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Caliban. La tempestad.

I recently witnessed an event of the Latin American theater: Caliban. La tempestad (The storm), by Augusto Boal, had its premiere forty three years after being written, directed by Tribo de Atuadores Ói Nóis Aqui Traveiz, from Porto Alegre, at the easternmost tip of Brazil. They call themselves a tribe because they practice the horizontality that surpasses traditional hierarchies. Everyone directs and respond according to the stage drama, everyone designs and participates in artistic decision-making, scheduling and production. Its expression combines vital and social action with the magic of acting. Its name might be translated as «Hello, we are here again», and they are reborn in every mise en scène.
With La tempestad, the scene on the street captures spectators of all ages. The connection is total, due either to the sharpness of the text, reread in the light of the current times by this Argentinean group and rendered into rhythm and melody in many passages, or because of the bursting of shape and color, in wonderful designs that are highlighted by the mixed scenery of streets and squares. Hundreds of them fill the public space, either in the Parque da Redenção (Redention Park) or the Praça da Alfândega (Customs Square), that hosted the performances I shared as part of the seminar «Caliban. Testimonios del teatro de Nuestra América», organized by this group.
La tempestad de Ói Nóis Aqui Traveiz, as written by Boal while exiled in Argentina that had its first issue in Conjunto no. 178 magazine, rather than a version of Shakespeare’s, is an anticolonialist and anti-imperialist response, inspired from the essay Caliban, by Cuban Roberto Fernández Retamar. The Brazilian version includes a sharp popular humor, ridicules the characters that hold power, and the group adds a critique perspective in acting: a Brechtian and festive one. Although the oppressed are defeated again at the end, as was the Brazilian people recently, the value of resistance is extolled.
The play ends and a murmur turns into a rhythmic roar, when the expression «¡Fora Temer!» grows and goes round the circle once and again. The scene sparkles like a political agora.