ABSTRACT
The violence of military dictatorships and coups reached its highest levels in Latin America in 1974. 1 A year before, an extremely violent coup had been carried out in Chile, where President Salvador Allende died with a rifle in hand at the Palacio de la Moneda. A few months earlier, the military had closed the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, implementing the coup in Uruguay. In 1974, the death of Juan Perón would have great impact in Argentina, paving the way for another coup. Augusto Boal, who was exiled in Argentina, simultaneously worked on the organization, conception, and finalization of two books. The first of these, published later that same year, would become the classic Teatro do Oprimido (Theatre of the Oppressed). The second, Técnicas Latinoamericanas de Teatro Popular: Una Revolución Copernicana al Revés (Latin American Techniques of Popular Theatre: A Reverse Copernican Revolution), published just a few months later in 1975, would, just like the first, serve to systematize the experiences that the theatrologist would call Latin American techniques of popular theatre, analyzing a set of continental experiences. The subtitle of the second work was taken from the title of one of the articles that makes up the book. In this article, Boal deals with the Latin American Theatre Festival of Manizales, held in Colombia. The importance of this festival, with which Boal associates an ongoing Copernican revolution in the theatrical production of the continent, stems from the fact that “it is a concrete fact that Manizales offered the first possibility of dialogue among Latin American groups.” 2
