HISTÓRIAS DO EXPERIMENTAL: “The Other Theatre” – experimental theatre in Portugal

The Other Theatre is a documentary film by António Macedo, captured between 1976 and 1977. Shot during a severe crisis in this artistic field, the documentary culminates with the recording of a congregation at FIL, in 1977. Amidst the crowd present at the event (ten thousand people demonstrating their support for the fight of independent theatre professionals) there is a balloon spinning. That balloon could represent experimental theatre in Portugal, floating between different times and people, tied to an unknown hand, interpreted according to varying references, a balloon that is as about to burst as it is about to wither. There are inevitable questions surrounding experimental theatre: what has experimental meant throughout time? What are its informal strategies and practices? How can a histography or historical retrospective forgoing protocols of truth and shedding light on suppressions be built?

The experimental, liberated from its use as an insult, is a path to an understanding of theatre as the science of intensification. Thus, experimental theatre reveals itself through euchronia, a time that supposedly never came to pass due to its constant state of mutation.