Performance, Democracy, and the Commune in the Black Sheep Revolution

This article analyzes cultural production in theaters across three pivotal historical moments from the 1980s to the present, including the theater as ruins, refuge, and resistance. It begins with the theater in ruins as depicted in the 1986 film, The Black Sheep, by the legendary playwright, director, and filmmaker, Román Chalbaud, in which a commune of artists, outcasts, and misfits squat in the theater, taking shelter from a storm of state-sponsored neoliberal austerity, corruption, and persecution in the pre-Chávez era of Venezuela. The article then turns to the work of community groups during Chávez-led revolutionary reforms to recuperate abandoned theaters as vital spaces for democratic assembly through municipal government programs. The last section of the article juxtaposes the advanced democratization of theaters and cultural production in Caracas during the Maduro era with a phase of violent street mobilizations in middle-class and wealthy sectors of the city (known as guarimbas), to raise questions about the role of the media as an intervening character in global theaters of illusion. Where the spotlight shifts in location from stages to streets, and the street to the screen, the actual conditions of democratized access are happening behind the unlit marquis, a global majority operating in an ‘underground’ commune in the same scenario as the film. Except in this case, the military-media arm of the US polices the ‘streets’ of the global media commons to malign the Bolivarian Revolution as a black sheep political project. The conclusion points to the media’s role in promoting a dangerous misperception of reality by erasing the constituent power of a revolutionary society and the perpetuation of violence against them.