After World War II, United States businessmen found it cheaper to run their own factories in Brazil, rather than ship goods from the U.S. They could profit from a low standard wage, and the factories would be closer to both the markets and the raw materials needed: steel, minerals, oil, etc. So it was decided to make São Paulo the largest industrial city in South America. U.S. money started pouring in, U.S. companies were granted enormous loans from Brazilian banks at low interest, and São Paulo soon became a prosperous city.

The nouveau-riche bourgeoisie, created by this boom, invited important European theatre companies and artists to perform in São Paulo. Brazilian artists began to imitate them and imported directors, mainly from Italy, to build and train theatre companies in São Paulo. As a result, actors began to resemble Italian actors and playwrights European playwrights.

In 1963, during the Cuban crisis, several playwrights in Rio de Janeiro called a meeting to write a script: The Blockade of Intervention: An Indictment. The following afternoon some students, workers, and artists from the Popular Center of Culture of the National Student Union rehearsed the script hurriedly, and performed it that night before a large crowd gathered in front of the Municipal Theatre in the heart of the city. The play opened twenty-four hours after it was written.

The Blockade of Intervention: An Indictment was one of the most important manifestations of popular theatre—Brazil's “theatre of agitation.” It belongs to a large repertory of plays, which include Patria o muerte, Cuba s, Yankee no, and others which deal with international politics. This theatre of agitation also includes small “raids” made by theatrical brigades during special occasions. For example, during, a political campaign a group of actors meet on a corner and begin arguing about politics to the point of threatening physical violence; people gather around them and the group suddenly begins an improvised performance that deals with the most urgent political issues.

During 1968 a group of avant-garde artists, moved by their own direct working experience, started openly to discuss the decrepitude and uselessness of prevailing Argentine culture and of their own art, which until then they—and their society—had perceived as a revolutionizing force.

The oligarchic-imperialist dictatorship in our country has increased its oppressive measures. Censorship has become obvious and crude, enforced by “cultural” institutions (museums, prize committees, etc.) as well as by the police.

We have shattered our own illusions that we were able to create, inside the bourgeois cultural apparatus, work that truly opposed the prevailing social structure. Our development now demands a complete restatement of the purpose and conduct of the artist and the intellectual, a search for new institutional frameworks, for new audiences, for new media and messages.

Critics generally have considered Gombrowicz’ plays Ivona, Princess of Burgundia and The Marriage as purely oneiric, incoherent texts whose principal value lies in their grotesqueness and affectivity. Gombrowicz himself interpreted the plays as attempts to present the problem of youth. In contrast to these views, I will try to show that both plays are compelling satires of society.

The two plays deal with two different societies. In Ivona, Princess of Burgundia it is pre-World War II European society (the play was written in 1935) or, more precisely, the ruling classes of that society. The Marriage (1946) is about the new society which resulted from the war and from the seizure of power by the communist parties, with emphasis on the events leading up to that seizure.

I have associated Gombrowicz’ theatre with that of Genet, as the only important work in contemporary avant-garde literature dealing—though from two different perspectives—with history and the conflict of historical forces.

A close relationship had in fact become apparent between The Maids and Ivona, Princess of Burgundia, and especially The Balconyand The Marriage. But then it seemed to me that Genet subsequently separated himself from Gombrowicz in his interpretation of the historic process, in its transposition to the imaginary.

Imagen de Caracas was presented in the east central part of the city at the specially constructed production/exhibition site, the Dispositivo Cuidad (Mechanical City). The project was the most ambitious effort made in Venezuela to integrate the arts, combining image, colors, forms, various stages and kinds of architecture, movement, music, sound, light, the spoken and written word: everything available in the new world of audio-visual expression. The work took two years of continuous labor to complete.

The principal objective was to tell the violent four-hundred-year history of our city. The film about Caracas’ history was divided in two parts: the first part, from the founding of Caracas through the beginning of the last century; the second, from 1800 until the present.

The appeal made to an audience by a theatre piece has always seemed to me primarily visceral. Even in periods of elevated verbal device and stringent academic rule, the spectator's real impulse was toward the flesh and blood. In an era when this impulse is obstructed by production techniques, habits of delivery, and domination by theme and character, a concrete, approachable personality still persists. Especially now, when we aren't in a context of observed tradition and literacy, we find this personality—a compound of the audience's desires for fiction, for fantasy situations, for the offertories of individual performers. It can control, gratify, outrage, and exhaust an audience in much the same way that any other publicly-met personality touches our private needs, our unacknowledged inhibitions, our unconscious animosities and loves. As long as its actors appear alive, the theatre can avoid the static existence of a thing and retain vitality.