Suddenly, the sound of pounding drumbeats permeates the air, seemingly causing the bins of peanuts and dried peppers and grains to vibrate. Toward one end of the market three young men dressed in colorful, carnival-esque costumes dance wildly. A crowd gathers around them, taking in the throbbing, primal energy of the drums and dance. Then a woman in black announces that this is Teatro Trono, here to offer a completely free theater performance. The dancers and drummers, young men wearing masks, one in a black velvet vest with gold braid and mirrors on it, start gyrating toward the nearby Plaza Miner, leading the entranced crowd behind them Pied Piper-style.

The theater performance starts under the watchful eyes of the life-size statues at the center of the plaza -- two miners in yellow suits and helmets, looks of steely determination in their eyes. El Alto is home to many miners, traditionally one of the country's most militant and powerful workforces until the industry virtually disappeared over the past few decades. Teatro Trono starts with a circus performance -- two young men in face paint and shiny clothes ride in circles on unicycles, and kids cavort around tossing and twirling brightly colored rings, pins and balls. A few times the crowd scatters to avoid flying disks that have been tossed too high. The men, women and children laugh and stare, mesmerized by the demonstration.

Gustavo Analoca, 27, one of the unicycle riders, takes the stage for a solo performance, doing a series of tricks with a disk balanced on string between two sticks. Analoca was one of the founders of Teatro Trono, which was started by a man named Ivan Nogales at a rehabilitation and detention center for boys in La Paz in 1989. Analoca, 13 at the time, ended up there after escaping from an orphanage where he had lived for eight years after his parents split up and were no longer able to care for him. Analoca is now the circus instructor for Teatro Trono, and dreams of opening his own circus school for street kids in El Alto.

After the circus performance, Teatro Trono members do a series of skits. The Tronitos, the youngest actors, become animals and celestial bodies for skits titled "The Hunter" and "The Caprices of the Sun and Moon." Teenage girls do one of the group's trademark pieces, which they have performed often during their multiple NGO-funded trips to Europe and Chicago. The piece is called "The International Market," developed from an old radio play. In the skit indigenous people discover the joys of cacao and how to make it into chocolate. Then an English-speaking trader in a cardboard ship comes, smells the chocolate and offers to buy the cacao from them at one peso per pound. Then she returns to sell the chocolate back to them at 10 pesos a pound. The indigenous people decide to start their own chocolate-making operation and sell it for five pesos per pound, but the trader undercuts them with prices of two pesos per pound and even hires them to work in her factory, loading them on the boat to another land.

"This is the way it happens in the international market," says the one dissident who wouldn't go work in the factory. "It's always the same."

"This was written 30 years ago, but it's even more relevant today," noted Coral Salazar Gonzalez, 26, a slender woman with big eyes and long black hair who along with her sister Ana is a theater instructor at Teatro Trono.

Bolivia is certainly feeling the effects of the international market these days -- many academics and social leaders describe it as a country without a developed economy and industrial base of its own that has been thrust too quickly into the global market and suffered as a result. Unemployment is up -- La Paz sociology professor Alvaro Garcia Linera notes that though official figures are lower unemployment is considered to be around 40 percent -- and thousands of campesinos and indigenous people are being displaced from the country side as they can no longer make a living.

For Nogales, fostering creativity and personal and collective growth is a major form of resistance.

"Ivan was doing therapy with the kids [at the detention center], but it was much more than therapy," said Claudio Urey Miranda, one of the original members of the theater group, who left his country town and ended up on the streets of La Paz after his parents both died when he was a teenager. His brother Angel, two years younger, was also at the detention center and joined the theater group. The boys lobbied to be able to leave the center to perform in different neighborhoods.

"They were afraid we would escape" -- as Claudio had before, he noted. "No one could believe street kids could actually do something like this. But eventually they let us go, and we were on our best behavior. It was a huge success."

Later they even did a national tour and got favorable media attention. "For a bunch of marginalized youth who no one believed in, that was a great thing," said Claudio, who had been in and out of the detention center for his drug use and "stealing problem."

When Claudio and Angel were released from the center, they went to live with Nogales in his tiny apartment and kept working with the theater. But they still both were suffering from serious drug addictions, and about five years after first meeting Nogales Claudio left Teatro Trono to focus on conquering his demons.

"For me marijuana was a door to other drugs, cocaine and crack," he said. "Kicking a drug addiction is a long process. But I had a religious experience that changed me into a different person." He was able to kick his habit at a faith-based rehab center in Santa Cruz called Mission Peniel. He started working at the center, counseling drug and alcohol addicted people of all ages. And he reconnected with Nogales.

"He had known nothing of me for four years," Claudio said. "We cried on the phone. For him it was like I had returned to earth."

Angel, now 28, also ended up at Mission Peniel, first as a patient and now as a counselor like Claudio. The two maintained sporadic contact with Teatro Trono, and in 1999 they went to Germany and Holland on a tour funded by European arts organizations. Claudio is a natural actor, lithe and animated with dark expressive eyes. Angel, stockier and quieter, lets Claudio get away with playful big brother bullying but then lets fly with a clever quip when least expected. Today they still live and work at Mission Peniel in Santa Cruz and don't have a lot of contact with Teatro Trono. But they are using what they learned to start a theater group with street kids at the mission.

"Theater comes naturally to kids who live on the street," noted Claudio. "They're really expressive, they talk a lot."

Claudio, who is also studying theology, doesn't think poverty alone is to blame for the huge numbers of drug addicted kids on the streets of Santa Cruz, La Paz or other cities. "It's a lack of love," he said. "A person who is addicted to drugs or alcohol -- or chocolate -- is looking for love. When I found God I had an encounter with love, and my real identity started to emerge little by little and my addictions dropped away. But it's hard to do this. Of the people who come to the mission, 10 percent succeed and 90 percent go back to the streets."

The difficulty of dealing with addictions is one of the reasons Teatro Trono has shifted away from working with street youth and become more of a community-based arts organization serving the children of El Alto. They still do outreach programs to several institutions serving street kids, but the bulk of their work is centered around an amazing seven-story arts center a block from the market in the Ciudad Satelite neighborhood of El Alto. Nogales and other theater members built the center over a five year period. It is also home to COMPA, another arts organization Nogales founded offering classes in ballet, m usic, ceramics and other classes. The center rises above all the nearby buildings like a surreal and whimsical playhouse, odd angles and materials fused together flawlessly, splashed with a myriad of colors and decorated with various baubles and sculptures. The building is made of almost all recycled materials, including windows scavenged from demolition sites and colorful aluminum doors from the micro-buses that careen around El Alto.

"Recycling materials is part of our whole philosophy," noted Coral Salazar. "We believe there's no such things as trash."

A square atrium runs vertically up the center of the building, multi-colored concrete stairs spiraling up around it past a ballet studio, a film screening room, various offices and guest rooms and finally a rooftop garden/ laundry space.

On an afternoon in early March, Nogales, wearing his trademark wide-brimmed hat and always quick with jokes and hugs for the kids, calls a group together for a photo shoot. About 20 youth take over the rooftop in a flurry of circus and theater gear and costumes. Glittery wigs and clown noses go on as Nogales circulates among the kids snapping photos, which will be used in their ever-pressing campaign to get funding from foreign organizations. The photo shoots moves to the street, where the entrance is guarded by an elaborate anthropomorphic sculpture made out of scrap metal. The kids spill out onto the street and the sculpture, climbing it and each other. "I love theater, it's beautiful," says 13-year-old Gimena, a freckle-faced relative of Nogales.

"It makes you lose your fear," says Christina, 13. "I'm going to be a movie star," proclaims Lito, a scrawny boy who has spent the whole afternoon striking jaunty poses while twirling a green Chinese plate.

Founding member and current circus instructor Gustavo Analoca gets into full clown get-up and face paint for some photos juggling and riding a unicycle. He notes that the puffy short-legged outfit he's wearing was adopted from the Spanish conquistadors, but he adds a Bolivian wool hat for an indigenous touch.

In the one-room apartment he shares with his wife and one-year-old son a few blocks from the Teatro Trono center, Analoca has a suitcase and boxes jammed with circus gear -- a multitude of glittery and satiny outfits he's made himself, special balloons and a pump to make balloon animals, a unicycle and a collection of pins, balls and other toys. He first picked up circus techniques from a French instructor visiting Teatro Trono, and then doggedly continued to teach himself the art of circus by studying video tapes from around the world, ranging from campy 1970s fare to modern works by Cirque du Soleil. He has been on local television himself doing performances and workshops at the Arcoiris (Rainbow) center for street youth. When he puts this video on the black and white T.V., his son stops what he is doing and stares at it entranced.

Though he likes working with Teatro Trono, Analoca longs to start his own circus school for marginalized youth in El Alto.

 "That would be a great thing for the kids and for Bolivia, because there aren't really any circus schools in Bolivia," he notes. He said there are several traveling family circuses, but they are the old-fashioned type with animals and sensational acts. He prefers the Cirque du Soleil model which eschews animals and slapstick violence in favor of artistry and acrobatics.

"Circus is an option for making a living, and it's a way to motivate you and open your mind," he said while balancing a unicycle on his lap in a crowded mini-bus on the way to Ciudad del Nino, the La Paz orphanage where he lived for eight years as a child and now teaches circus classes. "In a normal life you're born, go to school, to university if you're lucky, start working in an office. Circus offers a different kind of life. You get to travel, perform, meet different types of people."

At Ciudad del Nino, a beautiful complex of dormitories, classrooms, gardens and even pig pens on a eucalyptus-lined hillside overlooking La Paz, it is evident he is taking the first step in opening a new world for some of the boys who live there. At Ciudad del Nino, a Catholic-run institution funded by the government and several foreign embassies, boys age five and older who are orphans or whose families can no longer take care of them learn trade skills and run small for-profit enterprises including a metal workshop and bakery. During one of his Sunday visits, Analoca plays a video of Cirque du Soleil's "Dralion" for about 30 boys, who sit mesmerized by the fantastic gymnastics and tricks of the performers. The second Analoca turns the video off, the boys swarm over to the buffet of circus equipment which he has laid out in the corner.

Moments later, they are off in a cloud of tossed and dropped hyper-color rings, rubber pins, tennis balls, scarves, big yellow flags and plastic Chinese plates. The pink unicycle draws a rotating crowd in the corner, where no one seems able to launch it without the help of the wall. Manuel, 9, with a runny nose and a scar on his face, moves from one piece of equipment to another seemingly intent on mastering them all. Miguel, also 9, spends the whole time with a yellow Chinese plate, grinning widely as he learns new moves, tossing it in the air and passing it under his leg. Sixteen-year-old Rodolfo, freckle-faced and one of the biggest kids there, is shy at first but then gets wrapped up in the challenge of balancing and twirling sticks.

Analoca hits play on a boombox he has schlepped across the city along with the unicycle and other toys. Soaring, almost operatic music with the refrain "Alegria" ("Happiness") comes out, creating a transcendental scene where any thought of poverty or loneliness is lost in the smiles and laughter of the boys and the flying colors of the circus.