A Progressive World Theatre: The International Theatre Institute’s Third World Committee, 1971-1977

Randle-Bent, Matthew Gordon

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-h4zt-np67

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A Progressive World Theatre: The International Theatre Institute’s Third World Committee, 1971-1977

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In the 1960s, the International Theatre Institute (ITI), the organization sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) with a mission to represents the world’s theaters, was faced with a crisis of representation. After twenty years of existence, the institution had not succeeded in substantially expanding beyond its Western European and North American origins. As a UNESCO organization, the ITI sought to be universal in scope. In an attempt to achieve that goal, the ITI executive founded a committee on Theatre in the Third World (TWC). Between its founding in 1971 and its demise in 1983, the TWC hosted festivals, conferences, and symposia that brought together theatre artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America — in dialogue with indigenous and minority artists from the First and Second Worlds, and other political allies. The height of its activity was during the years 1971-1976, in which time the TWC hosted events in Manila, Shiraz, East Berlin, Caracas, and Rennes, among other cities. Its members articulated a unique institutional and artistic agenda. Institutionally, it sought to transform the ITI from within: attempting to reform its internal structures to make space for artists from the Third World to hold positions of influence, and make powerful administrators more accountable. It also sought to turn the ITI into a campaigning organization on behalf of the rights of dissident artists. Artistically, the committee gradually articulated a vision of what would be called “progressive world theatre” — an aesthetic approach that artists from the First, Second, and Third Worlds could rally around. Progressive world theatre would use art as a tool for social transformation, drawing on culturally-specific forms to further an internationalist political project. This story has not previously been accounted for in Anglophone theatre and performance studies scholarship. Yet historically it coincides with a significant period in the historiography of contemporary theatre and performance — the 1960s and 1970s — and the TWC events traverse key sites through which received histories of modernist and avant-garde performance have been articulated: the Shiraz Arts Festival, La MaMa ETC, the Berliner Ensemble. Furthermore, through the symposia, festivals, and publications of the TWC a range of debates over dramatic theory were engaged: the politics of aesthetics, folk forms, translation, among others. Therefore, to revisit the story of the TWC is to offer a significant revision to both the history of avant-garde performance during the 1960s and 1970s, and the history of theatre and performance theory. This revised history places the voices of artists from the Third World, and their collaborations with artists from the First and Second Worlds, center stage.

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