Visual and Performing Arts

Abstract

Since they work in the public eye actors and musicians are particularly vulnerable targets for repressive regimes. They are by definition public figures, and readily associated with the potentially ‘dangerous’ ideas they — quite literally — represent. In Uruguay recently, a performance of Julius Caesar was broken up, its actors and director imprisoned and subsequently exiled. But more often the ideas portrayed are their own: the emotive force of words and music rendered subversive when they reach the hearts and minds of large audiences. Pop-singers, folk-singers, popular theatre can attract popular support on a scale many a political demagogue would envy, and there may indeed be an element of professional jealousy in the ruthlessness with which singers and actors have been attacked. How else does one begin to explain the elimination of a troupe of actors in Uganda, or the vicious way in which the Chilean singer Victor Jara was mutilated and murdered?