Reclaiming Space, Reclaiming Happiness: A Report from Buenos Aires

I

Buenos Aires' alternative spaces lie beyond the legendary Teatro Colón, beyond the impressive municipal theater complex and the commercial theaters that line the Avenida Corrientes. Nestled between newsstands and bakeries on quiet side streets or up winding staircases in crumbling Beaux Arts buildings, not-for-profit cultural centers abound, making community-based and independent performing-arts programming, as well as cultural and vocational education, available to most porteños, regardless of age, subculture, geographic location, or class. Argentina's shrinking economy has been prostituted to the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the whims of multinational corporate investors; its corrupt politicians merit the rampant popular distrust they receive; its citizens, if they manage to retain their jobs, watch their working hours increase as their wages fall. "The political and economic situation here is excessive," says Matías Chebel of La Fábrica. "The air is dense and heavy. It's a question of when and how things are going to explode."

The seeds of such an explosion are being sown in some of these cultural centers, many of which operate without subsidy, in the form of community-based theater productions, underground performance events, free arts workshops, and other alternatives to official histories and imported commercial culture.

El Galpón de las Catalinas (Warehouse of Las Catalinas): Grupo de Teatro Catalinas Sur, a legend among children of the postdictatorship "flower of democracy" period (1983-89), moved into this permanent space in La Boca in 1997. A three-dimensional mural adorns the building's facade, its caricatured figures of sailors, bawdy wenches, and tangueros leaning out of trompe l'oeil windows to greet passersby. Inside, on Friday and Saturday nights, audiences sit on stadium-like benches to watch El Fulgor Argentino, an original epic musical that the group has been presenting since 1998. El Fulgor, performed by a cast of one hundred volunteer community members, romps through a popular history of twentieth-century Argentina as told through the story of a "social and sporting" neighborhood association. The entire cast fills the stage, dancing and singing, during periods of democracy; the stage empties during periods of dictatorship, a lone waiter mopping the floor. The production ends with an apocalyptic vision of the near future, which the chorus interrupts with a grand finale, singing: "For memory, for hope, we will resist!"

El Galpón: an underground cultural center run by a group of artists in a massive warehouse in Constitución. Their parties attract throngs of youthful student-types who pay $2 each to wedge themselves between a freestanding sculpture and a trapeze, munch on homemade pizza, watch experimental theater, and listen to an in-house band singing plaintive ballads on environmental issues. The artists, who renovated the space themselves eight years ago, live on next to nothing. They rent the warehouse using money earned from the filled breads they bake during the day and sell in parks and plazas.

Centro Cultural Tierra del Sur: an apartment on the second floor of a deserted street in the Barracas neighborhood, walls covered with political graffiti. Operating independently since 1998, the center gives parties and free workshops in guitar, mime, photography, voice and movement, journalism, and theater to neighborhood residents. They also hold open-air events below the massive concrete pedestrian bridge outside their window and have painted the following message to be seen by anyone passing by on the adjacent highway: "We conquer isolation and reclaim happiness, the street, the lost bridges."

Independent theater productions also find rehearsal and performance space in a vast number of inexpensive venues, tucked away in basements or alleyways, many with their own cafes and art galleries. Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas, the mammoth cultural complex of the tuition-free University of Buenos Aires, is always buzzing with activity: among this month's classes, performances, exhibitions, and symposia are a clown conference, an improvisation workshop using Indian folk instruments, and a Nietszche week featuring cinema, theater...