Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Framing the Revolution: Triana's La noche de los asesinos and Ceremonial de guerra

1990; Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Kansas; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

2161-0576

Diana Taylor,

Latin American Literature Studies

Jose Triana begins his play Ceremonial de guerra with an epigraph from Miguel Hernandez: MYo me digo: si el mundo es teatro, si la revolucion es carne de teatro, procuremos que el teatro y, por consiguiente, la revolucion sean ejemplares, y tal vez, y sin tal vez, conseguiremos entre todos que el mundo tambien lo sea. H Triana thus reaffirms a connection between theatre (ceremonial) and revolution (guerra) which he already advanced in his title, Ceremonial de guerra: revolution-as-theatre, theatre about revolution, theatre as engendering revolution. But how is revolution, specifically the Cuban Revolution, theatrical! And what is the relationship between theatre and revolution as posited by Triana'a La noche de los asesinos (1965) and Ceremonial de guerra (1968-1973)? The Cuban Revolution, aside from providing the hope of viable political alternatives for Latin America, also produced a riveting theatrical image. Without reducing the Revolution to a spectacle, it is important to notice that its spectacular components served a vital, real function. They captured world­ wide attention; they rallied their followers and admirers by ennobling the revolutionaries and giving them an identity while simultaneously delegitimizing their opponents. The compelling figure of Che in his beret, and to a lesser degree the figure of Castro, dominated the imagination of a huge sector of the population of Latin America. The revolution generated images of epic proportions: a new world was being created before one's eyes-a new beginning, a new hero, a new revolutionary man.1 Che's heroic quest could almost be decoded with Brechtian terminology: the episodic plot, the frozen frame, the green fatigue costumes, the gestus, the popular audience. The entire sequence was spectacular. Unlike the Brechtian dialectical theatre which specifies that the spectator and actor ought not to approach one another but to move apart (Brecht 26), the revolutionary spectacle encouraged an Artaudian identification, even merging, with those heroic figures who were capable of imposing this supreme notion of the theatre, men who [would] restore to all of us the natural and magic equivalent of the dogmas in which we no longer believe (Double 32). Artaudian theatre calls for collective fusion