Zé Celso Martinez: The Revolutionary of Theater and Customs

Free theater, for the people. Strong political engagement. In tune with social movements, as well as a great, constant artistic restlessness. Founder of Teatro Oficina in São Paulo.  These are some of the most common attributes highlighted when Zé Celso Martinez is mentioned.

His life is intertwined with the trajectory of popular Brazilian theater so intrinsically that at times it’s hard to distinguish one from the other. Zé Celso stood out for his use of bold language, which encouraged a true revolution in the performing arts.

An award-winning writer and director, his defining moment came when he gained national acclaim in 1967 with the staging of the play ‘O Rei da Vela,’ based on a text by Oswald de Andrade.

Born in Araraquara, in the interior of São Paulo, Zé Celso graduated with a degree in law but never practised the profession. However, it was during his time at college that he founded Teatro Oficina and staged his first plays. 

Throughout the 1960s, the theater was located in the Rua Jaceguai building in Bela Vista, where it began to put on plays. As the civil-military dictatorship tightened its grip, Zé Celso began to suffer from the repression of his performances and texts, culminating in his arrest in 1974. 

This episode led him to leave the country and settle in Portugal, where he documented the Carnation Revolution. He later moved to Mozambique, where he documented the African country’s struggle for independence. However, by 1978 Zé Celso was back at Oficina.

Over the decades, he kept the theater active and fertile in terms of performances, and never imagined he would face such a significant corporate adversary as the Silvio Santos Group, owner of the land next to Oficina’s headquarters. 

Several legal battles ensued, and the theater’s designation as a historical monument by the city of São Paulo, which only happened in 2010, finally removed any risk of the space being transformed into a mall as the group had wished.

Throughout this time, Zé Celso continued producing and writing shows. In the 1990s, he founded the Companhia Uzyna Uzona at Oficina, becoming even more famous with the staging of ‘The Bacchae’ by Euripides, which inspired many other artists.

... the scenography featured more than 50 artists on stage, in a collective that included musicians, actors, and even children from the Bexigão community project. Besides ‘Os Sertões’ and its developments, Zé Celso also presented another show called ‘As Dionisíacas.’

Zé Celso was a well-known personality in Brazilian life, the kind that transcends his field of work and spills over into other areas.

He influenced the political and social life of the city of São Paulo and Brazil, and revolutionized customs, putting his progressive and indomitable mind to work at promoting art.