Call for articles Sinais de Cena, III, 5 Thematic dossier

Theatre, revolution and the construction of democracy

José Pedro Sousa and Ariadne Nunes coord.

From ancient Greece to the present day, theatre has thrived in democratic contexts, participating in the life of the polis and questioning its citizens. But if tragedies like Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Sophocles’ Antigone problematise issues that interfere with the government of the city, contributing to the civic awareness that democracy requires without questioning the nature of the regime or the governance, a comedy like Aristophanes' Lysistrata, by staging a revolutionary process, represents a qualitative leap in the sense of questioning the establishment, its dogmas and its institutions.

Throughout the history of theatre and performance, the binomial democracy/revolution has been the theme or pretext of a wide corpus of plays, explored in the most different genres and models, from experimental to musical theatre, from documentary to epic. Georg Büchner's The Death of Danton or Claude Prin's Cérémonial pour un combat are examples of this universal repertoire, anchored in two revolutionary moments that are decisive for contemporaneity and for modern democracies: the French Revolution and the Paris Commune.

There is also theatre produced in a revolutionary context or that emerges from it as a consequence of new political and socio-cultural coordinates, for, as Enzo Traverso observes in Revolution: an Intellectual History, ‘most revolutions contain or engender aesthetic turns’ (2021: 16). A paradigmatic case is the October Revolution and the different artistic movements that it gave rise to, such as Suprematism and Constructivism. In relation to theatre, Lunacharsky's texts and the aesthetic revolution that Meyerhold's biomechanics represented, inseparable from Mayakovsky's engaged playwriting, are well-known outputs of this period. In the Portuguese context, it's important to remember Luiz Francisco Rebello's complex programme for the theatre, which manifests itself in his dramaturgical, historiographical, pedagogical and legislative endeavours.

While Theatre and Performance Studies have a robust bibliography on theatre and revolution (see Itzin 1980, Wiltshire and Cowan 2018), more recently, perhaps as a consequence of the current political polarisation, there has been a growth in publications focusing on theatre and democracy. Monographs such as Democracy, Theatre & Performance: From the Greeks to Gandhi, by David Wiles, and The Playbook. A Story of Theatre, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War, by James Shapiro, contribute to expanding the analytical and methodological horizon of this subject-matter. While Wiles reflects on performative practices as inherent elements of democratic praxis throughout history and in different geographies (for example, the importance of oratory in public speeches during the French Revolution or Gandhi's pacifist and ‘de-Westernised’ performativity in the quest for democratic independence in India), Shapiro focuses on the fleeting history of the Federal Theatre (1935-1939) in the United States of America. Created in the context of the New Deal, this project reconciled the aim of revitalising a collapsed industry and employing a class that was falling apart after the crash of 1929 with the realisation that theatre should be financed by the state due to its role in the preservation of democracy, an attempt foiled by the action of the House of Un-American Activities Committee, in a witch-hunt that foreshadowed Macarthyism. Today, the Belarus Free Theatre's activity in promoting freedom of expression through performance and activism shows how the performing arts continue to contribute to building a fairer society in adverse contexts (see Kompelmakher 2023).

This issue of Sinais de Cena - Journal of Theatre and Performance Studies aims to take a critical look at the processes of democratic construction in (pre- and post-) revolutionary periods and the role that theatre and performance played in these circumstances. Whether from a global diachronic perspective or in local micro-historical projects, the thematic dossier of Sinais de Cena, III, no. 5, seeks to offer new ways of studying the intersection between theatre, revolution and the construction of democracy.

Call for articles Sinais de Cena, III, 5 Thematic dossier

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