Orlando Furioso is an environmental spectacle developed by director Luca Ronconi and writer Edoardo Sanguineti, based on the poem by Lodovico Ariosto. It was first performed last summer in Milan and toured throughout Italy and the continent. It most recently appeared at the Odin Teatret's spring seminar in Denmark. Performances in New York and a U.S. tour are tentatively scheduled for the fall. The photos which accompany this article are from a performance in Milan.

The first stirrings of the Cinema Nôvo movement were in the early 1950's, when some young filmmakers began to protest the expensive imitations of Hollywood and cheap musical comedies (chanchadas) that made up the traditional Brazilian cinema. This protest found an immediate echo among young film critics.

In 1952, Italian neo-realism was the main inspiration of my first film, Agulha no palheiro (Needle in a Haystack), for which Nelson Pereira dos Santos served as assistant director. Neo-realism dominated dos Santos’ own first two films, Rio, 40 grans (Rio, 40 Degrees), 1955, and Rio, zona none (Rio, Northern District), 1957, as well as his production of Roberto Santos’ O grande momenta (The Great Moment) in 1958. From 1958 to 1962, there was a series of experimental short films.

The name of the movement, Cinema Nôvo, appeared for the first time around 1959-60, but even then it was as fluid and undefined as that of the French nouvelle vague.

Like every other culture in this technologydominated world, Brazilian culture shows the influence of cinema. Film arbitrates life-styles, activates the imagination with its fantasies, and shapes moral life. Yet it is impossible to speak of the cinema in its Brazilian context without referring to North American film, whose influence and aggressiveness distributes North American culture throughout the world so that audiences now expect from all films only those images they are accustomed to seeing in Hollywood cinema.

The Brazilian public, which is economically and culturally much closer to the United States than to Europe, has also based its images of life on North. American films. A vicious circle: when most Brazilians make films, they make them “a la Americana,” and it is primarily for this reason that Brazilian spectators try to make any Brazilian film they view into a Brazilian film “a la Americana.”

What was most striking (from the New York perspective) about the Maydays of 1970 was that students were organizing themselves to use facilities and resources, not to destroy them. The nihilism so powerfully present in the Columbia uprising of 1968, and always prominent in “revolutionary” rhetoric within the student movement, was transformed into something more fundamentally revolutionary. “Burn it down,” “trash it,” “shut it down” were not heard so often as “take it,” “use it,” “open it up,” “liberate it.” In either case the work is somewhat symbolic—that is, burnt buildings can be and usually are rebuilt and liberated buildings can be and usually are reoccupied. The establishment is not so weak that it will yield everything at once. But it is not so strong that it will last out the decade.

This year, bids will be submitted for the construction and equipping of Britain's National Theatre. It is ironic that after sixtyfive years of planning and four major attempts to actualize this dream, that its reality will fall so short of meeting the needs of the present circumstances. Drama will be presented there in the evening to a restricted audience in a prestige building costing twenty-four million dollars.

Seating only two thousand people in its two theatres, and with a subscription system for reserving places, the new National Theatre will not be open to all citizens of the nation. “The first four rows of seating in each auditorium, which some might consider uncomfortably close to the stage, are spaced more closely than the seating in the main body of the auditorium so that they can be sold to younger theatregoers on the day of performance.” (National Theatre. Detailed Design Proposals, Nov. 1967.) So much for the building committee's attitude toward poorer spectators, but what about its rich patrons?

At a 1967 symposium in Montreal, I, along with other colleagues, had to answer the question: “What kind of theatre should we do?” Throughout almost my entire professional life, I have been asked that same question and with each new stage of my life I responded differently. But when I heard it in that foreign country, where the only thing familiar to us Latin Americans were the Indian reservations, I suddenly felt I was on another planet, stunned. I don't remember what I answered. I said something vague and unrelated—“anti-culture”—and I realized I was again entering a new stage.

At this time I had just finished Documents from Hell, which was staged by Danilo Tenorio of TEC (Experimental Theatre of Cali), my own theatre in Colombia, and was the most serious attempt we at TEC had made to become involved in the life of our people.