{"id":134,"date":"2025-04-20T20:13:26","date_gmt":"2025-04-20T20:13:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/31\/?p=134"},"modified":"2026-05-21T17:42:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-21T17:42:13","slug":"community-theatre-in-colombia-origins-and-trajectories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/31\/community-theatre-in-colombia-origins-and-trajectories\/","title":{"rendered":"Community Theatre in Colombia: Origins and Trajectories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sarah Ashford Hart<\/strong>*<\/a> and Janneth Aldana<\/strong>**<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

There has been renewed national interest in socially-engaged arts since Colombia\u2019s 2016 peace accord, but the legacy of community theatre is largely ignored in pedagogy and scholarship. This article considers origins and trajectories of Colombian community theatre starting from the 1960s. While methods such as El Nuevo Teatro<\/font> and Theatre of the Oppressed have come to dominate the Latin American theatre cannon, we show how the influential ideas of Augusto Boal and Enrique Buenaventura were shaped through dialogue and exchange with collages who are much less known. We examine debates from the 70s about whether \u201cpopular theatre\u201d was by or for \u201cthe people,\u201d which have evolved into a contemporary commitment to working in community. We consider key international encounters that occurred at regional festivals like the Festival de Manizales, which was a laboratory for the development of an anti-hegemonic Latin American theatre. Despite the extrajudicial persecution of \u201cleftist\u201d artists carried out across the region during the 80s, aggressive commercialization and persistent institutional amnesia regarding creative practices of resistance, we find that \u201cpopular theatre\u201d has endured by adapting to changing (now neoliberal) contexts, becoming \u201ccommunity theatre\u201d in the 90s. We highlight the work of three active Colombian groups with long-term trajectories: Teatro Experimental de Fontib\u00f3n (Bogot\u00e1), Nuestra Gente de Medell\u00edn, and Esquina Latina (Cali). All show a commitment to transgenerational collaboration and have proven resilient in contexts that are often life-or-death. This brings us to a Latin American understanding of applied theatre based in building affective connections and repairing torn social fabrics.

Keywords<\/strong>: community theatre, Colombia, popular theatre, Latin America, applied theatre<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The history of community theatre in Colombia is rich yet generally unknown. Tracing its origins and trajectories offers new ways of conceptualizing the international field of applied theatre. In 1997, the Colombian Network of Theatre in Community emerged with the purpose of unifying a movement described as \u201c[theatre] done with<\/em>, by<\/em> and for<\/em> the people, who are the protagonists of their own dream\u201d (Una red que teje pa\u00eds 71). This was a new theatrical trend built on legacies of popular theatre, university theatre, and El Nuevo Teatro<\/em> of previous decades. The way it distinguished itself from commercial, traditional, Eurocentric, or avant-garde theatre, unlike these earlier movements, was not precisely by its national, political, or social content, but its commitment to ongoing collaboration with marginalized communities. At the same time, the groups in the network then and now value high aesthetic standards, a distinctive factor of community theatre in Colombia, as opposed to other contexts in the world, where community arts take more processual forms and there is less emphasis on the product.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Sample of Esquina Latina\u2019s youth and community theatre groups<\/a>. Photo: Courtesy of Esquina Latina Theatre Group<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The choice of the name \u201ctheatre in community\u201d resulted from a debate among network members; they discussed the difference between theatre for<\/em> the community, theatre by<\/em> the community, and theatre in <\/em>community (i.e. with <\/em>the community and constitutive of it). This last distinction indicates that there is not a directionality (from outside the community inward or from inside the community outward) but a location: the participating theatre groups are situated in<\/em> and shaped by their communities, who are also their audience, their inspiration, and their legacy. It is worth mentioning that the founding groups of the network that we focus on (Nuestra Gente de Medell\u00edn<\/a>, located in Las Cruces since 1987, Teatro Experimental de Fontib\u00f3n<\/a> (TEF) in Bogot\u00e1 since 1979, and Esquina Latina<\/a>, located in the eastern neighborhoods of Cali since 1978), were chosen precisely because of their long trajectories, which show the influences of the popular and university theatre movements that fed into the Nuevo Teatro<\/em> movement from the late 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We look briefly at how these three community theatre groups emerged (from which theatrical movement), why they persevered and what their approach is today. They have received little recognition at the academic level, mainly due to a lack of archival documentation, in addition to institutional amnesia (sometimes intentional) towards practices of resistance from below<\/em>. What\u2019s more, they work in territories of Colombia where diverse and excessive forms of violence and inequity are manifested – territories that at different moments of Colombia\u2019s prolonged armed conflict have received thousands of displaced people, often from rural regions, who resettle in marginalized neighborhoods of large cities seeking to build conditions for a dignified life. In human development terms, dignified life requires the guarantee that citizens will be able to fully exercise their capabilities as human beings (namely, bodily integrity, political participation, education, health, culture, play, thought and emotion, affiliation with others, interspecies relations, and control of their environment) (Naussbaum cited in Mantilla).Community theatre in Colombia aims to contribute to the conditions for dignified life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Brazilian practitioner\/scholar Augusto Boal is widely credited as laying the foundations for \u201capplied theatre\u201d\u2014a term used to refer to a range of theatrical practices applied to social and somatic issues\u2014, community theatre has a tenuous relationship with Boalian ideals. Boal was a leader of the popular theatre movement in Latin America from the 1960s onward. He rigorously documented the theories and practices of the movement in several books. Thanks to his publications and their translations, his work is known almost everywhere in the world, but Boal is an exceptional case; most of his colleagues in the popular theatre movement, with whom he collaborated in many Latin American countries, remain largely unknown and their contributions, even their influence on Boal’s ideas and practices, have not been formalized or taught, as Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed (TOTO) method has been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although his contributions are invaluable, Boal\u2019s hegemonic position in the applied theatre cannon is problematic. TOTO systematized a kind of work that many popular theatre groups of the 1960s and 1970s did. Moreover, TOTO was a historically specific response to authoritarian states in Latin America, yet it continues to be disseminated, applied and adapted to different social contexts around the world, partly because it is effective in facilitating community participation. However, Boal\u2019s dualistic oppressed\/oppressor conceptualization often falls short of addressing complex power dynamics in current neoliberal realities. For instance, in the context of post-apartheid South Africa, Kennedy Chinyowa calls for adapting TOTO into a more inclusive \u201ctheatre of the oppressor,\u201d because \u201cTheatre of the Oppressed seems to falter when it comes to dealing with the inherent complexities that are hidden in real situations of oppression\u201d (Chinyowa 15). Meanwhile, Latin American practitioners of popular theatre continued to evolve their approaches in relation to changing circumstances. We ask, then, what can the experience of groups such as Nuestra Gente, Esquina Latina and TEF offer applied theatre pedagogy?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To understand Colombian community theatre, we briefly retrace the emergence of popular theatre and El Nuevo Teatro<\/em>, followed by an analysis of popular theatre\u2019s evolution towards community theatre, which we see as a mode of survival. We provide illustrative examples of these three groups\u2019 experiences and include audiovisual materials they have disseminated online, in an effort to depict their dynamic approaches. We want to highlight their constant struggle to work in<\/em> community, in a socially engaged, anti-hegemonic way, despite the limitations of being immersed in precarious contexts. In Colombia, we see a remarkable capacity for self-determination and self-sufficiency in the face of violent (often life-or-death) situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resilient creativity emerges from seemingly impossible conditions\u2013not only the armed conflict, but drug trafficking, crime and corruption, the persecution of community leaders who protest the violations of human and environmental rights by international and national corporations, the lack of support and protection from the state for vulnerable groups, and the structural violence that maintains social and economic inequality. Community theatre in Colombia confronts these various forms of violence every day in very real ways in the barrios<\/em> [ghettos].<\/em> As Nuestra Gente de Medell\u00edn\u2019s director explains, their work stems from a commitment to \u201cbuilding artists for life\u201d in a context where \u201clife was worth nothing and no one cared what happened to the other kids who lived on the streets\u201d (Una red que teje pa\u00eds 68-9). Although he refers here to the Las Cruces neighborhood of Medell\u00edn in the 1980s, he could be talking about any number of barrios <\/em>in Cali or Bogot\u00e1 in recent years. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Nuestra Gente\u2019s Comparsas<\/em>, part of their National Community Meeting of Youth Theatre. Photo: Courtesy of Nuestra Gente Cultural Corporation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

However, Colombia is more than a \u201cculture of violence\u201d (Jaramillo 119). There are many different worlds within the country: peace and war, the presence and absence of the state, neoliberal and informal economies, poverty and wealth, indigenous cosmovisions and colonial paradigms, folkloric ideologies and Catholic beliefs, ancestral and scientific medicines. For the same reason, the history of popular and community theatre in Colombia has been ignored\u2014because it exists in the margins, in the worlds invisible to institutions, including the institutions of memory in many cases. Most books on this subject examine parallel movements in other countries, such as Argentina or Chile, that have contributed to memory work. When Colombian popular theatre is mentioned in the literature, there is a tendency to name only the two most emblematic groups (Teatro Experimental de Cali and Teatro La Candelaria), which have never been community theatre groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The groups we focus on have not been fully accepted as part of Colombian theatre history, though they have published about their own work and students have written about them. On the one hand, there has been renewed interest in the role of the arts in creating a \u201cculture of peace\u201d in the years since the last peace process, which led to the \u201cfinal accord for the termination of the conflict and the construction of stable and enduring peace,\u201d signed in 2016 by the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia (Farc) and the Colombian government. Thanks to this there are now more publications documenting the use of theatre for reconciliation, community building and memory. On the other hand, there is still little mention of the legacy of community-based theatre in Colombia. Something we find remarkable about Colombian community theatre is a commitment from its inception to shaping the next generation through pedagogical work with young people from poor neighborhoods, both as audiences and as artists. It is precisely this transgenerational view that can strengthen both memory and hope as inherently intertwined.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The communal construction of TEF\u2019s theatre building. Photo: Courtesy of Teatro Experimental de Fontib\u00f3n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
The Emergence of Popular Theatre and El Nuevo Teatro<\/em><\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

It is impossible to understand Colombian community theatre without first discussing popular theatre in Latin America. Colombia played an important role in the development of the popular theatre movement at the regional level, especially with the International Theatre Festival in Manizales and the National Festival of Nuevo Teatro<\/em>. As Adam Vers\u00e9nyi states, \u201cthe 1960s and 1970s saw a proliferation of theatre festivals throughout the region\u201d that were \u201cof immense importance in establishing links between theatre practitioners and breaking down the historic barriers to communication between countries\u201d (193). He adds that the festivals were not only a forum for the exchange of ideas, but also \u201ca stage for the presentation of theatre created upon an aesthetic foundation directly linked to specific communities and reflecting those communities\u2019 problems, preoccupations and means of expression\u201d (193).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The label El Nuevo Teatro Latinoamericano<\/em> [The New Latin American Theatre] began to be used to describe work at these festivals created under the principles of collective creation, which \u201cassumed that theatre-making was about critical reflection on social contents and traditional values, and in general on the ideology understood as the discourse of the status quo\u201d (Chaparro 138). Adolfo Chaparro adds that in Colombia \u201cby the seventies, collective creation became an aesthetic-political formula that contained both militancy and creativity\u201d (11). Thanks to the influence of Teatro Experimental de Cali (TEC), directed by Enrique Buenaventura, and their systematized method, disseminated via regional festivals and numerous publications, the central concept of El Nuevo Teatro Latinoamericano<\/em> became an \u201cemphasis on the popular and non-commercial, based in the history of the people, and the initiation of the collective creation method, which would later extend to the rest of the continent\u201d (Chesney 89-91).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

El Nuevo Teatro Latinoamericano<\/em> was distinct from European and North American collective creation, because it was conditioned by the \u201csocial and political needs\u201d of the Latin American people (Vasquez cited in Guti\u00e9rrez 136). The 1960s \u201cwere marked by the forceful intervention of the United States in Latin America, which, in the face of the conditions of underdevelopment prevailing on the continent, created as a reaction an intense yearning for unity and revolutionary combative action, aspects to which the theatre would not be alien\u201d (Chesney 97).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

El Nuevo Teatro Latinoamericano<\/em> was initially part of the workers’ movement and the quest to consolidate an autonomous language of self-expression. Enrique Buenaventura explained that in the Colombian context, \u201cthe working class of the country, with its current growth and unitary and conscientizing process, is also taking to the field of theatre, as an art form that is today more immediate and accessible\u201d (Buenaventura in Guti\u00e9rrez 214). As militant groups converted the theatre into a weapon of resistance, Nuevo Teatro<\/em> groups of the 1970s (mostly middle-class intellectuals) rallied around a concern for the needs of \u201cthe people\u201d and a desire to engage marginalized sectors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the same time, they resisted traditional, colonizing theatre forms, which historically had had more institutional support\u2014a matter that was the subject of debate at the festivals. Augusto Boal documents, for example, his experience of the 1972 Manizales Festival, which for him represented \u201cthe vices of bourgeois officialdom and all the virtues of a battlefield\u201d, specifically between \u201cLatin American theatre and colonialist theatre\u201d (117). He criticized the Colombian government for closing the Manizales Festival, due to the leftist content of the plays, and instead investing in bringing high profile companies from Europe to a new national theatre festival. Adolfo Chaparro confirms that by the end of the 1970s in Colombia, with the suspension of the Manizales Festival, and the political persecution of well-known directors, \u201csilence in the shadow of fear obfuscated the vitality of the theatre movement\u201d (30).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another target of state censorship was the university theatre movement, which was expressly militant and had established a presence throughout the country. It was forced to disappear in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when \u201cimprisonment, raids and torture to counteract the growth of popular movements were on the rise\u201d (Parra 72). Curiously, El Nuevo Teatro<\/em> managed to adapt and survive, thanks to a newfound commitment to the aesthetic over the explicitly political. It would seem that popular theatre lost the battle. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This phenomenon was repeated throughout the region in different ways; by the 1980s, Latin American theatre and the regional festivals changed focus, in part due to the end of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, leaving behind the political and social emphasis that had defined popular theatre (Vers\u00e9nyi 193). Artists had been forced to leave their countries due to political persecution, whether by dictatorships in Chile and Argentina that detained, murdered and disappeared a large portion of the cultural sector, or by more clandestine forms of violence in Colombia, which achieved similar effects. Although a military regime was not imposed in Colombia, the violation of human rights occurred due to the democratic restrictions of a two-party system of government that prevented the rise of new social forms. Among many excessively violent responses to leftist movements, the most resonant case is the genocide against the Patriotic Union (UP), a party that brought together several leftist organizations. Between 1985 and 1993 more than one thousand militants were assassinated and another hundred disappeared at the hands of state forces in alliance with paramilitary and drug trafficking sectors (Palacios 112-70).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, theatre artists who survived the repression of the Cold War era in Latin America (a war waged against an \u201cenemy within\u201d), if they manage to return to their homelands, sought out other ways to continue their work, leaving behind their leftist agendas both out of necessity and because utopian illusions could no longer be sustained. As the economic climate became more neoliberal and individualistic (even after the return to democracy in the Southern Cone), grassroots theatre groups that operated on a voluntary basis with limited funds struggled to survive. Conservative governments let the market govern cultural production, which functioned as a form of censorship that favored commercial theatre over social and political theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result of this economic austerity, from the late 1980s onward popular theatre arguably disappeared from record in Latin America, although it continued under the radar. While Prentki, Preston and Balfour describe Theatre for Development (TfD) in Latin America as a continuation of \u201cThe Nuevo Teatro Popular\u201d <\/em>(Prentki et al. 49-50), we identify distinct but connected trajectories. What has become applied theatre, synonymous with TfD, is a grassroots theatre [Teatro de Base<\/em>], which in part lost strength because grassroots work that was carried out by \u201cdiverse types of popular organizations: human rights committees, trade unions, women’s groups, ethnic vindication associations\u201d, as a form of resistance to repressive states, had lacked information networks and occurred in isolation in each country (Ochsenious 11). That is to say, the established groups of El Nuevo Teatro<\/em>, whose work was popular in its aims but not necessarily in its modes of production, that participated in the regional festivals (and are well documented) represented only the tip of a much larger movement; Teatro de Base<\/em> was happening in less visible contexts, like streets and prisons, though it was scarcely documented. Carlos Ochsenious describes Teatro de Base<\/em> as an \u201coccasion-event through which the group or community acts upon itself to regain a sense of belonging, identity, commitment, and collective participation\u201d (127). Though the neoliberal market and state repression were deadly antagonists, a collective memory of these practices remains; it is a memory that is fractured, interrupted, partial, and embodied. This other <\/em>memory of the legacy of popular (grassroots) theatre is revived and reimagined today in community theatre, sustained by the long-standing \u201cinvisible friends\u201d of the more recognized groups. We consider below how they survived by moving from making political interventions in the barrios<\/em> towards making a home there.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Nuestra Gente\u2019s Sonata para un Sina\u00ed <\/em>outside their \u201cCasa Amarilla\u201d cultural center (2022). Photo: Courtesy of Nuestra Gente Cultural Corporation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
The Evolution from Popular Theatre to Community Theatre<\/strong><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Community theatre groups across Latin America have organized national and international networks and festivals, gaining traction from the 1990s on, but are less known in theatre studies than El<\/em> Nuevo Teatro<\/em>. This is because community theatre and its festivals are (intentionally) situated within marginal spaces. Historically, 1970s popular theatre included both theatre made by<\/em> the people and for<\/em> the people: \u201cone way corresponds to the productions made by groups from slums, factories and peasant communities [. . . .] The other way involves visits to poor communities [. . .] and above all, is made by groups alien to these communities\u201d (Guti\u00e9rrez 5). Community theatre is effectively the evolution of the former, although some groups began working with the latter approach (which characterizes El Nuevo Teatro<\/em>). Because popular theatre is context-specific, and \u201cthere is no single popular theatre for all times, for all places and for all social groups\u201d (Piga cited in Guti\u00e9rrez 74), we must consider how the specificities of the time and place shape each approach and its aims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1970s Latin America, Boal distinguished the following categories of popular theatre: 1. of<\/em> the people and for<\/em> the people; 2. propaganda; 3. didactic (discusses an ethical problem); 4. of<\/em> popular perspective but for <\/em>another audience; 5. of<\/em> anti-popular perspective but for<\/em> the people (44). Boal’s conceptualization of \u201cthe people\u201d [el pueblo<\/em>] reflects the Marxist ideology of the era\u2019s leftist movements, focusing on class conflicts and idealizing the proletariat. Boal states: \u201cPeople is a generic designation that encompasses workers, peasants and all those who are temporarily or occasionally associated with them;\u201d he classifies the \u201canti-people\u201d as \u201cthe landowners, the bourgeoisie and their associates\u201d (21). This dualistic conceptualization served to elaborate a counterhegemonic discourse as well as a form of social organization for theatre-making based in the collective, which prioritized as its audience the popular masses oppressed by neo-colonial, capitalist society (Pardo in Antei). This ideology has evolved in today\u2019s community theatre towards a rights-based commitment to dignified life, requiring a consistent presence in marginalized sectors that goes beyond solidarity to cohabitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We can thus trace different but connected routes: commitment to revolution (which eventually fell by the wayside), collective creation of a Latin American aesthetic, and rootedness in community organizing (not for politics, but for life). We are interested in how the latter route emerged. Carlos Ochsenious identified three goals of grassroots theatre: educational (learning something together about ourselves), communicational (articulating a shared vision of ourselves), and animative (expressing a collective aspiration) (129). His discussion of Teatro de Base<\/em> evidenced a move away from political discourses of \u201cthe people\u201d towards what would later be called \u201cthe community\u201d. There is a clear difference with Boal’s more ideologically Marxist tone. In part this is due to the repressive context of the Chilean dictatorship where Ochsenious wrote, but it is also because Teatro de Base<\/em> is linked to liberation theology, the fundamental basis of which is the \u201cactive, aware, critical questioning of society by an individual that moves by degrees towards a collective consensus\u201d (Vers\u00e9nyi 188). Vers\u00e9nyi explained, \u201cteatro de base parallels the religious base communities in that it is theatre made by <\/em>the marginalized population for <\/em>itself, not by university students or professionals who bring \u2018culture\u2019 from outside the community\u201d (179). This marks a departure from the conceptualization of popular theatre as being either by <\/em>or for<\/em> the people and prioritizes embeddedness in<\/em> grassroots groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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