Dissident Theatricalities: Civil Practices and Democratic Imaginaries (Spain, 1968-1992)

Abstract

This dissertation presents and analyzes a corpus of countercultural practices that experimented with dissident ways of life, recovering the forbidden spaces, the silenced words and the practices that Franco’s regime repressed through the corporealization of critical and emancipatory discourses from the potentiality of the encounter and collective action. At the end of the sixties, a generation of young theatrical artists challenged power by vitally organizing themselves and endeavoring to recover spaces and memories that were forbidden and made invisible during Franco’s dictatorship. This recovery occurred alongside their invention of circuits, construction of performance halls, and practice of new forms of communal and itinerant life in which life and politics and militancy and theater were indissoluble. This dissertation establishes a genealogy of dissident materializations at the intersections between politics and aesthetics, the body and the imaginary, and their different mutations throughout the three historical periods that it navigates: late Francoism, the transition, and democracy. Divided into two blocks (the first articulated on the basis of space and the second on time), the dissertation is arranged in seven chapters and a final coda. The first chapter analyzes the influence and legacy of The Living Theatre's Spanish tour and its testimonial memory that the Comediants collected. The second expands the corpus of experiences in the public agora to more than thirty street groups and acts. The third chapter treats the dissident theatricalities that utilized commercial spaces to allow for the corporealization of anti-Franco discourse. Finally, this first part closes with the study of the performances that took place in unconventional venues, such as a sports center, a psychiatric hospital, and between four tractors. The second part begins with a study of the historical imaginaries, alternatives to the official Francoist historiography, and how the aforementioned collectives staged them. The sixth chapter analyzes the material and symbolic networks that sustained the theatrical countercultural field, particularly its flows, exchanges, and endogamies. The final chapter documents the state and parastatal terrorism that the theatrical artists suffered because of their artistic and vital anti-Francoism.