Preface: The Spaces Between María Delgado It is impossible to consider Argentine theatre without folding in some discussion of film. Any discussion of 21st century Argentine cinema similarly touches theatrical motifs and prisms. It’s not simply about actors—like María Villar, Pilar Gamboa, Esteban Lamothe, Julian Tello, and Esteban Bigliardi, among many others—whose performative ethos has been shaped by both. Dramatists like Walter Jakob and Santiago Loza also work in film, as an actor and director, respectively. These kinds of crossovers are just the tip of the fertile exchange that characterises Buenos Aires’ creative arts culture. The essays featured in this collection point to wider currents and exchanges. Romina Paula and Lola Arias work as performers, writers, and directors across both stage and screen cultures. Alejo Moguillansky works as a writer, director, and editor in cinema, but theatre spills into his films through plotting, performance, and intertextuality, disrupting their surface realism in playful, impish ways. The boundaries between these art forms, as the spatial configurations of Buenos Aires indicate, are hugely porous. Part of this has to do with the city’s lithe and improvisational theatre culture. Productions shift from venue to venue. A production may “take a break” when actors are filming, or play one or two days a week or play late in the evening—it’s not unusual to be heading to a performance at 11:30 p.m. Buenos Aires lives and breathes theatre—from the proscenium arch venues of central Corrientes to the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires’ (CTBA) cluster of theaters to the plethora of fringe theatres that can be found in the Abasto. For a decade the Abasto was home both to Buenos Aires’ independent film festival, the Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine (BAFICI), and the city’s alternative theaters, and BAFICI’s origins can be linked to Buenos Aires’s biennial international theatre festival, the Festival Internacional de Buenos Aires (FIBA). [End Page 3] Both alternative theatre and the New Argentine cinema are built on a culture of thrift, of making do and improvising with the means you have at your disposal. All the works discussed in this volume are lean and focused—nothing superfluous, nothing wasted—and they are often marked by an approach to artistic creation that may be branded around the writer/director but is effectively realised in the rehearsal room or on location through group creation. Minefield (2016) and El loro y el cisne (2013) both show this process at work. This strategy also spills over into the multifarious roles that the artists featured in this collection occupy: directors work as producers or editors on the films of their contemporaries; actors direct and directors act; and groups of actors—ensembles of sorts—feature across the works of Romina Paula and Matías Piñeiro. The essays in this collection handle a range of productions (across both film and theatre) that articulate the intersections between history, memory, and fiction that have been so prevalent in Argentina’s creative arts over the past decade. The stages are varied. In La forma exacta de las islas (2012), the Falkland Islands/Malvinas are the theater for a quest narrative where the road movie and travelogue meld together. Lola Arias’s Minefield also returns to the Falklands/Malvinas, only the islands are here a space of memory and recollection, a place that is conjured through props and photographs, newspaper cuttings and pop songs. Communities are created through performance—whether it’s the Argentine and British veterans in Minefield or the family forged through film in Moguillansky’s El loro y el cisne. Community—what it means, how to forge, and sustain it—is key to the works covered in the volume. Community, of course, was central to the oldest documented theatrical cultures of Western Europe. Theatre’s origins lie at the interface of democracy and performance. A way for a community to debate the key issues of the time—issues of governance, ethics, and responsibility, of history, memory, and representation. As with the ancient Greek theatre of Dionysus, the stages discussed in this issue offer the space to debate the foundations on which post-dictatorship Argentina has been...