particularity of theater is that it brings about the audience as an essential part of the art being presented, a reason why many theater studies involves deconstructing the different relationships between actors and audience, performer and observant – the integration of bodies in space as part of the live art that is theater.

This thesis joins other efforts to bring to surface the relevance of festivities and temporary transformations of cities as an aspect intrinsically related to the built environment, as well as a strategy of civic culture transformation that can surpass the use of image consumption for purposes of power control. “Is permanence over-rated in the field of architecture?” Asks Architecture Historian Louise Pelletier in Architecture of Events: Reconfiguring the City.9 Pelletier explains why the non-permanent configurations of the city that have a wide range audience, conclusions

have been overlooked: it is a problem of the extension of a metaphor—the spectacle was the function through

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which capitalism took over everyday life, not an invention of capitalism but a function found in public space and reproducible for diverse means.

8 Diana Taylor, Michel Foucault (Durham, US: Routledge, 2014). Accessed April 24, 2016. ProQuest ebrary.

9 Louise Pelletier, “Architecture of Events: Reconfiguring the City” in Thresholds 31, EPHEMERA (2006), 44 – 51.

When the audience is in turn considered an active entity of an event, the condition of power is questionable. When the realization that a temporal use of a space does not require possession over such space, an altogether different possibility emanates in that space. This is what street theater performers were capable of subverting; the dominion of a space in its temporal form.

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