Theatre and cultural self-determination after the Revolution

Abstract

In April 1976, the theatre group Os Bonecreiros travelled to three locations in the Beira Alta region, where they engaged with various cultural associations and cooperatives at the invitation of the regional delegation of the Agrarian Development Support Service. They produced a three-page report, accompanied by five photographs, whose details reveal a constellation of different support systems and initiatives that organized and sustained the theatrical decentralization movement initiated with the Revolution and its cultural dynamization campaigns. This movement extended beyond the campaigns through an institutional tripod formed by the Theatre Fund, the Support Fund for Youth Organisms, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Drawing on documents from three archives – the Mário Jacques collection (CET), the Comuna Archive, and the Gulbenkian Archives – this paper explains this effect of institutional centrifugation around independent theatre. It examines the reformulation of ideas that operated transversally across all these institutions, driven by both internal and external forces. Furthermore, it analyzes the meanings that were sought to be clarified between the concepts of theatre, animation, decolonization, self-determination, and cultural decentralization.