ABSTRACT
Before 1944, when I made a reality of the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theater), known as the TEN, in Rio de Janeiro, other thoughts developed, as a result of which the original project became much more profound and complex. I asked myself: What could there be, besides the ornamental color bar, that justified the absence of the Black on the Brazilian stage? Could the theory of their inability to play serious roles, their lack of artistic responsibility, be true? Was it that they were considered capable of playing only the picturesque "black-boy" or the folkloric characters? Could there be deeper implications, a basic difference of artistic conception or theatrical expression-perhaps a white aesthetic and a black aesthetic, produced by the conditioning of segregation and conflicting interests? There must have been something underlying that objective abnormality that existed back in the year 1944. Because to speak of genuine theater-the fruit of man's imagination and creative power-is to speak of plunging into the roots of life. And Brazilian life had exluded the Black from its vital center only out of blindness or the deformation of reality. Thus we must go back in history to decipher the contradictions that face us and perhaps to find the illumination for the path that the Black theater in Brazil must follow [Nascimento, 1967: 36].
