Osmar Rodrigues Cruz was the founder and director of the Teatro Popular do Sesi¹ - TPS – during 40 years. This institution is singular in Latin America, the only triumphant experience to offer culture, art and education to less assisted classes of society which can’t afford a commercial theater production.
Through its popular theater the TPS, produced theatrical performances with free tickets, with renowned professionals and presented classic as well as modern texts to an audience, mostly composed by workers², sold out every night.
As an institution that it is, the SESI is maintained by the state of São Paulo industry collection. So it is exposed to difficulties due to economical crisis the country passes through. The continuity of his work, and so the TPS one was mainly obtained thanks to its founder ability, who always engaged himself to maintain the institution loyal to its purposes, even having to administrate a limited budget due to scarce entries.
The TPS was formally created in 1963, so, on the eve of the coup d’état that started up the Brazilian Military Dictatorship on 31st March of 1964. His main goal was to expose the population to culture, art and education in a very pleasant way, having as target an audience not composed by the elite, but by an audience that had never before been encouraged to see the theater as an option to culture and participation as a consequence of a government policy that promoted the alienation.
The TPS had to find ways to achieve its goals despite the politicians interests which followed its trajectory since its foundation, once the Military Dictatorship used many sorts of methods to suffocate any kind of political participation between Brazilian population, even taking advantage of the censorchip officialization, working as a repression instrument.
Despite all the adverse conditions to concretize its goals, the TPS aimed at the Brazilian to aware them about its greatness, exposing them to the national reality through the presentation of national authors, from classic to modern, incessantly in searching of transforming the dramaturgy view into a place for national reality reflexion place, though the necessity to create means to avoid the express persecution of repression from a repression politics, what certainly would be an obstacle to its work continuity.
Even before the TPS foundation, its founder and director while an amateur theater director had always the concern to offer a high quality work to the audience trying to keep informed about the literature relative to this area, moved by his intellectual and scientific curiosity and also by his investigative spirit. Unfortunately there was scarce offer of this kind of material in Brazil, what made him appeal to a foreign bibliography.
By along 50 years, Osmar Rodrigues Cruz brought together a rare collection that has more than 20 thousand issues (last century dated books, manuscripts, numbered collections, plays, magazines, etc.). Away from the TPS direction and retired by political reasons in 1990, the founder director realized that the goals of the institution he created and directed for 40 years were no longer a priority for this kind of theater. Producing today a work much more focused on the self industry promotion and concerned about having media space, the TPS now pays more attention to the medium class, getting away from its main and first goal, which led its own creation.
The TPS theatrical creation work, such as all Osmar Rodrigues Cruz’s trajectory was registered on the book Osmar Rodrigues Cruz – Uma Vida no Teatro (A life in Theater) published by Editora Hucitec (publisher) – in 2002, which was awarded with the Bolsa Vitae de Artes (Scholarship for Arts), in 1999.
It has recently been chosen one of the Brazilian books to take part in the American Congress Library, which has the biggest world’s online collection.
¹ Social Industry Service. ² The TPS distributed tickets to workers in their own factories.
| Osmar Rodrigues Cruz Institute Council | ||
| Profa Dra Eugenia Rodrigues Cruz |
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| Profa Dra Gleyde Ilka Barbuy Cruz | VICE-PRESIDENT | |
| Prof. Dr. Clovis Garcia | 1º SECRETARY | |
| Valdemir Gonçalves da Silva | 2º SSECRETARY | |
| Prof. Dr. Raimundo Matos de Leão | 3º SECRETARY | |
| Prof. Dr. Antonio Lopes Neto | TREASURER | |