David Amado’s Theatre of Resistance
The iconoclastic playwright is shaking up Paraguay’s artistic scene.
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In June 2024, visitors to a small, single-storey home in downtown Asunción were met with an unusual performance: twerking, fire-breathing, parodies of unpopular politicians, an art heist captured on camera, and the brandishing of a (fake) assault rifle by two topless actresses and a ninja-style stagehand camouflaged in wallpaper.
The location was Sala Piloto – a new independent theatre space – and the performance was Las Densas. A multimedia polemic written and directed by David Amado, Las Densas has since been staged more than 30 times to packed audiences.
It was just the latest theatrical hit for Amado, 36, who in recent years has won a fanatical following in Paraguay for his unconventional, hilarious storytelling – as well as his fearlessness in demolishing conservative taboos.
The Paraguay Post dialled in to Berlin – where the playwright moved a little over two years ago to immerse himself in the German theatre scene – to hear more about the origins of his unorthodox approach, and how he is handling the challenge of working with actors from a distance of 7,000 miles.
From garage to campus
Amado was always rebellious. “My tendency to talk back germinated with my dad. I think standing up to what seemed hostile or violent was my first kind of performance,” he tells the Post. That performativity was key when growing up in Paraguay, a country where LGBT people still face rampant discrimination by the ultraconservative religious right.
“Being a gay kid kind of forced me to go through life pretending to be something else, performing the role of a straight boy,” he reflects. “My dad would ask me, ‘who’s your girlfriend?’ and I’d tell him, ‘Martha’. I mean, if you’re demanding that fiction from me, I’ll give it to you.”
Aged around nine, Amado – who grew up in a Mormon household – attended a performance of Living Legends, a touring spectacle curated by Utah’s Brigham Young University. The show made a big impression. “It blew my mind, the Polynesian dances, the giant rings, the circles of native North Americans,” he recalls. “I went crazy, I couldn’t believe it.”
While Amado has since left the Church — which he criticises for its strict “Honor Code” forbidding homosexuality — and today admits to cringing at the “colonialist” vision represented by Living Legends, it sparked a passion for live performance. He stole a VHS copy of the show and restaged it in his garage, complete with lights, programme, and actors (his siblings and friends) he paid with his pocket money.
As a teenager, he started to avidly consume local theatre in Paraguay. Perdidas en el instante perfecto (2006), adapted by Paola Irún and directed by Tito Chamorro, proved another important cultural detonator. “Seeing Paola settled it. The play was pretty queer for the time; it was two women in love. I saw it seven times,” Amado explains. He began to study theatre at the Escuela Teatro Irún, run by Paola and her mother Margarita, another storied actor of stage and screen.
The first thing that struck her about Amado, Paola tells the Post, was “his curiosity. Added to that, his intensity, his conquering everything in his stride, the drive to keep trying new things.” The result, she says, “is the beautiful, intense and creative chaos that is David.” Irún moved to New York for a master’s degree soon afterwards, and it would be another decade before they worked together again.
Subsequently opting to study architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Asunción (UNA), Amado formed his first theatre company, Teatro Bruto. In September 2015, amid a sprawling corruption scandal implicating senior UNA staff, students organised sit-ins and protests to demand justice and transparency: a movement known by the hashtag #UNANoTeCalles.
“We staged theatre while occupying the campus,” says Amado. “I think that informed my style in a huge way.”
Faith and obsession
In 2017, Amado created a new theatre company, La Posdramática, and returned to formally studying the art form with Irún once more. “It was a student-like desire to start trying things out,” he explains.
The subject matter he tackled included dictatorship and democracy, as well as the raw personal experiences that shaped one of his early successes, the drama-comedy What is love, ni banal, ni conceptual, un experimento. Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me no more (2022). The show, Amado explains, interwove the real-life stories of its four actors with a tale of redemption for the frustrated team of synchronised swimmers they portrayed.
“Theatre is definitely an ambivalent arena for me,” Amado says. “It was a kind of weapon, something that always made me happy.” But throwing himself into his passion came with a cost: abandoning his architecture degree and the promise of a much more lucrative career.
“I’m conscious that it’s a privilege to make theatre. But taking this path was economically disadvantageous; it still is. But I can’t do anything else. I don’t know what would happen. My body would explode,” he laughs. “I’d keel over and die on the train. I’d rather not find out.”
2022 also saw the debut of Los Mormones* creen en el espíritu de Elías, a Posdramática production that blended family photos and a live band to tell the semi-fictionalised story of Elías, a young trans Paraguayan also raised in the Mormon faith.
“Speaking publicly about his transition marked a before and after for Elías,” says Amado. “We did things through theatre and fiction that are impossible for him” – like changing his name on the family tree and on his ID card, a right currently denied trans people under Paraguayan law – “but which became possible on stage.”
La Posdramática’s most recent outing at Sala Piloto is La Obsesión, a rotating “biodrama” in which Amado challenges friends and fellow artists to confess to the public their unusual hobbies and personal fixations.
“The idea with La Obsesión is to generate a space where individualism is praised and celebrated, but it inevitably ends up being something universal,” Amado explains.
Theatre and its practitioners in Paraguay have long been sidelined by the state, especially because of the artform’s historical role in denouncing injustice and questioning social realities.
The 1954-89 dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner typically censored plays and other performances, while artists opposed to the regime were often persecuted and exiled.
While Paraguay is now formally a democracy, Stroessner’s Colorado Party remains in power and is increasingly in thrall to a “pro-life” and “pro-family” agenda, casting a shadow over critical voices and artistic expression.
Amado’s works are typically staged in alternative venues – including Sala La Correa, Espacio E, Nhi Mu Teatro Aéreo, and Galpón del Pasaje Molas – created to house the productions that traditional theatres are unlikely to risk staging.
Pilot project
Among them is Sala Piloto, a space Amado dreamed up from Berlin in conjunction with local artist and multidisciplinary performer Manu Alviso. The idea behind the former residential home in Barrio General Díaz is to house not just plays but also provide a space for social movements.
“It’s crazy,” he explains. “I feel like the space constantly tells me and Manu [Alviso], who jointly manages it, what it wants to be and how it wants to exist, like a living organ.”
Las Densas – the riotous, nudity-flecked, Pussy Riot-esque show debuted last year – was rehearsed and performed in the middle of a historic heat wave across South America, with Amado directing the cast via video call from a laptop despite power cuts, poor connectivity, and the five-hour time difference with Germany.
“Being physically absent from Asunción made me feel the need to be present, at least in some form, in the city,” Amado adds. “Forgetting and letting go is often a decision made by migrants. I couldn’t do it. I feel like La Posdramática has a following that I can’t abandon.”
For Paola Irún, Amado is an irreverent, experimental and nonconformist voice, fundamental to shaking the performing arts world and Paraguayan society as a whole out of its torpor. “David, La Posdramática and Sala Piloto pose questions and take a socially committed stand that is absolutely needed in the local artistic scene,” she argues.
Not long after arriving in Berlin, Amado tells the Post, he found work in an Amazon warehouse. Each day, he took a high-vis orange vest from the dispenser and kept it.
Eventually, he had 80 fluorescent tabards. He took them back to Paraguay to use in Este parque no ha muerto, a site-specific, ambulatory performance staged in Parque Bernadino Caballero – a dilapidated-but-popular green space named after the founder of the Colorado Party – in late 2023.
It’s a striking example of how Amado juggles two worlds, disregarding propriety and easy answers. Rather, his works provide a space where otherness is defended and difference is an act of resistance.
“Berlin-Asunción is also this,” the director reflects: “A South American who steals from Amazon to talk about death and democracy in his home country.”
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