Antonio Bivar e O cão siamês/Alzira Power: história e experimentações teatrais (1963 - 1971)

Abstract

This research aims to contribute to the academic production on Brazilian theater in the late 1960s through the analysis of Antonio Bivar’s dramatic text O cão siames de Alzira Porra-Louca/Alzira Power, written and performed for the first time in 1969. In order to examine the position of the play in theatrical historiography, I aimed to understand the origin and impact of the “new dramaturgy” on the scene, the debate about the notion of a “cultural void” and the discussion that took place in the final years of the 1960s regarding the political actions of leftist artists. By proposing a narrative about the playwright's experiences, I sought to highlight the cultural practices experienced by the social segment of which he was a part, responsible for creating other forms and meanings, and occupying space in time through the agency of new subjective experiences that reverberated in what we know as counterculture. Furthermore, I attempted to explore how the playwright appropriated the past and organized his trajectory in autobiographical works. For this purpose, I used the following historical sources: versions of the dramatic text O cão siamês/Alzira Power referring to the first two productions (1969 and 1971), reviews written about Bivarian plays, autobiographies, a biography written by Maria Lúcia Dahl, and other newspaper publications that contributed to elucidating both the event of the production and the playwright's trajectory and the debates of the period.