When the theater broke its canons: an exhibition about Di Tella and Parakultural

A sloping mirror that functions as a fragile floor for two actresses, a theatrical space where the objects are gigantic, where the performers are on the edge of balance. A basement in San Telmo, its theater machinery destroyed, but it ignites as the actors and actresses become the owners of the night. Alejandro Urdapilleta throws himself down the ladder, entering the stage as if there were no more time, as if his body were asking him to rid himself of any enigma. Griselda Gambaro imagines a strange artifact on the leg of one of her characters, and it is as if she gives concrete form to those "test objects" that Roberto Villanueva encouraged people to create at the Di Tella Institute 's Audiovisual Experimentation Center (CEA) in the 1960s. This disconcerting use of space brings it closer to the experience of Parakultural in the Return of Democracy (1986-1990).

This sequence of moments is reconstructed and recreated in the narrative of the exhibition This is Theater. Eleven Experimental Scenes: From Di Tella to Parakultural, where the theatrical particularities that emerged at the CEA from 1963 to 1970 and the formation of the underground in the 1980s are found on the second floor of the Museum of Modern Art .

Behind black curtains, each capsule engages in dialogue with a notion of the exploding stage. The Di Tella Audiovisual Experimentation Center on Florida Street, part of the so-called "crazy block," and the Parakultural on Venezuela Street, where the remains of the old independent theater La Cochera still remained, were two places that, at different times , discussed notions of representation and created a performance. Or, more precisely, a form of theatricality, through which the performers were authors and directors of the drama that unfolded within their bodies in a defiant and unbridled way. There were no docile bodies in these experiences; performance was a political force that was disturbing because it invented a world while it was being performed.

The title of the exhibition, curated by Alejandro Tantanian , the academic and playwright Andrés Gallina, and the curator and visual arts critic Florencia Qualina, reflects the question— "Is this theater?"— turned into an affirmation of the relevance of art, of the categories of the theatrical when forms emerge that go beyond the disciplinary, the knowledge, and the conceptions of a finished work that respond to institutionalized technical guidelines. The museography is by Victoria Noorthoorn, director of the Museum, and Daniela Thomas.

“That was the question the public and critics were asking themselves when they went to the Di Tella: Is this theater? We said, ‘This is theater,’ but history also reaffirmed it,” says theater director, actor, and playwright Alejandro Tantanian, who is also the curator of the theater section at the Museum of Modern Art. It's worth remembering that “This is Theater” is also the title of a song by Nacha Guevara , a star artist at the Di Tella to whom the fourth station of the exhibition, where her protest songs can be heard, is dedicated.

“There is a thesis that underpins the exhibition that has to do with thinking about a sort of genealogy of national theater in this period from the 60s onward linked to a certain disruption of realism and certain ideas linked to the masculine,” Tantanian continues.

–Andrés Gallina: At one point, we considered a more direct and bellicose title, "The War Against Realism." It was a much more blatant statement of that hypothesis.

–Tantanian: We decided to go for the positive, since we're surrounded by cracks. What Andrés was saying has to do with the emergence of Griselda Gambaro, who, for us, is the first major departure in Argentine drama from that realist model.

As if it were a retelling of Kafka 's The Metamorphosis, Griselda Gambaro injects a character named Alfonso into El desatino , who lives with his mother and wakes up one morning with a strange device in his leg. Premiered in 1965 and directed by Jorge Petraglia, the play provokes a shift in notions of realism.

Influenced by absurdity but also by a personal conception where identification isn't sustained by categories of pity and fear for the victim, Gambaro takes the viewer to a place where they are able to identify with a tyrant or with a character who chooses to remain outside the drama, without getting involved or participating. In this way, the audience becomes an object of criticism because they must rethink and be honest about their social role in the face of political events, the real behavior they assume outside of fiction.

In society, the most authoritarian beings tend to be seductive, and we don't always side with the sufferer. Gambaro proposed a dramaturgy where the roles of victims and victimizers, to which the realism of the time and political theater appealed, were not those that sustained authority or the theme of the scene. He wasn't interested in offering a reassuring tone to his audience; his desire was to allow them to consider the level of involvement of each subject in the face of forms of domination, how tyrants manage to convince and establish allies, and how victims collaborate with their executioners.

But, fundamentally, Gambaro's work challenged the notion of a realistic national theatre that was always run by male playwrights.

–Tantanian: In the second station, dedicated to Griselda Gambaro, there's a work commissioned from visual artist Daniel Basso. It's a reworking of the artifact that the character of Alfonso possessed in El desatino . That artifact, along with Griselda's presence, planted the first clear seed in Argentine dramaturgy. Previously, there had been experiences like the first production of Waiting for Godot in Argentina (in 1956, directed by Jorge Petraglia), but I'm referring to a national author. Gambaro's appearance would be unthinkable without the CEA (Cultural Academy of Arts), directed by Roberto Villanueva.

–Gallina: In the more traditional historiography on Argentine theater, such as the books by Néstor Tirri or Osvaldo Pellettieri, the controversy between realists and absurdists is widely described. The theater of the absurdists, or the theater referred to as neo-avant-garde, was a very minor issue within that landscape of Argentine drama. In the description, Gambaro, Eduardo Pavlovsky, and Alberto Adellach appear as those who participated in that debate. The idea was to give space to other experimental experiences, to take something from what we thought during Alejandro Tantanian's tenure at the Cervantes, that realism had won the institutional battle, that it had won the battle at the Cervantes, at Argentores. There is a certain hegemony of realism, and we pondered what remained of those experimental variants that appeared in the 1960s, which problematized the concept of traditional theater, because that question is part of Villanueva's program. There's a quote we borrowed from Villanueva: "I was determined to erase the barriers between dance, mime, and theater, and I put all shows on an equal footing." There was a lot of talk about young people arriving with a portfolio and wanting to do something, and Villanueva would tell them, "It's here." It was a center of experimentation where error was encouraged, where at the same time Villanueva also wrote to Alfredo Alcón telling him he wanted to perform John Osborne's Luther at the Di Tella. There was clearly a very strong dialogue with the European post-avant-garde and with this center of experimentation that crossed different languages ​​and audiences that weren't closed to the realm of theater. The exhibition is also a place of contagion, of contamination, and of opening up languages.

–In Vicente Zito Lema's critique of the 1968 premiere of El Campo at the Di Tella in Crisis magazine, he points out that these were not times for ideological ambiguities. There was a great deal of resistance to assimilating and recognizing what Gambaro proposed in his early works.

–Gallina: We also have to look at how the playwrights of that era, those influenced by Arthur Miller, and Gambaro, who was reading Harold Pinter, Beckett, and Eugéne Ionesco, processed the work. Critics of the time described her as "a mere epigone of European absurdity." They treated Gambaro as such, as foreign and depoliticized. When Silvio Lang wrote the prologue to Gambaro's complete works, he said she was the first woman to enter the history of Argentine drama, putting a stop to realist drama, opening the door to a new drama, shedding light on something else. The debate isn't just about realists and absurdists, it's about men and women and dissident sexualities.

– It’s no coincidence that it was a woman, she sums up that discussion.

–Tantanian: And the duo she formed with Laura Yusem for so many years balanced the dominance of male directors and playwrights. In season two, dedicated to Griselda, we'll hear testimonies from Yusem, Cristina Banegas, and set and costume designer Graciela Galán.

Di Tella was classified as a neo-avant-garde movement, but it still established a connection with the codes of the 20th-century avant-garde movements. This notion no longer held true in the era of Parakultural (1983–1990), when the alternative or underground dimension emerged.

Another distinction lies in the conditions of production. The Di Tella was a space financed by the Siam-Di Tella company, a kind of cultural patronage or sponsorship borrowed from the North American model. It was also divided into areas: the Center for Economic Research, the Center for Medicine, the Centers for Social Research, the Latin American Center for Advanced Musical Studies, directed by Alberto Ginastera, and the Center for Visual Arts, directed by Jorge Romero Brest, in addition to the CEA (Central American Academy of Arts), which is one of the themes of this exhibition.

The Parakultural was a self-managed space where all art forms were mixed without a structured division. But in both cases, a discussion materialized about the play as a finished product. What mattered was the test, the experimentation with scenes that could be interpreted as performance or happenings in the 1960s, or in a kind of variety act at the Parakultural that coexisted with 1980s punks and new rock bands, including Los Redonditos de Ricota and Don Cornelio y la zona.

–Gallina: At Di Tella, there's something more programmatic. Villanueva was thinking about a program and the great category of the avant-garde focused on the new, on how to build on that newness and dynamite the old.

–Tantanian: Parakultural was more of a place where people went to do things or see things; it was a sort of democratic thing between those of us who went as spectators and those who went as performers. For Villanueva, it was a kind of confluence, as he says in the texts printed in the Di Tella programs: the idea of ​​working in the present, a kind of convergence of tradition but rethinking forms. He was a unique person in that sense, because he wasn't just focused on youth, but on thinking about what's happening today, not clinging to the past, living in the present, but with an awareness of the weight, in a good way, of tradition.

–Florencia Qualina: When an avant-garde event remains at the forefront, it never dies. In the case of Víctor García , a tremendous artist who will be a revelation to so many people who don't know him, they will encounter radical, novel, and moving experiences in relation to the procedures he was arguing with official theater. He worked with tradition, with classical texts, but what he did, what he materially achieved with his creations, is moving today. This place of active avant-garde offers the possibility of encountering gestures that remain powerful today.

Víctor García is the creator of the staging of Jean Genet's The Maids , which premiered in 1969 at the Poliorama Theater with the tilted mirror where Nuria Espert and Julieta Serrano passed, mentioned at the beginning of this article. A director and actor from Tucumán, he arrived in Buenos Aires in the 1950s and conceived the scene based on a transformation of scale, a monumentality in the objects.

He had studied architecture, and his forms placed actors and audiences in an extreme and demanding position. He went into exile in France during the Onganía administration after being imprisoned and threatened by the famous and feared official Luis Margaride. In Paris, he studied with Marcel Marceau (his company was called Mimo Teatro). Samuel Beckett recognized him as a renovator of French theater, and Genet believed there could be no better setting for his plays. Víctor García shared the French author's fury and, at times, marginalization.

Before that, she had a stop in Rio de Janeiro, where she trained with a student of choreographer Martha Graham . Her stage productions considered conflict in relation to these giant objects, which, more than scenery, were elements that retained their power in the eyes of the performers, who had to invent a performance to confront them.

–Tantanian: There's an associative drift in the exhibition, beyond the Di Tella and the Parakultural, and station number six is ​​dedicated to reviving the figure of Víctor García. I even saw The Maids at the Odeón (when Nuria Espert brought it in the 1980s). He's a figure who's been forgotten for being gay, for being black, and because he left the country. It's an important reviving because it's a line that's not continuing, that's broken.

–Gallina: At one point, we talked about the somewhat paradoxical idea of ​​an individual avant-garde in García because we were amazed by these videos and materials, seeing the scale, the dimension, how it challenged the entire representational system to which we're accustomed. In fact, we traveled to Tucumán to visit the archive of Juan Malcún, a Tucumán-based researcher. It's worth noting that the exhibition provides a space for many Argentine researchers: there are books by Malala González on The Black Organization; by Lorena Verzero, who worked on the figure of Ángel Elizondo; by María Fernanda Pinta on expanded theater; by María Amichetti's Di Tella; by Batato Barea. The exhibition brings the value of contemporary theatrical research into dialogue.

–The figure of Ángel Elizondo is precisely the connecting point between the two spaces, as is the technique of mime. Elizondo participated in Di Tella, and many of his students (Batato Barea, the entire Clú del Claun, Las Gambas al Ajillo) studied with him. Furthermore, Víctor García's company was called Mimo Teatro.

–Gallina: The critical exercise of uniting Di Tella and Parakultural, which have two very different management models, led us to an idea from Kado Kostzer, who said that without Di Tella, Parakultural wouldn't have existed, as if something had been founded at Di Tella, a space for experimental stage practices. There we began to see what kind of figure could generate some connection between those two spaces in a material and concrete way, and Elizondo emerged. His first work was Mimo en el Di Tella (1965): he used the classic CEA slides, something extremely innovative; apparently, Villanueva didn't allow him to do nudes, which was a very strong mark in his later shows. And, at the same time, this figure of Elizondo traverses the dictatorship in a kind of "inxilio," because he continues producing works and teaching, and he is the teacher of many: Batato, Omar Viola, and Horacio Gabin, the two creators of Parakultural, Las Gambas al Ajillo. What we do with Gianni Mestichelli is a photo shoot for the Argentine Mime Company. The language of mime was very constitutive of that democratic opening. You see Batato perform and you see the marks of that technique.

At the Parakultural, the dark laughter that didn't so easily accept the codes of the democratic spring was rehearsed. The image of Alejandro Urdapilleta smoking at the door, dressed as a woman, or Batato Barea 's wanderings through the Buenos Aires nights with long hair, heels, and a skirt were risky political interventions that demonstrated the continued repression, that the streets were still under surveillance. There was a continuity between that scene without hierarchies, where the actors wrote their texts but didn't consider themselves authors, and the figure of the director was practically nonexistent, and the way of establishing themselves in that outside world with the imprint of a character.

–Gallina: In Malala González's book about The Black Organization, which was not part of Parakultural but we included in that associative drift that Alejandro mentioned, there is a hypothesis by Ana Longoni about the idea that they are the spoilsports of the beginning of democracy, that while the unveiling and the party are taking place, they come to bring the image of horror through their performative practice.

–Tantanian: Parakultural had that cavernous quality, that catacomb, that hiding place, and it became a magma with that. That violence against bodies, Urdapilleta's way of acting was a being taken over by something of enormous violence, of extraordinary power and unique poetry, but it clearly wasn't a meek body; it was a body at war that came to say its thing, its emphasis on acting, that extraordinary way of speaking. The exhibition closes with station eleven, dedicated to Urdapilleta, and there's a 40-minute video of Urdapilleta performing Lunch at the Ludwig W House, directed by Roberto Villanueva (Teatro San Martín, 1999). There's clearly a connection there, and there's something unique, non-transferable. The exhibition has that intangible quality that theatre has, that one cannot truly bear witness to. It is an exhibition of ghosts, a poetic, evocative exhibition, which requires the spectator to be active, imagining that which is not there, because it is very difficult not to fall into a photograph, into an archive, there is no other way. But it seems to me that the dramaturgy of the exhibition constructs a fascinating and tale of discovery because there are many things that the vast majority of the public does not know.

–Gallina: We are going to show some of the Gloria and Rivadavia notebooks by Urdapilleta that Cecilia Roth, Alejandra Flechner and Horacio Dabbah kept.

Meeting him in the basement of the Parakultural, confronting the electric power of his art, was an experience that dismantled any idea of ​​acting, reborn as spectators in a way that made irony a stinging spring and forced us to remain constantly alert. During the 1980s, the gesture, the grimace made by Alejandro Urdapilleta, an overwhelming actor, must have been a diatribe in the Alfonsinist spring. There was no warmth there, no liberating hopes, but a nerve transformed into word and deed. Because Urdapilleta wasn't just a gifted actor, an actor capable of enveloping and unsettling: he was someone who made acting a tool of criticism, who intervened in the scene with characters who were always saying something else. It wasn't enough for him to demonstrate that he could imbue himself with television realism, as he did in Tumberos , or compose a Polonius in the early 1990s in Ricardo Bartís's production of Hamlet or the War of the Theaters . (Andrés Gallina remembers that Batato Barea told him: “You sold out, it was the kind of theater we didn’t want to do”) with a comic quality that drew slashes in the air, he was a swordsman who sought to break the cloth of appearances.

–Gallina: Reading those notebooks was like another way of seeing him act because you see in his handwriting super energetic strokes of some highs…

–Qualina: And a depth, an intelligence, a sensitivity, a never-ending search, a wicked sense of humor, and a fragility. It was one of the most mind-blowing moments of the investigation.

–Gallina: He talked about how to act, how to knock down the other person when they're acting, how to stop acting and never act again, how to fuck. The greatest legacy left by the avant-garde is that there's no distinction between art and life, and you see this in Urdapilleta: there's no distinction between going to the supermarket and performing with Gasalla.

At Parakultural, an unexpected school of acting emerged. They recovered a style of acting and writing—because Urdapilleta and Batato were playwrights all the time, creating scenes and poems, falling in love, and imbibing the words of Alejandra Pizarnik—very typical of River Plate theater, where the body, the power, the voice, the exalted passions were there, offered as thinking material, as an intervention that always seeks the astonished and alert gaze of a spectator, the object of their sharp laughter, of that sarcasm that foreshadows tragedy.

–Gallina: In Urdapilleta and Batato, and at the Di Tella as well, there's a kind of fervent anti-theater. There's a constant fight, not only with official theater, but also with independent theater, which they see as something stagnant, fossilized. This phrase by Batato is very famous: "The theater doesn't interest me at all." And it speaks to how these performance practices are built with a will to torpedo and clash, to combat the institution. They performed for rockers. I asked Horacio Gabin what a punk who saw him dressed as a woman, or a rocker of that era who listened to Todos tus muertos, would think of Urdapilleta. He told me: "They were afraid of him."

–Tantanian: I, who was lucky enough to see him, to meet him, and to know him, was frightening. What was happening at that time was very impressive. Later, he refined himself, although he never left that mark. His body was completely poeticized, and it remained that way until he died. Even when he was doing Serving Mr. Sloane (Joe Orton's 2007 film), which was something else entirely, or when he did Strindberg's Lightning at the Cervantes (directed by Augusto Fernández, in 1996), you couldn't stop looking at him. And yes, he was frightening.

–Qualina: There was a nonconformity that went against all common places.

–This exhibition also leads us to think about how revisiting or learning about these experiences can stimulate the current scene.

–Gallina: When Milei appeared, we hoped for the revival of the underground . It was like seeing that something wasn't happening on the scene, and so the need arose to go back and see what the experiences were like that attempted to reflect on the persecution by the Onganía government and what Margaride was doing in the 60s, and what it was like to throw those parties after the terror, or with terror still in the early days of democracy. And to leave that question lingering—because it doesn't have a clear answer—about what the alternative system would be today, if it exists, on the contemporary Buenos Aires scene. But there's something interesting: Ricardo Bartís premiered his first play, Postales argentinas (Argentine Postcards) (1988) at the Parakultural, and the same thing happens with El externo de Objetos (The Peripheral of Objects ) (1990). The two emblems of the 90s, of the renewal of post-dictatorship theater, each bid farewell to the Parakultural with their first play.

*From May 30th, the exhibition "This is Theater. Eleven Experimental Scenes from Di Tella to Parakultural" will be on view until February 2026 at the Museum of Modern Art, San Juan 350.