Under the direction of José Celso Martinez Corrêa (b. 1937), Oficina’s staging of O rei da vela by Oswald de Andrade (1890?1954) inaugurated the company’s new architectural space, which included a cyclorama, in 1967 (a year after a fire had destroyed the facility). The show was dedicated to the director of Brazilian Cinema Novo, Glauber Rocha, who shortly before had completed the film Terra em transe. Produced for the first time in the three decades since its publication, O rei da vela was presented as a “manifesto-spectacle.” In fact, its staging became the theatrical representation of the then-thriving Tropicalism movement, based on its visuals and interpretations using parody, and the grotesque and irreverent. The singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso stated in his book Verdade tropical (1997)—a paronym of the bolero by Gonzalo Curiel Vereda tropical—that he was present at one of the shows days after he had written the music for Tropicália, whose title was suggested by the filmmaker Luis Carlos Barreto, and was inspired by the homonymous work by Hélio Oiticica. Andrade’s book communicates the under-development and economic dependence that afflicts Brazil through the saga of a candle factory owner on the brink of bankruptcy because of his debts to a Yankee imperialist.
[As a complementary reading on the Tropicalist movement, see in the ICAA digital archive the article (anonymous) [“O tropicalismo é nosso, viu? (…)”] (doc. no. 1110422); by Oiticica “Tropicália” (doc. no. 1074985); and by Mário Chamie “O trópico entrópico de Tropicália” (doc. no. 1075019)].