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Teatro de Rua: An Empowering Space for Brazil

By Wilson Loria © 2003 Wilson Loria

Paper delivered by Wilson Loria during the II Hemispheric Institute of Politics and Performance
Monterrey, México, June 2001
 

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen… Our show’s starting right now!” loudly announced the M.C. under the spotlights of an improvised stage.

“Whatareyouguysdoingouthere? C’mon, spread your legs apart. Y’hear? Right now! You’re all being searched and shut up,” grunted one of the green-complexioned soldiers, holding and pointing his machine-gun at a group of people under a street lamppost.

I heard those two lines a few times while growing up in my hometown of São Paulo in the 70’s. The first line especially was from the play my theater group used to present in the subúrbios (working-class neighborhoods). We customarily went to slums, unions (metal workers, teachers, hospital staff), grassroots associations, government-owned shelters for abandoned street children, churches and schools in order to present our play so that we would aim at the culture created for and by the povo (masses). I heard the second line several times in the 70’s as well. Under a dictatorship, police officers and army soldiers used to shout that question at any group of people who happened to gather in the streets at night. At that time, there was a curfew in effect all over the country, although, many people today would say that there never was. In my case, one of those fearful police trucks screeched to a halt in front of our high school on two different occasions when a group of my classmates and I got together to chat and gossip, or to have an eventual cigarette.

The Brazilian popular theater movement starts in the beginning of the 1960’s when, motivated by a possibility of land and educational reforms throughout the country, a group of intellectuals, playwrights, actors and students found the Centro Popular de Cultura da União Nacional dos Estudantes (Popular Center of Culture of the National Union of Students) in Rio. The key phrase to understanding such a movement is the appearance of “street manifestation” in Brazil. After months of excitement and revelry and more precisely during President Juscelino Kitbitschek’s term when the construction of Brazil’s new capital Brasília was completed in the late 50’s, Brazilians thought life would improve. His successor Jânio Quadros resigned – a little less than seven months in office – in 1961. Next came João Goulart who was President of Brazil for only three years.

In his book The Brazilians, writer Joseph A. Page discusses that short period of time. “The Left on its part was hardly of one mind about the tactics it should follow. On one extreme were those who advocated violent upheaval. A more moderate radical sector sought to mobilize workers and peasants by organizing them into state federations and national confederations, to bring about a far-reaching land reform, nationalize certain foreign-owned enterprises, and to change the Constitution to allow illiterates to vote.”² Although Page classifies Jango’s three years of governing Brazil to be “years of tumult,” it is clear that that time was exactly when CPC tried to do its work among the masses. “ The CPC acted in all areas of artistic expression, but mainly in theater, music and cinema. The theater area worked with plays that were short and needed a minimum of production, so that it was possible to perform in schools, streets, squares, distant neighborhood and favelas. The sparse production also allowed a quick escape when the police arrived. […] The CPC joined the União Nacional dos Estudantes (UNE) and were quite active in the period before 1964 spreading throughout schools and universities.”³
 

national dramaturgy, which reflected Brazil through its most authentic and primitive cultural manifestations. Others saw the stage as the most precious vehicle for those who wished to teach the ‘working masses’ the notions they needed to not only defend themselves but also counter-attack in the right moment.”4

Accused of being a leftist (mainly for orchestrating a nationwide land reform, which, by the way, hasn’t happened in Brazil to date) João Goulart went into exile after “he gave a highly charged speech announcing a series of decrees that would nationalize all private oil refineries and expropriate vast amounts of underutilized land”⁵ on March 13, 1964. No sooner had Goulart left the country, than the military stepped in on March 31s, and were in power for 21 years.

General after general took turns in office from then on. In the 70’s, Emílio Médici was in power. Most disappearances of individuals took place in Brazil during his “presidency.” Because everyone’s attention was almost completely focused on the Soccer World Cup, held in Mexico in 1970, arrests and killings were almost strategically unnoticed. Fortunately, some journalists and artists – aware of what was going on in the big cities as well as in the backlands of Brazil where some guerilla activity existed – would not let the military in power get away with their actions that easily. In the meantime, censorship was at its pinnacle. Musicians, poets, intellectuals, actors, actresses and directors started to go into exile. Some of them went abroad voluntarily, but a few of them were summarily expelled. Those who stayed in the country had to make use of metaphors and aphorisms in their art in order to – as we say in Brazil – “dribble the government censors’ wits.” Some claim that – although it was a period of repression – all art forms in Brazil were then proficuous, elaborately crafted because of the lack of free speech. Art should only be the expression of freedom.

It was at a high school where I fortunately found a space to experience freedom, or what we thought was freedom. We were at least certain that what we had were “our treasured exercises of freedom” inside four walls.

It all really started one afternoon in 1974 when I came to see the very beginning of a theater group at a high school near my house. This school was not the same one I was attending at that time; however, at the end of their first meeting, I was gladly accepted in the group as if I belonged to that school as well. At that first meeting, it was clear that the need for a theater group was due to a very unique reason: during recess, only American music was heard on the loudspeakers on the school’s big patio. With the support of the school principal, Ms. Adib Abujamra, a French teacher, Ms. Beatriz Tragtenberg, then decided to start a theater group. According to Ms. Tragtenberg, Brazil had much more to offer her students than what was being heard on the loudspeakers or, better yet, what was being taught at school.

In January 2000, during an interview Ms. Tragtenberg gave to me, she reminisced:
“I then really did a crazy thing. That was something, at that time, quite unheard of. Three theater groups! There were too many people. I collected a lot of Cordel chapbooks. The groups performed acts based on them. One group was in a circle, at the entrance of the school. At its door. The other group was on the school patio. And the third group was near a few classrooms at the other end of the patio. Then, the students were blocked. There were three groups presenting at the same time which was something that made people wonder about my pedagogical approach. The students used to say “But we didn’t see the play acted at the door!” And I used to answer, “Well. That’s life. If you’re here with me, it’s because you decided to be with me... here and now. It’s a matter of choice, really. And that was exactly the idea: to “deconstruct” the school space.”

Ms. Tragtenberg’s words emulate images that could very well be compared to the ones we had in the streets in the 60’s in Brazil, when people took to the streets. Now, students were taking the school space as a whole. Besides that, the motivation behind the need for a theater group was that the real culture from the povo had always been (and still remains today) totally removed from the school curricula.

Of course, some pop culture – the one the establishment okays once in a while – is offered to students through the media, but the origins of this same pop culture are usually never revealed or studied. What our theater group tried to do was to show that a genuine popular poet, for example, who performs in the street reading his verses is totally marginalized by the so-called established media. We at times do not even suspect that the same plumber who has come to repair something in our houses could be an extraordinarily popular artist himself.

Yan Michalski, well-known Brazilian theater reviewer, has already pointed out that “in Brazil, there is a ‘divorce’ between the dramatic art and the education process.” That fact has been true throughout Brazil’s history. And how frightening that ‘divorce’ was during those years of dictatorship and repression! Well, the two parties (theater/education) of this ‘divorce’ had nothing in common, not a single form of communication. Sadly, theater in Brazil – as Brazilian writer Ana Mae T. Barbosa has written about art education – has also been considered a “sheer decoration, and what’s worse, sheer snobbishness or effeminization which leads one to a bohemian lifestyle.”

While directing the theater group, Mrs. Tragtenberg made use of French pedagogue Celestin Freinet’s ideas and principles. In brief words, Freinet’s pedagogy professes that education is a learning process through the method of experimental trials, learning being essentially active; therefore, it comes from the essential needs of the student and it depends on the necessities of the same society he belongs to, allowing him to face his or her own destiny as a human being. An individual only goes through a new learning acquisition when his previous experience marked him so deeply that that acquisition has become a technique of life, that is, a solid springboard for new acquisitions.

With that in mind, Ms. Tragtenberg and a few students started to produce ‘mini-plays’ based on literatura de cordel chapbooks. Literatura de cordel – literature on a string – is a series of chapbooks in which a poeta popular tells people what today’s news is at an open market during any given day in the Northeastern part of Brazil. In the past, these poetas were considered for a long time the ‘anchormen’ of that region. Today, television has been available in almost every Brazilian home; consequently, the poeta’s role as a popular anchormen has changed and is now considered antiquated.

A small group of students then started to present these ‘mini-plays’ (called ‘lightning plays’ due to their brevity) during recess. Little by little, the American music on the loudspeakers remained silent while our group literally took the floor on the school patio. That fact was proof that the first battle was won.

From then on, the group – eventually called Teatro-Circo Alegria dos Pobres (Theater-Circus Happiness of the Poor) immersed itself in reading everything about literatura de cordel, plus popular plays written by authors from Brazil’s Northeastern region. Those plays usually revolved around the problems of the peasants and the retirantes (peasants who were (are) forced to flee their land due to the never-ending drought in the region). Soon Teatro-Circo consisted of twenty-seven members, rehearsing and writing plays and music plus studying Brazilian culture. Everyone had his own chores and duties. And everything was shared in a democratic way. Out there in the streets, the repression was quite strongly. Our objective was then to reinforce those learning acquisitions. For that objective, Teatro-Circo accomplished a kind of theater that students from middle school, high school and college could see and experience as well. At that time, it was quite costly for anyone to afford a theater ticket. In her book Teatro da Militância, author Silvana Garcia transcribes what Ms. Tragtenberg said during an interview in 1986,

“The majority of the members of the group did not know theater initially (…) for that reason, one of the Group’s objectives is exactly to bring its spectacles for those who do not have the chance to know theater and to promote it as well.”

From 1975 to 1983, Teatro-Circo presented its own plays in several places around the state of São Paulo. Plays were presented to the bourgeoisie as well, but it was among the povo that Teatro-Circo’s work seemed to be fully comprehended. Brazilian playwright Ariano Suassuna’s plays O Auto da Compadecida (The Act of Our Lady) and A Pena e a Lei (The Punishment and the Law) were also presented at FEBEM (State Federation for the Well-Being of the Minor, the institutions where abandoned street children live) and several schools in the outskirts of São Paulo. Based on a process of collective work, Teatro-Circo wrote and put on a play based on Brazilian popular songs entitled Tocar o Impossível Chão (Touching the Impossible Ground). Its theme dealt with the retirantes and their problems in the big city, and it also tried to convey the importance of listening to Brazilian and not American music.

By 1978, Teatro-Circo had already left the school and become an “independent” theater group. Leaving the high school where it was first originated meant Teatro-Circo’s moment of emancipation. Installed in its own headquarters (a small rented house), the new play Teatro-Circo: A Festa do Pastoril conta Cordel e Mamulengo (Teatro-Circo: The Pastoril Feast tells Cordel and Puppetry) was also a collective work based on Brazilian folklore, cordel chap books, puppetry, folk dance and music. It was presented in squares, subway stations, schools and unions from 1978 to 1982. Soon, a new play was mounted, O Último Xaxado em Macaxeira (The Last Xaxado – a Brazilian rhythm – in Macaxeira – either cassava plant or a fictional name of a city). Its title was an intended pun on the famous film The Last Tango in Paris.

Brazil has also had its own tradition of resistance, which has somewhat been part of its history for the past 501 years. However, such resistance was most lived and felt from the 60’s through mid-80’s. Two decades showed how Brazilians were also capable of resisting and displaying their own anger in spite of all atrocities that took place at that time. Popular theater worked as an empowering space for voicing people’s dissatisfaction, anger, fear and hope. The Brazilian reality may appear to be quite different from the reality of other Latin American countries due to their own idiosyncrasies. But they, without a shadow of doubt, converge on the same point, on the same struggle, that never-ending struggle for freedom.

ÇTop
 

1. Joseph Page, The Brazilians, pg. 211-212, Massachusetts: Perseus Books, 1995. >Back
2. Clovis Levi, Teatro Brasileiro, um panorama do século XX, pg. 114-115, Rio de Janeiro: Funarte, 1997. >Back
3. Decio de Almeida Prado, O Teatro Brasileiro Moderno, p.100, São Paulo: Ed. Perspectiva, 1996. >Back
4. Joseph Page, The Brazilians, p.212. >Back

                                                                                                                                     Rio's sambódromo

                                                                       "Tristeza não tem fim, felicidade sim"(Sadness has no ending, happiness does."

Felicidade by Vinicius de Moraes & A. C. Jobim

What makes Brazil's Carnaval so different from other Carnivalesque manifestations in other parts of the world such as Italy or Germany? What makes Brazilian Carnaval unique? Would there be a lurking "purpose" behind what we see in the Brazilian Carnaval? If so, could there be a socio-political  purpose behind what one sees parading on the Avenue before our eyes? To whom does Carnaval "belong" anyway? Is it high or low culture? Is there a Carnaval culture? Is there culture in Carnaval? These questions must be considered when trying to understand what this breathtaking "experience" really engenders.

Bakhtin writes, "Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While Carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it."(1)During Carnival time, life is subject only to its laws of its own freedom. In Search of Popular Culture, Pete  Burke writes, "Goethe was excited by the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed in 1788 and interpreted as a festival 'which the people gave themselves'"(2) Juan Flores's ingenious idea of what he sees as popular culture in his text pueblo pueblo is, "Popular culture is energized in 'moments of freedom,' specific, local plays of power and flashes of collective imagination."(3)

Bakhtin, Burke and Flores wisely seem to tackle what Carnival or Carnaval (in Portuguese) could possibly represent: a moment of freedom when there is no other life outside it, and people give themselves.

In his text Carnival in Multiple Planes (4), Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta writes about the house and the street in Brazilian society as two social domains (p.209). He identifies their differences as follows:

Street                                                                                  House

World with unpredictable events, its actions, and passions       Controlled universe, harmony, warmth

Movement, novelty, and action                                              Calm

One works                                                                            One rests

Relationships are of patronage and a character of choice            Associations by kinship and blood

                                                                                             relations

I believe that DaMatta has deliberately forgotten what a Brazilian house resembles when he is describing it in the context of the Brazilian society whose norm is replete of forms and fixed formulas. As a Brazilian citizen myself, I cannot see how harmonious a Latino or Latin American household can be. However, that would certainly be a totally different discussion. The street is where one should not, as DaMatta writes, "violate unknown or unperceived hierarchies" (p.209). Thus, the basic rule of the street is to deceive and to take advantage of others. In Brazil. this attitude is simply called malandragem, that is, the Brazilian "art" of using ambiguity as an instrument for survival. In case one needs a visa at the American consulate, i.e., one pays someone to stand in line all night, so that when one gets to the consulate in the morning, he'll take his place in line. That's malandragem.

The house, though, is the universe: it is a space demarcated in a way that becomes, as DaMatta writes, "a grouping of spaces where greater or lesser intimacy is permitted, possible, or prohibited" (p.209). In the house, one has to respect rigid codes and norms; it is where one will grasp the idea of being "someone" and will eventually become a person. The focus of the world of the house is on the "rules and men, events and classifications, elderly and young, masters and servants, men and women, parents and children, respect and obedience, blood and social relations" (p.226). 

                                                                        Revelers in the street

                               A reveler at the Sambodromo

Again, the world of the street is the opposite. The street is where one is "torn loose from his moral and complementary group and subjected to the impersonal codes of traffic, of supply and demand." (p.226) The street is where the question, "Do you know to whom you are talking?" is usually used as a tool for showing that the person who utters it is someone, as DaMatta points out in his text. However, I would also add that such a question is definitely used by a person to impose fear, forcing the other -- to whom it was directed -- to realize how "important and/or influential" the first supposedly thinks he is. Coercion would me more like it.

The reason I mention DaMatta's text concerning the relationship between house and street in Brazilian society is to attempt to show that the origin of the Samba Schools in Rio de Janeiro is unarguably linked to the "outside," that is, outside four walls. More importantly, as "outsiders" of Brazilian society, blacks undoubtedly created the Samba Schools. I shall explain. Different versions and stories have been told and written about the origin of the Samba Schools; however, the most talked-about and/or studied is the one also found in Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha's book The Brazilian Sound (5), "The first Escola de Samba, Deixa Falar (Let them talk) was founded on August 12, 1928, in Estácio de Sá by Ismael Silva, Bide, Armando Marçal, Nilton Bastos, and others. Apparently, the name 'samba school' was an ironic reference to a grade school across the street where the group met." I can now only imagine, of course, this group of musicians happily discussing, drinking and playing their instruments under big trees (mango trees, maybe?) on a huge patio, facing that school mentioned in the story! The image of having these people sitting, discussing and playing in open air seems to be quite relevant to the origin of the Samba School itself. Black musicians -- the "outsiders" of Brazilian society and more precisely the carioca (from Rio) society -- were undoubtedly the creators of the first Samba School at that time and they were also descendants of the blacks -- certainly the clearest example of "outsiders" in any given society -- who were brought from Africa to Brazil.

Blacks, at the time of slavery, were not allowed to have their own homes. Slaves literally lived "piled up" in the basement of their master's house and spent most of their time outside their "basement" anyway, working long hours exhaustingly on the sugar cane plantations. It is also an unfortunate irony to have the noun "school" attached to Samba School since any form of schooling -- unlike in the U.S. -- was almost categorically erased from the Brazilian blacks' rights for years on end! To me, this seems to be quite an important facet in the origins of the Samba Schools. DaMatta categorizes the street as a "world of unpredictable events;" however, history shows that that was the only place where blacks could exercise their "moment of freedom" (maybe we could also tentatively call them "moments of organizing themselves") since their arrival in Brazil. Consequently, the street curiously  plays the "same" role as the house (an organized and harmonious place) if one considers that blacks were ousted from their own lands as well as from the right to have their own home.

Leda Cavalcanti's article Da festa da Colheita ao Carnaval Aereo (6) wonderfully illustrates how important the street was to the blacks as well as to the "birth" of the Samba Schools, "Colonial Brazil registers the first signs of Carnaval when blacks -- those who landed in the old capital (Rio de Janeiro) as well as those from Bahia -- met at the port to sing and dance in their horas de folga (the hours they were off work) to the sounds of rustic instruments. Those were the original rodas de samba (circles of musicians playing samba) where baianas were prominent. During the day, baianas sold their quitutes (African dishes such as vatapá, quindins etc) on little stands; at night, they showed their dance abilities. The rodas got bigger and the musicians, who were humble people, kept going up the hills to live. They would come down the hills to dance in the downtown area, and consequently formed groups that eventually were named cordões, blocos and ranchos."

In 1928, only forty years dater the abolition of slavery took place in Brazil, the first Samba School Deixa Falar was opened as a reaction against, as Cavalcanti mentions in her text, "the indiscipline of the blocos and the rigidity of the ranchos."

Blocos may have originated from the Feast of Nossa Senhora do Rosario, the patron saint of the blacks. Blacks, who lived and worked in the same neighborhood, formed blocos, or groups of black dancers and "musicians." As for ranchos, these were quasi-organized groups of men with the presence of women and "sophisticated" instruments such as guitars, ukeleles, flutes and clarinets. There has their own music and choreography.

The Samba School Deixa Falar originated in Rio's neighborhood Estácio de Sá. Its name was a response to other neighborhoods that united to "fight" against Estácio de Sá, which, at that time, boasted that they had the best samba in the city. Three black musicians, Nilton Bastos, Alcebíades Barcelos and Heitor dos Prazeres, who were led by Ismael Silva, introduced a new cadence to samba. These musicians are credited with introducing both samba-enredo (7) and Samba Schools. From then on, the favela dwellers came down the hills to dance at Praça Onze asking everyone else to participate in their revelry.

Can we thus tentatively say that this "going against the other group of samba" was a "fragile presage" of "organizing" among a few blacks from Rio in the 1920s?

In the text Carnival in Multiple Planes, DaMatta writes,"Carnaval is a festival 'outside of the everyday social world without the individual being subjected to the fixed rules of belonging or of being someone'"(P.227). If Carnaval functions as a "tool" for not being subjected to fixed rules, then its revelers form a group (or a "class") which seems to be quite organized during a time of "organized chaos." Perhaps organizational inversion is a more apt description of their desfile: some say that no sooner this year's desfile (the English word parade does not give justice to what one sees and enjoys in the streets of Brazil during Carnaval. Parade in Portuguese is parada, which means to stop. Yet only the military parades. During Carnaval, people have a desfile, which roughly translates "to walk in a file.) is over, than people start working on next year"s desfile for months. Thus, they organize themselves to work in order "to play" Carnaval. Although a Samba School may suggest the idea of a "corporation," paradoxically, Carnaval is a "boss-less moment." In Brazil, it is widely known that a Samba School is the utmost example of "an ideal enterprise." Everyone is eager to work. No one is late, and in the end, he has to pay to do his job. Each one involved in the desfile has to purchase his own fantasia (costume) if his true wish is to participate in it. A fantasia is his "entrance ticket." Due to its high or, at times, astronomical cost, a person who lives in one of the many favelas of Rio, must save money for one year to purchase his fantasia, or, at least, that's how the story goes.

Five days of Carnaval festivities are the period of time "owned" by the destitute and the dominated, the people who possess nothing except their own bodies, and labor.

TO BE CONTINUED

There is still an unfortunate, generic confusion and misunderstanding about what this huge chunk of land with more than 580 million inhabitants represents in today's world. Starting with tutti-frutti Carmen Miranda -- or maybe much before the famous petite Brazilian bombshell, i.e., Rodolfo Valentino in  the 20s -- who was "used" by the American government to be the spokesperson of the people from "south of the border" in the late 40s and early 50s, Latin America has always since then been stereotypically depicted as the land of the lazy, skinny, and good-for-nothing men under huge sombreros or the sexy, lascivious, and sexually-charged women wearing only tangas. How easy it would certainly be for us who are trying to understand it if that were the real Latin America!

From Mexico to Argentina's Tierra del Fuego, Latin America is a much more complex and diversified stretch of land. And having been in contact with some literature about Latinos in the U.S. for some time, I now wonder if America -- known more accurately as the United States of America -- would not also be part of the so-called Latin America. There is no better example than California. According to recent statistics, the Latino population has surpassed any population of any other race in the "golden" state, let alone Florida or Texas. Also, would the attempts at a new and innovating commercial treaty such as WTO -- among the Americas be a tiny sign of the United States' desire to join the two other Americas? Not really!

In the introduction of interdisciplinary artist and writer Coco Fusco's book Corpus Delecti, Performance art of the Americas, she writes, "I do not intend this volume to be taken as definitive or exhaustive, but rather as a preliminary gesture. Those who want more writing about artists they are interested in but who are not between these covers should publish more books about Latino performance. They are certainly needed." (p.16) Although Fusco herself warns us that her book is a "preliminary gesture," she definitely presents to her readers a compelling array of outstanding examples of Latin American performers and performances. Thus, Fusco compiles texts by various scholars who are seriously interested in Latin America: José Esteban Muñoz, Silvia Pellarolo, Raquel Mendieta Costa, and Maris Bustamante, for example. The performers, whose works have been the themes for those writers are: Jesusa Rodríguez, Maria Elena Escalona, Guillermo Goméz-Peña, Tito Vasconcelos, Luis Alfaro, Ana Mendieta, Lygia Clark and so on. Also in her introduction, Fusco writes that every Latino artist knows what the term performance means, adding that a few of them have even "offered alternative terms such as 'plastic actions,' 'non-objectual aesthetics,' etc." (p.3)

In the U.S., the debate about Latin American performance, she continues, "has been framed in anthropological terms, focusing on the study of rituals, on traditional and 'everyday life' performances, and on the performative dimension of political action." (ps.3-4) It is here where lies part of the "misunderstanding" about Latin American performance and performers. The works by both Brazilian performer Denise Stoklos and artist Tunga immediately surface when one reads that most of Latin American performances rely on the study of rituals.

Studying Stoklos's work for many years, I certainly cannot place her work as ritualistic in the same sense that most scholarly papers deal with ritual in general. As for the latinidad in Stoklos's oeuvre, Diana Taylor's essay The Politics of Decipherability in TDR issue smartly tackles that thought through Stoklos's performance, Civil Disobedience. In it, Taylor writes that at the time the play was presented at New York's La MaMa, in 2000, she polled a few friends and acquaintances to see what their opinions about the Brazilian performer were. Taylor writes, "[...] Others found her work too 'European' in the way it drew from traditions (mime, vaudeville, etc.) or avoided any specific 'Latin American' references or issues." [...] Taylor continues, "A friend found the performance 'very Latin American,' and the English hard to follow." Would that difficulty to categorize Stoklos's work as a Latino performers be totally related to her lack of a more "typical" Latin American ritualistic practice on stage? Would that idea be so disorienting that an American theatergoer is not able to see her as Latino performer? Would that concept make her less Latina?

Latin American vs Latino

In a televised interview in São Paulo, Denise Stoklos was asked the following question: "During your travels abroad, do the reviewers perceive your brasilidade ("brazilianess") in your work, since you are searching for this transcultural communication? Because you could apparently be a Brazilian, a Croatian, a German..." To which, Stoklos answered: "Yes, they do very much. Maybe my extroverted energy. My humor. This 'throwing myself' on stage... My own fear before going onto the stage makes me go full blast..." Those questions shall certainly send us back to the most discussed question put by either most of the Latino performers themselves and the experts on Latin American performativity: what is it to be a Latino performer?

As for Tunga, examining the performance/installation Ponta Cabeça (Inside out, Upside down), performed at Documenta X, in Germany's Kassel, in September of 1977, for example, the spectator may be totally fooled if he attempts to identify the artist's nationality just by attending the performance. The piece shows a group of seven blonde women -- who according to Tunga "reminds one immediately of the Caryatides, the supporting figures of antique temples" -- wearing a big hat which Tunga sees as "a temple or holy space, like Delphi with its oracles and its fortune teller." (Interview with Tunga on 27 June 1977 for Universe in universe Website). What he presents here is definitely art different from any pre-conceived idea of what a Brazilian artist, a Latin American artist should be. In the book Tunga: 1977-1997, writer Suely Rolnik in her chapter An Instauration of Worlds quotes the Brazilian artist, "[...] What Brazil gives us as subsidies in cultural terms is obviously its diversity, its heterogeneity, and the possibility of engaging the most diverse practices, the most diverse languages, that will produce a so-called artistic form. It would be difficult for a European artist to have at his disposal a wealth of cultural experiences and languages that make possible the more complex work." (p.148) And he goes on, "The key to Brazil is its fluctuating identity." (p.149)

Would that comment also be a possible answer to the Latino performativity issue? Would each country in Latin America have its own "fluctuating identity"? That idea might very well be the case. The identity issue makes us automatically remember what Fusco discusses in her introductory text as interculturalism, "[...] it can refer to dialogues among artists from different countries, the absorption of influences from other cultures, the syncretism of diverse sources within a given culture, or the history of theoretical debates about terms such as mestizaje, creolité, transculturalism, syncretism, etc." (p.5) Would this mélange of attitudes towards the acceptance of the "other" automatically influence what we culturally are? Would we all be the composite of these fluctuating influences?

To grasp some of these concepts and ideas about both Latin American performativity and identity, one must consider Guillermo Goméz-Peña magnificently well-written article New World Culture published in TDR spring 2001 issue. Peña begins by stating that "in the last three years of the 20th century I stopped writing essays altogether. [...] All our ideological parameters and political certainties were crisscrossing under our feet. Suddenly, binary models of understanding the world were no longer functional -- us/them, right/wrong, progressive/reactionary, local/global, Third World/First World, alternative/mainstream, center/periphery, etc. -- were constantly shifting fault lines in an ever-fluctuating landscape." (p.7) However, this fluctuating attitude towards understanding one's identity as valid, now does not seem to be accurate according to Mexican performer Goméz-Peña. His words seem to question if this "fluctuating landscape" were something "bad." Perhaps as Tunga thought that fluctuation is good. What is it really to be a Latino performer?

Goméz-Peña does not attempt to answer this question, but he writes about what a  Latino performer has become from the 1970s to the era of globalization and multiculturalism. Goméz-Peña writes, "The mainstream bizarre has effectively blurred the borders between pop culture, performance and 'reality,' between audience and performer, between the surface and the underground, between marginal identities and fashionable trends. Artists exploring tensions between these borders must now be watchful, for we can easily get lost in this fun house of virtual mirrors and distorted perceptions." (p.13) Goméz-Peña states that if defining our own identity was a hard task in the past when we lived without globalization, now it is all the more difficult when these borders are completely suppressed!

And as if he were complementing his ideas on today's performer's work, the well-known Mexican artist also transcribes Richard Schechner's words from an e-mail received in September of 2000,"Originality is no longer a possibility. Maybe it will come again, or maybe it never was."(p.16) On the one hand, both authors apparently sound quite bleak concerning the performers and their work in today's world; but on the other hand, by the end of his essay, Goméz-Peña states that the performer may be lost in this global house of virtual mirror. He questions: "Why in the era of digital communication are we unable to communicate effectively across nationality, race, gender and class?" as "tools" for the performer "to get articulated in [our] work in such a unique way that we challenge effectively the compassion fatigue of our audiences." (p.30) As Diana Taylor quotes Goméz-Peña in her book Negotiating Performance, "Multiculturalism is fine, when there is an equal exchange and dialogue." (p.3) Interpolating them, Goméz-Peña is stating that there remains much ground to cover! There is still time to roll up our sleeves! There is still much work to be done!

How are Latin American performances perceived by non-Latino audiences? Trying to eradicate those stereotypes that compartment Spanish sounds like the "Spanish-speaking Chihuahua who wants Taco Bell" (p.6), Fusco suggests that we "encourage awareness of just how much of the experimentation in Latin American visual art, literature and theater in this century has adjudicated between national and regional influences and international vocabularies, and to demonstrate how these experiments cannot be reduced to any single formula (ps.6-7). Also in those lines, as if it were another way of reducing such stereotypes on the academic level, Diana Taylor in her book Negotiating Performances shows that the role of professors and practitioners have been to "disseminate and internationalize knowledge of and about our relatively marginalized cultures [...] (p.2)

Is then our first question finally answered: what is to be a Latino performer? So far, I haven't certainly arrived at a convincing answer to that challenging question. But in the hopes I have found a possible answer to it, I dare say that such answer could be lurking in the universities, schools, cultural centers, museums, grassroots organizations, churches, the cabarets, theaters, plazas, slums, homes throughout that huge stretch of land which today we know as Latin America.