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Community Arts, Popular Participation and Teatro Comunitario: Buenos Aires’ Programa Cultural en Barrios
Buenos Aires’ Programa Cultural en Barrios (Cultural Program in the Neighborhoods), now in its twenty-third year, is a city program that promotes the arts, culture and popular participation on the neighborhood level. In the aftermath of the last military dictatorship, its network of neighborhood-based cultural centers and free arts workshops gave the citizens of Buenos Aires an important outlet for self-expression. Since 2002, its support of community theater groups has helped to sustain a cultural phenomenon that emerged out of neighborhood-level activism after the 2001 Argentine economic crisis. The Programa Cultural en Barrios is a large-scale, enduring example of grassroots cultural policy in a large metropolis, and an exploration of its framework, history and recent developments prompts questions about the relationship between community arts, government and society in contemporary Argentina. The Programa Cultural en Barrios principally consists of a network of 38 cultural centers that operate in public elementary schools and offer free arts workshops in myriad disciplines to children, youth and adults on weekday evenings. As Adriana Benazquen, a longtime program staff member, told me, “There’s not a neighborhood in this city that doesn’t have its cultural center.” The program also supports four community theater groups, runs a theater space in a public children’s hospital and tours a “mobile cinema.” The program is currently housed within the Department of Cultural Promotion, a division of the city’s much larger Ministry of Culture, and exists alongside an assortment of small community arts programs. Its 900 part- and full-time employees include workshop instructors, staff for each cultural center and administrators working in a central office in the main Ministry of Culture building. The program’s objectives focus more on social change than arts education or recreation. Its Web site claims that the Programa “democratizes access to cultural information and training in a decentralized fashion,” “develops strategies that work toward social inclusion” and “promotes collective work about issues of identity.” Because each cultural center is run semi-independently, the program is able to “guarantee cultural diversity in the city of Buenos Aires,” as well as ensure the integration of each center into its local community through partnerships with neighborhood artists, institutions and other (noncultural) government programs. Every year, the cultural centers offer around 1,200 free, year-long workshops as well as a calendar full of other arts events, reaching 40,000-50,000 direct beneficiaries annually. The program’s workshops are divided into nine different subject areas:
The program’s impact is also measured on a human scale. “Success has to do with the testimonies we’ve received from people,” said Virginia Haurie, the program’s first general coordinator, in 1983-89. “People would say, ‘I never imagined I could do’ this or that. That’s how I measured success.” Silvia Maddonni, who managed the program from 2000 through 2006, told me that the workshops affect other areas of participants’ lives as well: “If you can connect with other people, or if you can learn to sing, and you always wanted to, maybe you can start standing up to your boss.” A Cultural Program for a New Democracy
The Programa was created in 1984, the year after the fall of the last military dictatorship in Argentina. For eight dark years, the dictatorship had used state terror on its own citizens, kidnapping, torturing and killing up to 30,000 people with impunity while repressing both public assembly and creative expression. The dictatorship forged, in the words of community arts worker Teresa Istillarte, a culture of “fear, indifference, and the idea of ‘don’t get involved’ (el ‘no te metás’).” After democracy returned in 1983, there was an “explosion: everyone came out of the neighborhoods — they wanted to do,” said Daniel Rodhegiero, a city cultural program manager. “People showed up and said, ‘Sign me up.’ ‘For what?’ ‘I don’t know — sign me up for something!’” Maddonni told me that “there was a general need to participate … to come out onto the streets; that’s why the program came about at that moment.” It responded to significant public demand. The Programa expressed the broader cultural policies of Buenos Aires’ then Subsecretary of Culture Mario O’Donnell, a psychoanalyst, playwright and public intellectual. According to Haurie, O’Donnell wanted to “bring culture out of the center of the city, and distribute the cultural offer on the one hand, while on the other to make culture through peoples’ participation, strengthening democracy.” Haurie and her team, advised by a group of popular-education specialists based at the University of Buenos Aires, devised the structure of cultural centers and workshops that remains intact today. They opened six centers at first, then six more, reaching “twentysomething” before being dismissed in 1989 as part of a partisan changeover in government. Over the years that followed, the number of cultural centers grew to the current 38.
According to Haurie, the program had a number of strengths early on. First, O’Donnell had given it a special status that ensured its budgetary and administrative independence: “That’s why we could do so much with so little money,” Haurie told me. Second, the program’s objective was fundamentally social — encouraging participation — rather than artistic or pedagogical. Therefore, as Haurie explained, “we could unite education, the arts, and community work, without any type of prejudice.” Third, and perhaps most important, the program’s structure was highly decentralized, with each cultural center able to create workshops in response to the specific needs of its neighborhood. Rosalía Winocur, in her book on the program’s early years, documents how a specific cultural center on the border between a working-class neighborhood and a villa (shantytown) adapted its workshop roster over time, from a period she calls “the customer is never right,” in which its workshops mirrored those of centers in middle-class neighborhoods; to “the customer is always right,” in which the center responded to neighbors’ requests for workshops in marketable skills and crafts; to finally “the customer is sometimes right,” in which the center balanced those requests with the program’s arts orientation.
“Of the programs created when democracy began,” Haurie told me, “[the Programa] is probably the only one that’s continued until today.” How did it endure so many party changeovers, policy overhauls, partisan-motivated appointments and structural changes in the city government? According to current and former program staff I spoke to, the program has endured principally because of the importance each cultural center came to have in its own local community. Adriana Benazquen pointed out the high political cost of closing a program with such “strong community presence.” Haurie remembered that when politicians tried to eliminate the program in the early 1990s, they were met by angry citizens protesting in the streets. For Maddonni, the program “formed part of a cultural resistance on the part of the people … when a person finds a place where he can feel really human, he feels ownership of it.” Although much beloved, today’s Programa is the worse for wear. It now lacks the administrative independence that once helped it achieve so much so quickly, and its budget has eroded to the point that the current program coordinator, denied a petty cash box, pays for photocopies out of his own pocket. Some accuse the centers’ workshops of becoming sedentary and exclusive over the years; others, such as Teresa Istillarte (who coordinated cultural centers for the program for 14 years) have seen peoples’ need to participate slowly relax into the desire to “find friends and do an activity.” Daniel Rodeghiero told me, “The Program’s become very old. It’s the same as in ’83. In 20 years, the world has changed.” Such stasis could certainly be attributed to problems within the program, such as a permanent scarcity of funds, or leadership chosen for party affiliation rather than competence at certain points in the program’s history. But it could also reflect the general slowdown in democratic participation that took place in Buenos Aires during the 1990s. In other words, the program changes as the city it works in and the people it serves change. A New Form for a New Era? The Programa and Teatro Comunitario A new wave of popular participation in the arts and culture accompanied the most recent episode of political turmoil and social protest in Buenos Aires, following the Argentine economic crisis of December 2001. One form it took was participation in newly formed community-based theater troupes that, beginning in 2002 and continuing to the present day, create and perform original musical street theater about life, history and current problems in the participants’ own neighborhoods. In 2003 and 2004, the Programa Cultural en Barrios began supporting four of these groups, two of which had originated under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, and it continues to support them today. Although they represent a small segment of the Programa as a whole, these theater groups have a particularly complicated relationship with their sponsoring program—reflecting the significant tensions between post-crisis forms of social and cultural resistance and the Argentine state.
In December 2001, the Argentine national government froze and then devalued the bank-held assets of its citizens, hurtling the country into the greatest financial crisis in its history. In response, Buenos Aires’ middle class took to the city’s streets and plazas, banging kitchen pots and pans and calling for the resignation of their politicians. Miles from the central Plaza de Mayo, where the main protests took place over several days, they also organized on the neighborhood level. In the new asambleas barriales (neighborhood assemblies), neighbors discussed the events of the crisis with one another, collectively made decisions affecting their neighborhood, and represented local demands to the city government. As Ana María Fernández writes in her book “Política y subjetividad,” the assemblies were politically, economically, age- and gender-diverse, nonhierarchical and committed to autonomy and autogestión or self-sustenance. Most of the asambleas broke up within the year, products of a fervent moment that diminished with improvements in the economy. But they had created new models for collective resistance, and participating in them had brought middle-class porteños (as the citizens of the city are known) back to a feeling of neighborhood identity, something that has always had strong social currency in Buenos Aires. The 2001 crisis also provoked a flowering of artistic activity reminiscent of the post-dictatorship period. This included a renewed interest among artists in street theater and theater made with community members as actors. This time around, artists who had come of age in the early 1980s actively encouraged and guided their younger counterparts in working in these ways. Directors Adhemar Bianchi and Ricardo Talento, whose theater groups Catalinas Sur and Circuito Cultural Barracas have been making theater with community members since 1983 and 1996 respectively, began giving workshops on how to start, write and compose for their variation of community-based theater, referred to as teatro comunitario. Marcela Bidegain, a theater researcher whose book on teatro comunitario is forthcoming, told me that some 30-40 teatro comunitario groups are now currently running throughout Argentina. Most belong to a network, facilitated by Bianchi and Talento, which gives space for artistic interchange and coordinates professional development for the groups’ directors. Like the asambleas barriales, Bidegain said, most of the groups are age- and gender-diverse; neighborhood-based; horizontally organized (although they are always led by theater directors with ample artistic training and experience); and “autogestivo” (self-sustaining; they often “pass the hat” during street performances and ask members to contribute around 70 cents per month to the group to cover basic costs). While most of the teatro comunitario groups are independent, two were founded under the auspices of the Buenos Aires city government. Bianchi and Talento gave their teatro comunitario workshops in the city’s “Traveling Cultural Tent,” a mobile stage that toured through various neighborhoods in 2002, presenting free performances and offering workshops for area residents. After visits by the tent to the meatpacking district of Mataderos and the historic neighborhood of Parque Patricios, community members in both areas responded to the teatro comunitario workshops by forming new troupes. The city collaborated by hiring theater teachers from the Programa Cultural en Barrios to direct the groups, and adding a music director and an assistant director for each group to the city payroll (the directors also received a pay increase). The Parque Patricios group split for personal reasons in 2004 and the city agreed to subsidize the splinter group in the same fashion. A fourthgroup from the Floresta neighborhood was added in 2004. Started under the rubric of the Department of Cultural Promotion, these groups officially became part of the Programa Cultural en Barrios in 2003. Silvia Maddonni was general coordinator when the teatros comunitarios joined the Programa. From what she saw, community members’ interest in making community-based theater together reminded her of the widespread need to “sign up” for the Programa’s early workshops. “The Programa Cultural en Barrios emerged as a right to participate, to self-express, to talk, to get together after so many years of military repression,” she told me. “The [new] teatro comunitario... seems to me to have emerged out of a moment in this country [following the crisis] that was about reclaiming public space, about taking to the streets in protest, about the assemblies, when people started getting together in public spaces to debate. For me, what teatro comunitario was in the 2000s what the Programa Cultural en Barrios was in the 1980s. So it seemed to me to be a phenomenon that the state had to support. It wasn’t just a group of people who decided to perform a play. They were saying something important.” For Maddonni, if teatro comunitario represented an important new form that people were using to express themselves artistically as a community, the “Cultural Program in the Neighborhoods” should support it.
Maddonni’s logic carves out an important role for the Programa in the city’s evolving community arts landscape. What she leaves out, however, is one factor that made the 2001 crisis so different from 1983, when Argentines were full of hope for their new democracy. If anything can be said to be quintessential about the 2001 protests, it is the widespread popular disillusionment with even a democratic government. During the crisis and the months afterward, protesters chanted: “Que se vayan todos, que no quede uno solo!” (Let them [the politicians] all leave, not a single one should remain!). This sentiment was also reflected in the decision by the assemblies, other grassroots groups, and, most importantly, the teatros comunitarios to adopt autogestión as their organizing model. Given this context, it is perhaps not surprising that the teatros comunitarios supported by the Programa have an unstable and ambivalent relationship with their parent program. The term “autogestión” hardly characterizes a group with directors on the government payroll (although this contradiction describes not only the Programa’s four official groups but also the parent groups of the movement themselves, Catalinas Sur and Barracas, both of which have long received support from the city government). The four city-sponsored groups sometimes “neglect” to mention the program or the Ministry of Culture; if they do acknowledge it, says the Programa’s current coordinator, Ariel Bonomi, “they mention me in the same way they mention the fabric shop that gave them a bit of fabric.” For Bonomi, who replaced Maddonni after the most recent party changeover in government, this boils down to a mutual avoidance. “The commitment the program has is a commitment to the neighbors, to their needs. That’s it.” Maddonni sees a more balanced equation: “the cooperative aspect of teatro comunitario is a wonderful thing,” she told me. “But without state help, it can’t work; the director has to eat. The state should intervene, pay salaries, give a bit of help.” Moreover, she said,
Conclusion What is the duty of the state towards community arts, particularly in the postcrisis context in Argentina? Is it the case that, as I heard a Harvard-based speaker say to a group of Argentines at a recent book presentation, when it comes to working for the social good “the state tends to just get in the way”? Such sentiments are rarely well received in Buenos Aires nowadays, where the privatization of state-owned enterprises that took place during the 1990s is considered to be much to blame for the 2001 crisis. Should the state make way for autogestión and independent popular alternatives that are, as Ana María Fernandez writes, “neither private nor state” in nature? Perhaps, but the question then becomes about sustainability over the long term; even among the members of the autogestión-oriented teatro comunitario network, a discussion is now arising about fundraising and resource generation. Perhaps, in counter to “Que se vayan todos” (Let them all leave!), the answer lies in differentiating the “good guys” in government from the “bad guys,” a task particularly difficult in the Argentine case, which is rife with backstabbing and double-dealing. Still, as Teresa Istillarte told me, “the good thing is that the state still takes responsibility for this work.” While undeniably imperfect, the Programa Cultural en Barrios demonstrates that at least at the city level, and even after the crisis, government can be an important instrument for sustaining community cultural work in Buenos Aires. Ruth Juliet Wikler-Luker is a New York-based theater artist and arts administrator who writes about international performing arts, cultural policy and contemporary circus. She spent the past year (2006-2007) living and working in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Sources Interviews:
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