Theatre of Argentina

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History

The history of Argentine theatre goes back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with public performances put on by Jesuits or missionaries in attempts to convert the local Indigenous population to Christianity. These performances were irregular until 1747. In 1757, the first outdoor theatre was built, though it only lasted until 1761.^[4]

The first viceroy, Juan José de Vértiz y Salcedo, created the colony's first theatre, La Ranchería, in 1783^[5] with the help of an actor named Francisco Velarde, who had proposed the idea initially and acted as the theatre's manager. The construction of it faced backlash from the church, to which Vértiz compromised by establishing that every staged play had to be approved by them first.^[6]

In this stage, in 1786, a tragedy entitled Siripo had its premiere. Siripo is now a lost work (only the second act is conserved), and can be considered the first Argentine stage play, because it was written by Buenos Aires poet Manuel José de Lavardén, it was premiered in Buenos Aires, and its plot was inspired by an historical episode of the early colonization of the

The musical creator of the Argentine National Anthem,

In the late 1800s, Spanish zarzuela was influential in the region, so much so that Buenos Aires eventually became the Latin American capital for zarzuela. This eventually led to the creation of a new Argentine form, known as zarzuela criolla.^[8]

The wave of European

This need for cultural growth in the form of theatre was addressed by Florencio Sánchez, a pioneer in professional theatre locally and in Uruguay. Local colour became the primary inspiration for Roberto Arlt, Gregorio de Laferrère, Armando Discépolo, Antonio Cunill Cabanellas, and Roberto Payró during the 1920s and 1930s, while also helping amateur theatre revive locally. The Teatro Independiente movement created a counterweight to professional theatre by wanting to reintroduce grotesque subject matter back into plays. The movement lasted between 1950 and 1955,^[10] and inspired a new generation of young dramatists such as Copi, Agustín Cuzzani, Osvaldo Dragún, and Carlos Gorostiza.

Gorostiza and other self-trained dramatists also popularized Realism in the Argentine theatre after 1950, a genre advanced by Ricardo Halac, Roberto Cossa, and among others. Griselda Gambaro and Eduardo Pavlovsky popularized the theatre of the absurd in Argentina after 1960, a genre that found local variant in the grotesque works of Julio Mauricio and Roberto Cossa, whose La Nona became an iconic character in the Argentine theatre in 1977.

Argentina's National Reorganization Process posed the greatest challenge to the development of local theatre since the Rosas era of the mid-19th century. Numerous actors, playwrights and technicians emigrated after 1976, though the pressures on artists were loosen around 1980. Seizing the opportunity, playwright Osvaldo Dragún marshalled colleagues to restore an abandoned sparkplug factory in order to organize the Teatro Abierto or Open Theatre movement which, between 1981 and 1985, sought to defy censorship and the erasure of theatre under the military dictatorship.^[11]

The theatre thrived before and after the 1983