“Our Theater,” in Performance

Abstract

The final chapter of Miguel Rubio Zapata’s El cuerpo ausente (performance politico) ‘Absent body (political performance)’ begins with an epigraph from Antonin Artaud, at first glance a very unexpected inspiration for a group famed for its politically-charged performances... This introductory material is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol32/iss2/2 Our Theater, In Performance Debra A. Castillo Cornell University The final chapter of Miguel Rubio Zapata’s El cuerpo ausente (performance politico) ‘Absent body (political performance)’ begins with an epigraph from Antonin Artaud, at first glance a very unexpected inspiration for a group famed for its politically-charged performances. Rubio cites a passage from the essay “On the Balinese Theater” (I cite from the available English translation rather than Rubio’s Spanish): “Our purely verbal theater, unaware of everything that makes theater, of everything that exists in the air of the stage, which is measured and circumscribed by that air and has a density in space— movements, shapes, colors, vibrations, attitudes, screams—our theater, with respect to the incommensurable, which derives from the mind’s capacity for receiving suggestion. . .” (Artaud 56). “Our purely verbal theater” ‘nuestro teatro puramente verbal’ is implicitly linked to Yuyachkani’s long trajectory in Peruvian culture, yet the quote is ambiguous, perhaps intentionally so. For in context, Artaud argues that Balinese theater could teach “our” excessively rational, overly verbal, European theater a thing or two about spirituality, about the metaphysics of gesture, about the “movements, shapes, colors, vibrations, attitudes, screams” that for him define his controversial approach to spectacle. Unlike European theater, in the Bali of Artaud’s imagining, the critical emphasis remains on ritualized qualities, located in the physical rather than the verbal, highlighting the role of gesture, music, dance, of the performative spectacle that does not rely on a pre-existing/dramatic text. These 1 Castillo: “Our Theater,” in Performance Published by New Prairie Press 250 STT’ (see Nigro for a discussion of another of Rascon Banda’s important bordercrossing plays). Thus, the French theorist who found inspiration in the image of the exotic Mexican Indian in his cosmopolitan city of Paris, travels back and forth across the ocean, and is finally brought back to the Americas and reframed here, both north and south, in theorizations that begin with the homely Indian, in the daily life of our America. Mad, drug-addicted, contradictory, Artaud still remains a significant force in our thinking about performance today, in that he, 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 32, Iss. 2 [2008], Art. 2 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol32/iss2/2 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1676