Mexico's popular theatre is a multi-faceted ancient art whose roots extend deep into pre-Hispanic cultures, as well as into the popular dramatic tradition of Spain. Today, nearly five centuries after the arrival of the Spaniards, popular theatre continues to be a phenomenon both of urban and rural Mexico, reflecting the rich gamut of cultural and historical characteristics found throughout this vast geographic and ethnic patchwork. While a wide range of distinctive qualities exist across the broad spectrum of popular theatre, formal differences give way – through careful observation and analysis – to the perception of an underlying unity of purpose which supports all popular theatre: addressing the spiritual and material needs of the common people.

One of the most revealing traits of the Nicaraguan revolution is manifested in the profound changes registered in the realm of culture. If Sandinista ideology focuses not on the fate of an élite but on that of the vast majority of the Nicaraguan people, it follows that for people to become the true subject of politics they have to become the true subject of culture as well. The popular Sandinista victory of July 1979 brought about the immediate establishment of the Ministry of Culture (the first in the country's history). Its goal: to give shape and nourishment to the popular effervescence and creative energies awakened by the long struggle. Work began with the organization of theatre, poetry, music and dance workshops throughout all sectors of the Nicaraguan society (army and police included), with the inauguration of Centres of Popular Culture in all regions, the creation of cultural committees in all grass-roots organizations, the training of ‘cultural promoters’ to work with regional governments, and with the task of rescuing and revitalizing popular cultural traditions.

The struggle to eradicate naturalism from the theatre (or its satiric counterpart, the comedy of manners strongly rooted in the Latin American dramatic tradition and still very much alive), led the Colombian New Theatre forerunners consciously to seek new approaches to reality in their work. At the same time, there was the need, from the very beginning, to turn their practice into a functional system flexible enough to adapt to the needs and challenges of every new play.

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.

São Paulo's Grupo Macunaíma has established a paradigm for a unique form of poor theatre, which has had a marked influence on alternative troupes in Brazil attempting to break the commercial mould and to return to a social vision, lost during the darkest years of the military dictatorship. Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre outlines the abstract formulation and practical applications of the method he elaborated in his Polish Laboratory Theatre. The director-theoretician proposed first and foremost to overturn what he called rich theatre: a form of staging using ‘borrowed mechanisms’ from movies and television and expensive scenic technology. The Polish Laboratory was also an actor-centred theatre in which the stage was redesigned architecturally for each performance to allow the performers to interact with the audience and in which there were no naturalistic sets or props, no recorded music or sophisticated lighting. The actor, through a complex system of signs, continually created and recreated the meaning of text, constumes, set, and props. ‘By this use of controlled gesture the actor transforms the floor into a sea, a table into a confessional, a piece of iron into an animate partner, etc.’ (Poor Theatre, p. 21). Grotowski's plays were filled with costumes made of torn bags, bathtubs serving as altars, bunkbeds becoming mountains, hammers used as ‘musical’ instruments. ‘Each object must contribute not to the meaning but to the dynamic of the play; its value resides in its various uses.’ Other tenets of the Grotowski system germane to this study are a return to mythical and ritual roots, the theatrical remaking of classical works, and the collective basis of stagecraft.

In order to assess Argentine New Theatre and traditional popular drama as comprising a phenomenon of convergence and continuity, one needs first to examine both forms in their relationship to hegemonic culture. Culture is viewed here not in monolithic terms, but rather as defined by its organic ties to a specific socio-political context. Consequently, the central question to be addressed is the way those ties become explicit in the artistic products themselves and, most importantly, in their functionality within the social sector they are inserted in. That functionality defines the ideological line between popular and mass culture, and determines the dynamic links between the New Theatre and traditional dramatic forms, in spite of obvious differences in discourse.

It is not surprising that the ancient republics allowed the condemned to escape death through flight. Exile did not seem to them a softer sentence than death. Roman jurisprudence also called it capital punishment.