Experiments in situation: between the neo-avant-garde and popular tradition

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 1971, architect Javier Navarro de Zuvillaga (b. 1942) designed a project called the ‘Mobile Theatre’, a mechanical device composed of four trucks carefully designed to house a theatre, cinema, emergency housing, and/or other social programs. This design drew from many of the counter-cultural paradigms of the time: mobility, material scarcity, social activation, technophilia, and political activism. This unbuilt project was based on a series of Navarro’s previous experiences with what he called ‘experiments in situation’. These experiments were working hypotheses, midway between architecture and installation. Whereas the situational experiments investigated the features of the international neo-avant-garde the Mobile Theatre extensively drew on ideas and forms from traditional and popular theatre architecture. The ideology of the Mobile Theatre was thus situated between the neo-avant-garde and the new appeal that popular theatre culture raised among counter-cultural artists. In 1976, Navarro published an essay titled ‘The Disintegration of Theatrical Space’. Therein he further articulated this coalescence of avant-gardism and popular tradition in the performing arts by describing a series of models and precedents that respond to the critical situation left out in the post-1968 historical milieu: the crisis of representation and cultural values implicit in the political failure of the avant-garde movements.