Picasso, history on stage: the twelve stage strategies of Desire Caught by the Tail will present this dramatic text as Picasso’s exercise in historical narrative, in play form, about Paris under Nazi occupation. I will offer an array of the twelve basic strategies that I believe allowed the playwright Picasso a simultaneously poetic and effective development of this theme and succeed in bringing Picasso’s creative process to what was then undiscovered country for the author and is still little discussed in interdisciplinary Picasso research, in its discursive as well as artistic dimensions.