The Theater:

2004 marked the 40-year anniversary of a military coup d'état in Brazil that took place between 31 March and 1 April 1964: an event recalled with great bitterness. Of the 20 years ('64–'84) that this dictatorship spanned – an era of authoritarianism, the suppression of constitutional rights, police persecution, imprisonment and torture – the year 1968 stands out as an especially significant and dark one: later that year the Institutional Act n. 5 (AI-5), a concession that closed the Congress and increased even further the powers of censorship, was passed.

Concurrently, and paradoxically, Brazil was experiencing a burst of blazing creativity, in which artists resisted and attempted to transcend political and economic constraints with roguish aplomb. In 1967, stage director José Celso Martinez Corrêa rediscovered in the modernist author Oswald de Andrade's 1933 play O Rei da Vela a means of addressing the complex issue of class relations as they played out in present-day Brazil. Corrêa's direction of Andrade's text was something of a landmark for an emerging underground movement; everyone saw it and was influenced by it. The play, although written in 1933 (and never performed until 1967), revealed itself as urgent and relevant to contemporary Brazil in its depiction of the various conflicting and corrupt social classes within Brazilian society, be it the rising bourgeoisie (the title refers to the “Candle King”, a man who profits at the expense of poverty and popular superstition) or the decadent classes of landowners, where perversion and vice dominated. In his adaptation, Corrêa employed the aggressive and participative techniques of Julian Beck and Judith Malina's Living Theatre, and experimental enterprises and concepts from Brecht's Epic and Didactic Theatre.

Another text by Andrade that resurfaced with urgent immediacy during this time was the Anthropophagite Manifesto, written in 1928. In it, Andrade insists, among other things, on the indigenous nature of Brazilians' heritage (“tupi or not tupi, that is the question”; tupi relating both to the Indian language and the Indian itself); humour and the carnivalesque as critical tools and fundamental characteristics of Brazilian nature and behaviour; and the concept of cannibalism as a cultural and political strategy based not on the mimesis of Otherness but on its deglutition to create a new identity of “Brazilianness”. This new representation would be based on the critical assimilation of imported, non-native ideas, gestures, attitudes and concepts and their re-elaboration in accordance with indigenous needs and circumstances, thus subverting the relations between coloniser/colonised through dialectical reflections on violence, ethnicity and gender politics.

This reinterpretation of Andrade's work impacted on all cultural areas. It gave birth to the Tropicalist Movement ('67–'68) and, especially, to ideas of the fusion and hybridisation of Brazilian culture and nationality with foreign elements to create new artistic products. It also gave birth to the dichotomy between primitiveness/tradition and modernity, and lowbrow and highbrow in performance and expression. The tropicalists also appropriated the revolutionary and subversive tactics of mockery, irreverence and improvisation from the Manifesto; and they relished in references considered outmoded, underdeveloped, kitsch and debauched from the counterculture. Although it lasted briefly, the Tropicalist Movement left indelible traces on music (Caetano Veloso – one of the main articulators of the movement, Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, and the influential rock band Os Mutantes, all of them combining forces to produce the key record of the period: Tropicália, ou Panis et Circenses [1968]), visual arts (the provocative installations of Hélio Oiticica), literature (most notably in the evolution of Concrete Poetry and the essays of Augusto and Haroldo de Campos) and Cinema Novo.

condensed from the article: Annotations from the Edge of an Abyss: Rogério Sganzerla's Anthropophagic Film Collages by Jorge Didaco