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.

In Pirotechnia (1558), Vanuzzo Biringuggio describes several ways of making ‘fuochi lavorati’ or fireworks, and he mentions the great skill of the Florentines and Romans in this special art. Their famous ‘castelli’ and ‘girandole’ were built for special festivities, such as Pentecost in Florence or the election of a new Pope in Rome. The custom of using firework displays as a popular expression of joy or ‘allegrezza’, was shared by several Italian towns during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Ferrara was no exception. The capital of Este's duchy provides an interesting example of how pyrotechny eventually became independent of popular and Carnival-like displays, and an established feature of court entertainments. Ferrara, one of the liveliest theatrical cities of the Italian Renaissance, provided a fertile ground for the development of firework displays.

You have turned the page, and thus have already opened a door.

A door to the text.

A text about doors.

Or, to be more precise, about the recurrence of doors and their function in Sophocles and Racine.

Our purpose in focusing on plays in which the door or gate has a significant role for the individual and his being-in-the-world is to delineate the passageway which leads the tragic character to a boundary situation and, from there, to a possible transgression of that situation. That which is on each side of the door, the spaces created by the thresholds, will thus help locate the place of the tragic event. This spatialization of the tragic event as the transgressing of a boundary situation is emphasized by the way in which both Sophocles and Racine determine the parameters of the action as it is structured within a specific space.

Surviving records of early eighteenth-century London theatres include a number of account books recording daily receipts, but fewer than we would like. ‘Rich's Register’ gives us daily totals at Lincoln's Inn Fields from 1714 to 1723, and we have accounts in one form or another for a good many seasons at that theatre thereafter. Drury Lane is a different matter. Not until 1741–2 do we possess day-by-day totals for a season there. In view of the comparative paucity of information about receipts at Drury Lane, neglect of one of the few sources of financial information available to us seems odd indeed. The MS at issue was quoted in print as early as 1939, and is cited in The London Stage (under the wrong reference number) – but no one has ever printed or analysed more than a small sampling of the figures available.

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.

That a large number of Elizabethan plays are the product of dramatic collaboration is well known. Just how this process of ‘collective creation’ operated in the public theatres, however, remains something of a mystery. Attempts to explore the mechanics of collaborative play writing have been of different kinds. The most common have been studies of published plays undertaken in the hope that characteristics of style would reveal the shares of contributing dramatists. In spite of valuable work (notably by Cyrus Hoy), however, too many of these studies suffer from the weaknesses described by Samuel Schoenbaum in his analysis of the limitations of conclusions about authorship based on internal evidence. As a consequence, assertions about patterns of collaboration based on the identification of an author's stylistic characteristics, such as those made in the early 19205 by Dugdale Sykes, are not as fashionable as they once were.

After the triumph of its première in Prague in November 1787, Don Giovanni enjoyed little immediate success in the theatres of central Europe. It was received with indifference in Vienna, with unease, even outright hostility elsewhere. Mozart's music on its own aroused almost universal admiration, but as a dramatic medium it unsettled audiences. This was best expressed by a correspondent for the Chronik von Berlin, who saw the first performance at the Berlin National Theatre in December 1790. In his review he granted readily that ‘Mozart is an excellent, a great composer’ but in Don Giovanni he felt that greatness to have been betrayed.

John Moore, the Glasgow physician and friend of Tobias Smollett, after attending a few performances at the Théâtre-Fran¸ais during a visit to the French capital in 1779, commented as follows on the surprisingly subversive behaviour of the Parisian parterre at that date: ‘By the emphatic applause they bestow on particular passages of the pieces represented at the theatre, they convey to the monarch the sentiments of the nation respecting the measures of his government.’ Moore gives no precise instances, but it is clear what he is referring to, and there were plenty of other contemporary observers to testify to the growing habit of making applications, and using this method to express opposition to certain government policies which, in the prevalent atmosphere of political repression, it might have been dangerous to contest too openly anywhere else. The theatre auditorium was the ideal place for voicing anonymous criticism with impunity. The guard in the theatre, entrusted with the task of preserving law and order, was powerless to prevent the parterre applying a maxim or simple phrase spoken from the stage to some matter of burning political import, and showing, by their vociferous applause, where exactly their sympathies lay.

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 semiotics of drama has proved incapable of formulating a theory of segmentation that can be used in practice. Tadeusz Kowzan admits that his suggestion, ‘l'unité sémiologique du spectacle est une tranche contenant tous les signes émis simultanément, tranche dont la durée est égale au signe qui dure le moins’ (1975, 215), leads to a multitude of small, totally unrelated segments. As Erika Fischer-Lichte pointed out (1983, 186–7), it is impossible to tell in advance whether any distinguishable sign system (or combination of sign systems) will manifest itself at all times in the performance. Her conclusion was therefore that semiotics should stop searching for homogeneous units. However, she added, anyone who for practical reasons seeks a division should proceed from the two categories of character and space without which no theatrical process is possible and which can never be consumed into one another. This will not create homogeneous units either, but together these two categories comprise everything to which the various types of theatrical signs may refer.

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.

Tzara's role in the Dada onslaught on the theatre is well known. His Le Cœur à gaz (1921) is often regarded as the masterpiece of that genre. It is sometimes overlooked, though, that Tzara's theatrical activity did not cease with the disintegration of the Dada movement. His fourth and final play, Mouchoir de nuages (1924), is often relegated to the status of a minor coda to his earlier experiments. It is certainly a less revolutionary work than Le Cœur à gaz or the two celestial adventures of Monsieur Antipyrine. On its own terms, though – that is, as an attempt at theatrical renewal rather than theatrical demolition – it is no less noteworthy than its more notorious predecessors.

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.

Two major theoretical requirements should be fulfilled before embarking on an attempt to suggest an adequate description of stage metaphor. First, an appropriate description of verbal metaphor is mandatory. Such a prerequisite does not imply that stage metaphor is a derivative of verbal metaphor; it assumes, rather, a common deep structure underlying both verbal and stage metaphors and recognizes the fact that theories of verbal metaphor are much more advanced. There is no way to avoid striving for a unified theory of metaphor, which assumes the existence of a common deep structure, and explains the generation of both particular types of metaphor. Second, an appropriate description of theatrical language, which is a particular case of iconic communication, is also mandatory since, according to the same premise, differences in the structure of metaphor in varying languages should be accounted for on the grounds of the specific features of the respective languages.

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.

The challenge and the excitement of expanding both the focus of our research and the field of our praxis beyond Theatre (or Film, Pop or Video) to Performance is to identify phenomena which transcend one medium and may enable us to know something about acting as such, spectating as such and thus ‘being’ as such: performance, not as a second-hand version of some more primary reality, but as a ‘realm’ in its own right.