ISSN: 2596-0229
Vol. 8 No. 14 (2025): Theater Groups Yesterday and Today: Acts and Potency of Transformation of Art and Society
More than fifty years after the students’ agitation in 1968, the potency of counterculture seems to have diminished. Although undoubtedly a lot has changed since then, and these changes in society are indebted to the forces that emerged at that time, it is also evident that the wave provoked by the desire for radical transformation that that youth expressed crashed against the rocks of reality and ebbed into contradictions it carried within itself. The present moment is marked by disillusion, by mental and physical sickness, by the feeling of impotence facing the world's machine that crushes dreams, turning them into commodities. But the present moment can also be the moment to say NO to so many forms of oppression cultivated within us for so long, if we are able to organize ourselves and fight so that our voices are not reduced to artificially compartmentalized and powerless discourses.
The majority of Theater Groups that were born in the 1960s-1970s - and many of their members - no longer exist. Some persist, maybe less in the margins or independent than they once were, maybe still guided by the same ideals, certainly adapted to the new realities. Other groups have emerged and emerge sill every day with their own designations and forms of organization. If History is a means of searching in the past answers for the future, then we can ask: What does Theater Group have to tell? Can it still be an effective means to act against the world's machine in contemporaneity?
Our Special Issue “Theater Groups Yesterday and Today: Acts and Potency of Transformation in Art and Society” aims to raise the aforementioned questions. We welcome papers and reflective accounts from researches, artists and artist-researches on the topic of Group Theater, in its many denominations and inflections, ranging from research on artists, groups and specific movements to broader studies related to this theme pervading the different fields of Art and Humanities.
Published:
2025-06-12
