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Traditional Popular Culture and the Cuban ‘New Theatre’: Teatro Escambray and the Cabildo de Santiago

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Judith A. Weiss
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Extract

The community-based popular theatre movement began in Cuba about ten years after the triumph of the revolution, but its main pioneers, the founders of the Cabildo de Santiago and Teatro Escambray, were professionals with considerable experience in virtually every style and experimental form of theatre. This article concentrates on the most dynamic period of the Cuban ‘nuevo teatro’, the 1970s, when the Cabildo and Teatro Escambray emerged as internationally recognized models of popular theatre and as valuable sources for research into Cuban cultural tradition and revolutionary transformation.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , Summer 1989 , pp. 142 - 152
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1989

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References

Notes

1. A network of amateur community theatres had been established in the early sixties.

2. Between 1966 and 1969, workshops were offered in Cuba by leading Latin American directors, including Augusto Boal and Enrique Buenaventura, and Cubans were exposed to the Teatro Campesino and the Bread and Puppet Theatre from the US, and to Latin American groups like La Candelaria and El Galpón. A major, crucial event of that decade was the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana.

3. I am referring to Szanto, George's Theatre and Propaganda (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1978).Google Scholar

4. See, for example, ‘En torno al Teatro Nuevo. Debate cultural’, Bohemia, 3 02 1978, pp. 30–7Google Scholar; Gutkin, Adolfo, ‘Amerindias: Una-experiencia de creación colectiva’, Conjunto, 16 (1973), pp. 37–9Google Scholar; Herrero, Ramiro, ‘Consideraciones sobre la puesta en escena de De cómo Santiago Apóstol puso los pies en tierra’, Conjunto, 31 (1977), 63–72Google Scholar; Padrón, Carlos, ‘Cine con gente de verdad: los primeros once años del Conjunto Dramático de Oriente’, Conjunto, 14 (1972), pp. 102–10.Google Scholar

5. It is interesting to note that the most distinguished theatre critics and historians, chief among them Rine Leal, Graziella Pogolotti, and Rosa Ileana Boudet, have travelled with one group or other and have stressed the centrality of such factors, which colleagues in other countries might consider peripheral.

6. Herrero, Ramiro, Teatro de relaciones, p. 226.Google Scholar

7. The relaciones bear a strong resemblance to mumming: they involve music, movement, audience participation (in the songs and dances) and often some colourful pageantry.

8. The bufo was a type of comedy inspired by touring US minstrel shows in the early 1860s. Its stock characters and situations were typically Cuban, and it was often mildly satirical.

9. Herrero, , Teatro de relaciones, p. 226.Google Scholar

10. The hilly and mountainous region of the Escambray straddles the former provinces of Las Villas and Santa Clara.

11. Many of these new communities grew around collective dairy farms or other government projects.

12. Other plays have dealt with conservative attitudes that led individualistic small farmers to resist collectivization and equality for women, and to welcome Jehovah's Witnesses. This conservatism had been exploited by the so-called ‘bandits’, many of whom came from families of that region.

13. Although, unlike the collective creations of other Latin American groups, each one bears the name of an individual author responsible for writing and editing it.

14. Important organizations include the Cuban Women's Federation, the National Farmers' Alliance, the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, and trade unions. More recently (1978), Popular Power was introduced, with elected officials at the municipal, regional and national levels.

15. Teatro de relaciones, selección de Ramiro Herrero, prólogo de Manuel Galich (Ciudad de La Habana, Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1983) and Teatro Escambray, compilatión de Rine Leal, prólogo de Graziella Pogolotti (La Habana, Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1978). These are to be complemented with Paz, Albio, TeatroGoogle Scholar (Editorial Letras Cubanas, Ciudad de La Habana, 1982), which includes ‘La vitrina’ (The showcase) and ‘El rentista’ (The Landlord), two of the Escambray's important plays; and Orihuela, Roberto, Ramona (La Habana, Ediciones Manjuarí, 1978).Google Scholar

16. The diablito is a figure identified with Afro-Cuban religious ritual, often with the dramatic representation of spirits. The ornate masks and costumes of grass, shells, etc., disguise the dancers'identities and also constitute a universal code that begs public tolerance of their sometimes provocative behaviour.

17. Herrero, Ramiro, Teatro de relaciones, p. 216.Google Scholar

18. See Ogunba, Oyin, ‘Traditional African Festival Drama’, in Ogunba, Oyin and Irele, Abiola, eds., Theatre in Africa (Ibadan University Press, 1978).Google Scholar Other notable manifestations in the Caribbean are described in Clark, VéVé's, ‘Fieldhands to Stagehands in Haiti: The Measure of Tradition’, paper presented at the Fourth Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Studies, Havana, Cuba, 07 13–15, 1982 (typed manuscript).Google Scholar

19. Teatro Escambray includes, besides El Paraíso Recobrao (Paradise regained), Y si fuera así … (If It Were So), a version of Brecht's Señora Carrar's Rifles, and Las provisiones (The provisions, published elsewhere as Las provisiones de Jehová, Jehovah's provisions).

20. This fin de fiesta is a traditional ending to Spanish comedies and short plays dating as far back as the Renaissance; it reflects the staying power of popular aspects of Hispanic theatre. The Teatro Escambray artists mastered the punto guajiro and made it the narrative backbone of most of their works.

21. This dead man resembles the central figure of one of Onelio Jorge Cardoso's short stories, ‘El muerto’ (The dead man), which was dramatized in an earlier production.

22. Ramona is a strong critique of sexism, which remains a problem with the most committed revolutionaries. It was written to coincide with International Women's Year, the Party Congress at which the problems of women were aired, and with the discussion and enactment of the Family Code and the new Constitution, which guarantees equal rights.

23. Other groups have cited similar experiences. The case of La Candelaria's Guadalupe, años sin cuenta, presented before Colombians who had fought along with the play's hero, is one of the most telling.

24. In the Gramscian sense.

25. The debate has been aired primarily in Tablas, the theatre magazine published by the Ministry of Culture, which has also published a survey of critics that ranks the best productions of the decade. The Cabildo and Teatro Escambray ranked high on the list.

26. Some members of the group have been elected as Popular Power representatives; others, to the Party.