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 approach it had always encouraged, the CAYC promoted experimental practices, appropriating a variety of examples of Argentine art from the 1960s.
Most of the groups and shows produced as part of the center’s extensive theatrical program shared a similar aesthetic approach whose essential idea consisted of developing a relationship between actors and audiences and working with minimalist stage settings as advocated by Jerzy Grotowski (1933–1999) and his “poor theater.” Grotowski’s Teatro Pobre, which relied on actors using their bodies and voices as they performed on a bare stage, was a direct reference to performance art, which was one of the experimental trends that Glusberg promoted in the local scene.
Grotowski’s ideas had a powerful influence on the Grupo de los Trece, a group of visual artists who were affiliated with the CAYC. The group’s original members (Jacques Bedel, Luis [Fernando] Benedit, Gregorio Dujovny, Carlos Ginzburg, Víctor Grippo, Jorge González Mir, Vicente Marotta, Luis Pazos, Alberto Pellegrini, Alfredo Portillos, Juan Carlos Romero, Julio Teich, and Glusberg) met with the Polish theater director when he was in Buenos Aires in November 1971 (GT-94; doc. no. 1478761).
Alfredo Portillos (1928–2017) took part in the CAYC’s activities from that point on and was one of the original members of the Grupo de los Trece. Latin American identity was a major concern in his work, which focused on rescuing “other Latin American cultures” with ritual and syncretic actions: Christian symbols, popular myths, the presence of priests of all hegemonic religions, as well as gestures and objects associated with different rites.
This newsletter announces a presentation of Teatro experimental de máscaras y objetos (Experimental Theater with Masks and Objects), which Portillos performed with his brother, Luis, at the Italian Cultural Institute in Buenos Aires. This production had also been staged in February 1976 at the fifth edition of the Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video that the CAYC organized at the Internationaal Cultureel Centrum in Antwerp, Belgium. (GT 605- 606; doc. no. 1477316).
