ABSTRACT
The impact of Bertolt Brecht on Latin American theatre is enormous though perhaps difficult to assess in any straightforward way. Every theatre practitioner in the region, I would venture to guess, knows Brecht’s theories, yet, few stage his plays. All of Brecht’s works are translated into Spanish and Portuguese and are available in most academic bookstores. No other theatre artist, from Latin America or abroad, boasts a similar status or reach. But no one would claim to do “Brechtian” theatre. This essay attempts to address this seeming paradox by looking at both the historical context within which Brecht gets introduced in Latin America, and at the way that theatre practitioners integrate “Brechtian” elements in their own work. Brecht fever caught on quickly and spread rapidly throughout Latin America around the time of his death in 1956. Coinciding with the waves of Marxist anticapitalist struggle that swept through Latin America at the end of the 1950s, culminating in the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Brecht’s theories of a socially responsible, critical, and historically grounded theatre, directed at the children of the scientific age, resonated throughout the region. The Festival of the Nations (Paris, 1954) had introduced Latin American practitioners to the theory, plays, and stagings that were to become the most decisive single influence on them during the next two decades.2 Translations soon followed. By the mid-1960s Latin America’s most renowned groups and directors (such as Santiago Garcia and Enrique Buenaventura, both from Colombia) were putting on their own versions of Galileo (1965) and Seven Deadly Sins (1969). Playwrights such as Enrique Buenaventura and Griselda Gambaro adapted the fragmented structure of Fear and Misery of the Third Reich to describe the political violence in their countries: Documents from Hell (Colombia, 1968) and Information for Foreigners (Argentina, 1972) respectively. Other major playwrights, such as Osvaldo Dragún and Ricardo Talesnik (Argentina), Luisa Josefina Hernández and Emilio Carballido (Mexico), started adapting or somehow engaging artistically with a “Brechtian”
epic structure.3 Politically activist theatre groups (such as Escambray in Cuba and Yuyachkani in Peru) used “Brechtian” methodology to train actors in the alienation techniques that would encourage critical participation from their audiences. Theatre schools and cultural centers hosted discussions on Brecht’s dialectical theatre.4 Terms such as epic, “culinary” theatre, and Gestus became commonplace in discussions about art and society. Brecht’s reflections on the “‘popular’ as intelligible to the broad masses”5 sharpened the focus of popular (or “New”) theatre practitioners in the Americas who were dedicated to raising political awareness among disenfranchised populations.
