Ever since it was founded, the CAYC (Centro de Arte y Comunicación), helmed by the cultural promoter, artist, and businessman Jorge Glusberg, was intended as an interdisciplinary space where an experimental art movement could flourish. The establishment of collaborative networks connecting local and international artists and critics played an important role in this process. As part of the interdisciplinary action it had always encouraged, the CAYC promoted experimental practices, appropriating a variety of examples of Argentine art from the 1960s.
The impact of advertising and the mass media, as well as the increasing importance of information theory applied to social issues, set the tone for the seminars and roundtable discussions that were organized at the CAYC in its early years. These events were intended for the general public, especially for artists, and the goal was to encourage the development of a poetics that the center could call its own. Semiotics thus became the main prism used to analyze art production at the CAYC in the 1970s. Terms like “ideology” and “systems” figured prominently in curatorial texts and documents produced by the center and were widely used in artists’ discourse.
Nosotros Laboratorio de Teatro—whose members were Alfredo Álvarez, Zulema Ciordia, Dardo Gómez, and Enrique Torres—produced several events at the CAYC. The group, which was started in 1970, had presented other pieces on previous occasions, including Ejercicios (Exercises, 1970), Nosotros (Us) and Caminos (Paths, both in 1971), and H.O.Y. (T.O.D.A.Y., 1972) at the Centro Cultural General San Martín in Buenos Aires (GT-244; doc. no. 1478791, GT-251; doc. no. 1478797).
Some of these works were included in the Ciclo de Investigaciones Teatrales 73–74. In this series, which had been organized by the center in 1973 (GT-297; doc. no. 1478830, GT-301; doc. no. 1478985GT-302; doc. no. , GT-308; doc. no. 1478837, GT-317; doc. no. 1478987, GT-321; doc. no. 1478841, GT-326; doc. no. 1478843, GT-410; doc. no. 1478893, GT-418; doc. no. 1478895), various groups took part, approaching theater as a political practice for social change.
Participating groups shared a common aesthetic approach, which was based on the interaction between actors and audience and a minimal reliance on props, inspired by Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) and his “poor theater” concept—using only the actors’ bodies and voices on an “empty” stage with no scenery. The Teatro Pobre concept was directly related to performance art, an experimental movement that Glusberg promoted in the local art scene.
