Food for the choir: from Gracias, señor to Uzyna Uzona

Abstract

Gracias, señor, the mythic Teatro Oficina’s performance of 1971 was always understood in Brazilian theatre history as an atypical spectacle, which provoked a deep crisis in the group and led to its extinction. This article refuses this thesis and projects that performance as the seed that would constitute the victorious trajectory of Uzyna Uzona two decades latter. Trigger of a political and aesthetical radicalization process that reached its climax in the Portuguese revolution of 1974 and implied on the dismantling of the original collective, Gracias, señor, creates the foundations of what was produced in the last three decades. Actually, the present Teatro Oficina Uzyna Uzona is the fullest realization of the utopia, which that experience projected and was engendered after years of maturation.