Latin American Theatre Research Articles

Artes visuales en un festival teatral internacional de 1984. Una ciudad conmovida entre la última dictadura y el retorno democrático: Córdoba, Argentina https://www.arteyciudad.com/revista/index.php/num1/article/view/574 10.22530/ayc.2020.17.574

This article explores a set of visual arts works exhibited in the Latin American Theater Festival held in the city of Córdoba in 1984. We will verify that these artworks were coordinated by the Association for the Development of Visual Experiences counting on official and private sponsorship. There converged more than thirty artists of different ages, claimant artworks and a huge audience. The main hypothesis holds that this scenario was the product and the producer of a situation of discontinuities and networks between unstable pairs that touched Córdoba (and Argentina): dictatorship and democracy, grief and joy, absences and presences, artistic fields and context, theater and fine arts, street and museum, localism and internationalism, traditions and disruptions. Through a transdisciplinary approach of Cultural History we will analyze those practices that changed spaces, objects and subjects. This research is based on the survey and triangulation of written, visual and oral historical sources.

Hacia una poética teatral de Jesús González Dávila (review)

Reviewed by: Hacia una poética teatral de Jesús González Dávila Brian T. Chandler Escobar Delgado, Antonio. Hacia una poética teatral de Jesús González Dávila. México, D.F.: Instituto de Bellas Artes y Literatura, 2010: 397 pp. Antonio Escobar Delgado begins the thoroughly researched Hacia una poética teatral de Jesús González Dávila by noting that, with the exception of a handful of Mexican playwrights that have achieved canonical status, there is a lack of integral, monographic studies that survey the body of work of individual Mexican dramatists. When conducting research in Latin American theater often one must be content with critical analyses that focus solely on individual works or themes common among various plays and playwrights. Therefore, it is refreshing to come across a scholarly book that delves into the career-long artistic trajectory of a playwright about whom relatively little has been written in comparison to his contemporaries of the generation of La Nueva Dramaturgia Mexicana. While ambitious in scope, Escobar Delgado’s study of the theater of Jesús González Dávila follows a fairly simple format. After a brief chapter that surveys the theatrical landscape in Mexico at the beginning of González Dávila’s career, Escobar Delgado organizes the chapters by grouping, in mostly chronological order, plays that illustrate the various stages of the playwright’s artistic career. Each chapter begins with an overview of the theatrical field in Mexico at the time as well as salient points pertaining to González Dávila’s personal and professional life, followed by [End Page 210] a synopsis and thorough literary analysis of the plays in question. Furthermore, the author provides and comments on the journalistic and critical reception the plays received when staged in Mexico City. In spite of this somewhat rigid format, the book reads easily as Escobar Delgado writes with clear, concise language and includes entertaining biographical anecdotes and glimpses into the politics, finances, and power players of Mexican theater in the last decades of the twentieth century. The book closes powerfully with a chapter entitled “Hacia una poética del fracaso” in which Escobar Delgado synthesizes the common aspects explored earlier to find that the central element of González Dávila’s theater is “el fracaso.” Escobar Delgado avers that in González Dávila’s theater, characters act solely on impulse and passion in absolute social and communicative isolation to the point that they lose their essence of being. Unable to effect change, they have no chance at transcendence. According to Escobar Delgado, this worldview speaks to and on behalf of the daily reality of the vast majority of the population, which lives in a society defined by inequality. At the end of the book, Escobar Delgado provides abundant supplementary material including an impressive bibliography that comprises academic writing as well as journalistic articles. This is followed by appendices that detail all of González Dávila’s plays staged in Mexico City and a thirty-page timeline that covers the life and work of the playwright as well as theatrical, cultural, and historic panoramas. As shown in Hacia un poética teatral de Jesús González Dávila, the themes of the marginalized, a society in decline, the loss of individualism, social isolation, disappointment, and failure, while common in Mexican theater, are treated in a truly unique way in the hands of González Dávila. For this reason, the playwright’s works deserve more critical study. As such, Escobar Delgado’s book is a step in that direction and an important work of scholarship that would be of interest to those pursuing critical studies in contemporary Mexican theater. Brian T. Chandler University of North Carolina Wilmington Copyright © 2011 The Center of Latin American Studies

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Performance?: A Metacritical Overview of an Evolving Concept

It is fair to state that performance is one of the most contested terms in our field, clearly evolving and emerging in the last few decades as one of the most significant terms in a wide range of academic disciplines and in society in general. This essay lays out many of the principal critical and theoretical concepts and debates related to performance—performativity, performance studies, performance art, etc.—to illustrate how the field and the lens through which we view it have changed and are continuing to change, as well as how those of us who study Latin American theater fit into the larger picture of examining the embodiment of meaning. This study of some of the main contributions to the discipline and to the creation of the field of performance studies offers an overview of the concepts, scholarship, and bibliography that have helped shape the ways in which we talk about performance.

Historical dictionary of Latin American literature and theater

Historical dictionary of Latin American literature and theater

Coloniality in Patagonia: historical archaeology and postcolonial critique in Latin America

In recent years, the colonial expansion of modern society has been studied by various disciplines and from a range of theoretical perspectives. South American historical archaeologists in particular have highlighted the homogenizing nature of this global process in order to re-evaluate the particular nature of different contexts in time and space. This paper focuses on the articulation between the scales of the global and the local and explores the role of local processes in the constitution of colonial societies. Latin-American postcolonial theory – or decolonized thinking – adds to this debate through the critical assessment of modernity in order to acknowledge colonial legacies in the social sciences. This perspective is presented here in combination with a case study from the Spanish colonization of the Patagonian coast in the late eighteenth century, in particular the settlement of Nueva Población y Colonia de Floridablanca (Bahía San Julián, province of Santa Cruz, Argentina).

International Hispanic Theatre Festival of Miami XXV July 7-August 1, 2010

International Hispanic Theatre Festival of Miami XXV July 7-August 1, 2010 Timothy G. Compton This 25th annual festival carried as a subtitle "A Tribute to Mexico," but the activities were truly international. The performance of sixteen different plays constituted the strong suit of the festival, only seven of which came from Mexico. But of those seven, a transplant from Argentina wrote one, two were staged readings, theatre groups from the United States performed three of them, and one was set in Colombia. Groups from Mexico, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay, Puerto Rico, Chile, Argentina, and the United States all performed plays, although not all brought plays written by their fellow citizens — a group from Spain performed a play by an Argentine/Ecuadorian playwright, and a group from Uruguay performed a Lope de Vega classic from Spain. Groups performed their plays up to five times each, but most provided just two or three performances. And beyond the plato fuerte, the festival featured a vibrant "Educational Program," the presentation of several significant awards, an exhibit featuring photos taken by Asela Torres of Mexican plays performed at prior iterations of this festival, and a pair of theatre workshops held on International Children's Day. As if all of the foregoing did not illustrate the enormous international dimensions of this festival, I would add that I have never seen a more extensive and varied listing of sponsors for a like event, which included 45 sponsors from four countries, ranging from governments to foundations to radio stations to banks to restaurants to airlines. The festival vividly reflected the vitality and internationalism of Miami itself. Before moving to some of the festival's theatrical highlights, I will dwell for a moment on the "Educational Program" organized and directed by Beatriz Rizk on the Wolfson campus of Miami Dade College, and sponsored by the College's Prometeo Theatre, Mexico's National Center for Theatre Research (CITRU), and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This [End Page 167] was a two-day scholarly conference on Hispanic theatre with presenters from all over the Spanish-speaking world. Many of the presentations focused on Mexican theatre, given the theme of the festival in general, but Jorge Dubatti of the Universidad de Buenos Aires delivered the keynote address on the study and philosophy of theatre as an "acontecimiento," arguing that researchers need to be close to and study actual performances, an argument which participants immediately put into practice at the festival. Other highlights included the presentation by Rodolfo Obregón, director of CITRU, of a video montage of numerous Mexican plays, and the presentation of the International Hispanic Theatre Festival of Miami 2010 Life Achievement Award to Mexican director José Solé. Solé then spoke of his experience in Mexican theatre, which started at a very young age with small puppets, after which he formed a theatre group when he was 12 or 13, and has now included directing, in abundance, avant-guard as well as commercial theatre, including a stint directing Mexico's Compañía Nacional de Teatro. Many scholars and researchers also presented ponencias and entered into a dialogue on a variety of Hispanic theatre subjects, and undoubtedly many of these ponencias will appear in an even more polished format in the pages of scholarly journals and books in the months and years ahead. Another fruitful session introduced recent publications in the world of Hispanic theatre, including traditional journals such as Tramoya, Gestos, Latin American Theatre Review, and Artez, as well as the cyber-journal Karpa, books ranging from the latest publications of CITRU and AINCRIT, and books celebrating festivals such this one. In fact, Beatriz Rizk presented the first of a two-volume set of books paying homage to the 25 years of the International Hispanic Theatre Festival of Miami. As if it had not been enough for Rizk to organize the scholarly portion of this festival and prepare the aforementioned book, she directed not one but two staged readings of plays by Emilio Carballido, Orinoco and Rosa de dos aromas. Here follows a list of the other plays performed at the festival during the month of July: Amarillo, a creación colectiva from Mexico directed by...

Le développement en perspective historique : le regard néoinstitutionnaliste, la pensée postcoloniale et les «mauvais samaritains »

The aim of this work is taking part in the debate about the neoinstitutionalist interpretation of development, turned into the new orthodoxy about economic development. To reach this aim, will be exposed the most recent reflections about the historic paper of violence on the modem societies development and the main criticisms to neoinstitutionalist explanation about colonization contained in the postcolonial studies that question the validity of Africanist interpretations about the conflict in postcolonial Africa and Latin-American theories about the rejection of occidentalization.

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre and Performance. Edited by Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 325. £80.95/$90 Hb; £35.95/$39.95 Pb. - Contemporary Latina/o Theatre: Wrighting Ethnicity. By Jon D. Rossini. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 253. £33.95/$37.50 Pb.

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre and Performance. Edited by Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 325. £80.95/$90 Hb; £35.95/$39.95 Pb. - Contemporary Latina/o Theatre: Wrighting Ethnicity. By Jon D. Rossini. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 253. £33.95/$37.50 Pb.

The Great Gathering of Latin-American Theater People: A Report on the 24th Iberian-American Theater Festival in Cadiz

SPRING 2010 169 The Great Gathering of Latin-American Theater People: A Report on the 24th Iberian-American Theater Festival in Cadiz Hedda Kage AHerculean effort yields only a meager profit for festival organizers. This could be the final assessment of those eleven days at the end of October, including 27 invited productions fromArgentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Spain, and Uruguay. As a constant observer over the years could verify, this is hardly a surprising balance if one knows the requirements and conditions of artistic decisions. With all due respect to the commendable largess of this atmospherically unrivalled festival of meetings, there were quality snags from time to time. Diplomatic obligations, respect, friendships, a limited budget for travel expenses, and the yearly rhythm neutralize artistic rigor. The festival founded in 1985 in order to connect Latin America’s worlds of theater to the linguistic mother countries Spain and Portugal, and soon to celebrate its twenty-five years of existence in 2010, has most of all succeeded in building and stabilizing bridges over which hundreds of Latin American theater artists have made their way to Europe every year. Cadiz not only offers them the time and space in which to present their own productions , but also the chance to see and learn about the productions of others and, in the accompanying forums and workshops, to engage in exchanges focused on aesthetic positions in the theater and cultural realities. Together, these artists enjoy great hospitality in the common festival hotel, make guest appearances in additional cities of the Iberian Peninsula, and travel from here to other European countries.Ayear after the return of democracy toArgentina, consolidating Latin America’s theater worlds was first achieved in 1984 by Carlos Jiménez, who, born in Cordoba, fled to Venezuela to escape the military junta. The ex-Cordoban, who Venezuela thanks for the theater wonder “Rajatabla” and the Caracas Festival, invited theater people from practically 170 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW every Latin American brother nation to Cordoba to the first Latin-American Theater Festival. In 1985 the same idea was to be adopted in Cadiz by Juan Margolla, and, since twenty-four years, continued by Pepe Bablé: Every year in Cadiz, for a period of eleven days, a portion of the dream of a United States of Latin America, over which independence strategists have probably pondered for 200 years already, is expressed theatrically.” Not without reason was Cadiz declared the 2012 Iberian-American Capital of Culture, and so now it prepares in every area — complete with more architectural visibility — for this honorary year. The over 3000-year-old white city is cleaning up its last tumble-down areas to tourist standards. The city’s valued and popular mayor, slyly nicknamed ‘the secret Queen Teófila I’ by her friends, intends to do everything in her power to make the festival the representative showpiece of the upcoming festivities. On this occasion too, she insisted on personally celebrating the award ceremony in the city hall’s palatial room. The festival prize for the life’s work of an artist was awarded Patricia Ariza Flores, the Columbian writer, director, actress, cofounder of the famous troupe “La Candelaria” (Bogotá), and many times threatened human rights activist. Awarded for the tenth time, this year’s “Atahualpa del Cioppo” prize went to the actor and director Mario Ernesto, also the founder and festival director of the International Hispanic Theater Festival in Miami, Florida. The Cuban-born Ernesto was praised for his tireless, twenty-five years of commitment to nurturing a theatrical Hispanic-American presence in the culture of the United States. Thanks to Teófila’s sponsorship, the Iberian-American Meeting for Women in Theater — an outstanding forum for reflection, with its symposiums, workshops and publications, organized every year by Margarita Borja and Diana Raznovich — has meanwhile become an indispensable part of the festival. Among the most convincing productions of this highly multifaceted program (20 productions with 32 performances in three theaters and seven open-air as well as street-theater productions with 12 performances) were two productions from Spain. FromAndalusia came the sensational, solo piece “El Testigo” (The Witness) by Fernando Quiniones. Narrating and performing alone...

Finished from the Start and Other Plays (review)

SPRING 2010 221 height of the vanguardia movement and how its international success put Cuba on the theatre map. Without La noche de los asesinos, he argues, the Cuban stage would not have seen Los siete contra Tebas by Arrufat, or Dos viejos pánicos. Montes Huidobro’s vast knowledge of Cuban theatre and his talent as a playwright are undeniable. In Volumes I and II of Cuba detrás del telón he has amassed what amounts to a life’s work in the theatre and as a critic, but most importantly, he gives us insight into what it has been like as a man of letters to live through and succeed in that momentous and tumultuous period in history, but also the alienation that comes with exile. To be able to revisit Cuban theatre through Montes Huidobro’s personal and intellectual lenses is a privilege, and these volumes constitute a unique and necessary contribution to criticism on post-revolutionary Cuban drama. Bretton White University of Wisconsin-Madison Radrigán, Juan. Finished from the Start and Other Plays. Trans.Ana Elena Puga with Mónica Núñez-Parra. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern UP, 2008: 193 pp. In the opening paragraph of her “Translator’s Note,”Ana Elena Puga articulates her dilemma: “as a translator, do I too have a duty to bear witness...or would feeling such an obligation encumber productions with so much moral freight that they would sink to didacticism?” (xi). Puga´s translation of six of the most powerful works by Chilean playwright, Juan Radrigán, strikes that important balance between introducing these now canonical texts to English-speaking audiences and interpreting their context so that these same receptors might reflect upon and react to the political, social, and human injustices they portray. With solid grounding in literary, cultural, and translation theories, the “Translator’s Note” explains the deliberate and often difficult choices that translators must make to remain true to the playwright’s intentions while they work to please their “foreign” audiences. “When faced with specific challenges in translating Radrigán, I found myself trying to create an accessible, entertaining play for a U.S. reader/spectator without falling into the easy trap of effacing the characters’ nationality, which I felt would perpetuate the kind of cultural colonialism that Radrigán so opposes” (xiii). Thus, Puga describes how she transformed “the thick slang of the Chilean underclass,” so predominant in Radrigán´s works, into “an argot of underclass usage common to any number of ethnicities” (xiv), while simultaneously embedding the Chilean in a way that would not allow “the play(s) to be mistaken for nothing more than a protest against poverty” (xxi). Through a process of trial and error, the translator wrestled with words, speech types, and cultural information, always conscious of maintaining the integrity of Radrigán’s text and trying “to preserve the rhythm of the original” (xv). She decided that an occasional Spanish word left untranslated, for example, “adds a welcome 222 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW level of complexity to representation” and might serve to “dislodge English from its position as dominant language, so that those who comprehend only English would at least very temporarily experience the sense of disorientation and powerlessness that subordinates, in terms of linguistic and often related economic disadvantage, live with every day” (xxv). Puga’s “Introduction” details Radrigán’s personal life and sets it against a succinct, well-researched and meticulously footnoted history of the Chilean politics that frame his works, giving the reader a great sense of the man, the playwright, and his context. Continuing with her challenge to “bear witness,” Puga reads Radrigán’s plays as Latin American testimonio. “Though rooted in actual political injustice, testimonio may be fictional: it may take narrative or theatrical form, and it may use poetic language to help position the individual character as a synecdoche for his or her community” (xl). Puga reviews accepted and sometimes contradictory definitions of testimonio and analyzes its specific implications in theater, maintaining that “when testimonio is performed,... the confrontation between actor and spectator provides greater opportunity to challenge and subvert the official stories propagated by dominant elites” (xli) because it...

Cuba detrás del telón I: Teatro cubano: Vanguardia y resistencia estética (1959-1961) , and: Cuba detrás del telón II: El teatro cubano entre la estética y el compromiso (1962-1969) (review)

SPRING 2010 217 her double identity as saint and whore, as poor little country girl transformed into Cinderella, as champion of the masses and robber of state coffers. Unlike Kahlo, however, Evita’s performance(s) had profound political repercussions forArgentina; as Misemer notes, “what is unique about Evita is the extent of her manipulation of the public through texts in which she describes the creation of her dual roles” (103). Perhaps her most manipulative performance was in death, when her body laid state to be worshipped and mourned by a devoted audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and then afterwards, when it began its surrealistic journey from one place to another. “The Brown Madonna: Crossing the Border’s of Selena’s Martyrdom,” looks at how the Queen of Tex-Mex shares with her fellow icons a dramatic death and subsequent mythologizing of her life. While alive all four were idolized (or in the case of Evita, reviled) figures; in death, they become sacred myths of contemporary popular culture, the secular saints to whom Misemer refers in the title of this beautifully written and well-researched study, which not only looks at these “saints” but also at a body of plays that recreate them as polyvalent signifiers for equally unstable, and therefore, forever fascinating (and exploitable), signifiers; for example, Alberto Castillo’s El espíritu de la pintora, about a young man who is possessed by Frida’s spirit; Carlos Gorostiza’s El acompañamiento and José Ignacio Cabrujas’s El día que me quieras, which recuperate the Gardel icon to make indirect political commentary; the French-Argentine playwright Copis’s demonization of Eva Perón in the play of the same name; and Hugo Salcedo’s celebration of the “brown madonna,” in “Selena: la reina del Tex-Mex,” among others. While certainly nowhere near as fascinating as the people who inspired them, Misemer’s analyses of these texts show them to be worth the reading (or the viewing). Kirsten F. Nigro University of Texas at El Paso Montes Huidobro, Matías. Cuba detrás del telón I: Teatro cubano: Vanguardia y resistencia estética (1959-1961). Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2008: 397 pp. Montes Huidobro, Matías. Cuba detrás del telón II: El teatro cubano entre la estética y el compromiso (1962-1969). Miami: Ediciones Universal, 2008: 365 pp. In the two initial volumes of Cuba detrás del telón, the dramatist and literary critic Matías Montes Huidobro accumulates a tremendous amount of information about the early years of post-revolutionary Cuban drama, spanning the decade 1959-1969. For the author, this period is the richest in Cuba’s dramatic history, but also one where Cuban politics increasingly limit cultural production on the island, and Montes Huidobro was not immune to these restrictions. Volume 1 covers 19591961 , a tumultuous three-year period for the island that began with the revolution’s initial triumph and concluded with enormous changes for Cuban citizens and for the 218 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW island’s international political relationships. This period ends with the Bay of Pigs invasion, as well as with Castro’s famous speech “Las palabras a los intelectuales,” in which he ambiguously outlined what Cuban artists would be permitted to express: “Dentro de la Revolución: todo; contra la Revolución ningún derecho.” Within the year the literary supplement Lunes de revolución was closed by the state, an action which further motivated Montes Huidobro to leave that same year, in 1961. What distinguishes these volumes from other critical works with similar encyclopedic breadth is precisely Montes Huidobro’s ideological and physical break with much of his subject matter. Although the author was still in Cuba in the 1959-1961 period that Volume I covers, he is of course writing from a contemporary perspective, but with the memory of the frustration and anger that was building at that time. Even decades later, the pain from that moment of separation — a moment that stretches out and over the decades — is still palpable, and it informs the entire work. Montes Huidobro may have left Cuba in 1961, but by revisiting his and others ’ works from that...

Camacho c'est moi: Parodia social y géneros literarios en "La tía Julia y el escribidor." (review)

This study, resulting from Falcón Paradí’s doctoral dissertation, could be useful to both scholars interested in the influences of Artaud on Latin American theatre and to those interested in the theatre of Montes Huidobro within the context of Cuban theatre and the theatre of exiled Cuban playwrights. While the material can at times be repetitive, the author indeed adds to the scholarship on Montes Huidobro by demonstrating in a lengthy study, for the first time, the indebtedness of the playwright to Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. REGAN POSTMA University of Kansas Wendorff, Liliana Tiffert. Camacho c’est moi: Parodia social y géneros literarios en “La tía Julia y el escribidor. ” Lima: San Marcos, 2006. 274 pp. Since its publication in 1977, Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel La tía Julia y el escribidor has been the subject of numerous studies by well-known as well as less famous critics and a popular topic for dissertations and conference presentations . Nevertheless, Liliana Wendorff goes beyond an analysis of soap operas and self-reflexive literature to present a creative reading with innovative ideas worthy of consideration. In her introduction she explains that she will examine Vargas Llosa’s novel as a postmodern work that utilizes extensive parody of both popular and canonical literature. She presents a clear and fascinating explanation of the different definitions and uses of parody and of its importance to the postmodernist movement. Chapter 2 consists of a meticulously researched review of the previous critical work concerning La tía Julia. This chapter is important for two reasons: (1) to remind readers of the huge impact the novel has made to Latin American literature of the Boom and beyond and (2) to set the background for the originality of Wendorff’s own study. She states that the primary focus of prior criticism of this novel has been on the nature of writing and literary creation itself but that the theme of her own book will be “el uso de la parodia de géneros literarios y populares para comentar sobre la praxis de la escritura” (43). Following her two introductory chapters, Wendorff proceeds to analyze in five subsequent chapters Vargas Llosa’s use of parody in the soap opera, the romance novel, the detective novel, the novel of chivalry, and the autobiography . Using the analogy of Chinese boxes (cajas chinas) or Russian nesting dolls, she explains how the Peruvian author structures his novel as a meta-literary story within a story within a story . . . provoking readers to look beyond a mere superficial reading in order to find the deeper (and as María Salgado suggests in her prologue to Wendorff’s critical study, “subversive”) aspect of the novel. Chapter 3, “Sintonice el próximo episodio . . . parodia de los ra120 Reseñas 109-124 Reseñas copia 13/9/10 11:12 Página 120 dioteatros,” includes a brief synopsis of each of the seven soap operas in the novel and discusses these serials as the representation of the “demons” of their fictional writer, Pedro Camacho, as well as the vehicle through which the real author, Vargas Llosa, expresses “. . . arte popular como otra alternativa escapista a la vida verdadera . . . y como recurso válido en la vida real y en una obra artística” (117). In Chapter 4, “Los amores imposibles: parodia de la novela rosa,” Wendorff discusses the subversion of popular Latin American romance novels with their handsome and young heroes and appealing female characters. She notes that the plots and characters invented by Camacho form a grotesque parody of what is considered the traditional novela rosa and that, through these characters and their fictional creator, Vargas Llosa criticizes “misoginia, la marcada división entre los géneros y los tabúes de la sociedad occidental, predominantes en el Perú” (154). In Chapter 5, “El detective atrapado: parodia social como novela de detectives ,” Wendorff explains how readers of Pedro Camacho’s second serial novel are treated to a description of awkward, bungling police ruled by racism and a distinct lack of tolerance for any individual who does not conform to the expectations of society. Beneath the superficial slapstick type of comedy lies a serious reflexion by...

El teatro en la Hispanoamérica colonial (review)

Reviewed by: El teatro en la Hispanoamérica colonial Jonathan Truitt El teatro en la Hispanoamérica colonial. Edited by Ignacio Arrellano and José Rodríguez Garrido. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008. Pp. 474. Illustrations, Notes, Bibliography. The 23 chapters in this volume reflect the papers presented at a conference held in Lima, Peru in 2006. The articles cover a range of subjects that can be encountered in the study of early modern theater. Some of the topics discussed include an examination of particular colonial plays, the reception of Spanish Golden Age drama in the Americas, the role of theater in religious education, indigenous translations and interpretations of Spanish theater, and how the conquest, of Peru in particular, was reexamined by colonial era dramas. Pedro Guibovich Pérez's essay on Jesuit theater in Peru is one among several in the collection that discusses the use of theater by the various religious orders. Guibovich Pérez's contribution starts the process of filling the gap surrounding the history of Jesuit education in the Spanish viceroyalties. While Jesuits were clearly not the only religious order to use theater to educate Native Americans, Guibovich Pérez discusses how the Jesuits used the courtyards in their friaries to display performances and how they incorporated singing and dancing into events. While these efforts served to instruct Native Americans, they served an even greater purpose in the minds of the Jesuits: to glorify God and man. [End Page 109] The pieces by Claudia Parodi and Beatriz Aracil Varón add to a growing historiography on indigenous theater in the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain. Parodi's piece examines Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlixóchitl's translation of Spanish Golden Age drama, in particular that of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. She finds that Alva Ixtlixóchitl did more than simply translate the pieces; he also adapted them to fit into the evangelization theater to which the Nahuas of central Mexico were accustomed. Aracil provides important insight into an area that has been largely neglected: Andean evangelization theater. While her aim is to understand how the play "Usca Paucar" developed from the tradition of the Medieval exemplum, the article is also important for further understanding indigenous life and evangelization in the Andes. The role of women in theater is also examined. The piece by Pilar Latasa, "La promesa de una 'farsanta,'" is a good example. Using a seventeenth century judicial case between María Torres and Diego Muñoz del Castillo regarding marital transgressions, Latasa examines the reputation of actresses in colonial society. She found that what the actresses did on stage was used against them in legal cases. This book covers a wide range of topics. Although scholars of Spanish Golden Age drama and colonial Latin American theater are the obvious audience for this volume, other readers will find that specific chapters may appeal to their interests. While some of the chapters in the compilation are very approachable, many use technical language appropriate to the field of literature that makes it difficult for non-specialists to follow. However, scholars interested in theater and colonial life alike will find themselves returning to this book from time to time for the gems it offers up. Jonathan Truitt Central Michigan University Mt. Pleasant, Michigan Copyright © 2010 Academy of American Franciscan History

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review)

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review)

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review)

Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance (review)

Living the Politics of teatro in Los Angeles: An Interview with Diane Rodriguez

FALL 2009 143 Living the Politics of teatro in Los Angeles: An Interview with Diane Rodriguez Chantal Rodríguez On June 23 2009, I met Diane Rodriguez in her office at the Music CenterAnnex in downtown LosAngeles to discuss her impressive career.An OBIE Award winning actor and multi-disciplinary teatrista, Diane’s work is distinguished for its deeply political bend and use of humor to confront oppression. A founding company member of El Teatro de la Esperanza, El Teatro Campesino and Latins Anonymous, Diane has become an expert in activist performance and ensemble work. Committed to diversity and equal access, Diane was appointed Co-Director of the Latino Theater Initiative at the Center Theatre Group (Mark Taper Forum) along with Luis Alfaro in 1995. A self proclaimed “theater geek,” Diane is currently an Associate Producer at Center Theater Group. I have followed her career with great interest as she continues to produce, direct, and write new work whose reach extends far beyond U.S. stages. How did you get started in teatro? I come from a performing family; my father was a singer and sang in a Baptist church. My mother was the church pianist. That sanctuary, holy place, was where I learned how to be in front of people and perform in plays. In the late 60’s my cousins were members of El Teatro Campesino and I saw them perform in The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, which was the first time I saw the teatro. Then my uncle and aunt sold their house and moved to Delano, CA, worked on the paper “El Malcriado” and belonged to the farm workers’ union. So, the notion of church and a social consciousness was in my family before there was really a Chicano Movement. But I think the real seminal moment was going to UC Santa Barbara and studying theater with Jorge Huerta.1 144 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW When did you begin working with El Teatro Campesino (ETC)? How did your experience there shape your artistic perspective? I performed with ETC during my summers in college and then became an ensemble member after graduation. When I went into ETC, I basically learned the concept of activism in terms of both social and theater activism: using theater to inspire and move a people to social action but also as a way of making choices as an actor. You have to make artistic choices and commit to them to make the moment work, and so in that way you are an activist, you activate a moment. It’s also a metaphor for being an activist in life. That’s the main concept that I took away and always carried with me. The other was building a foundation for our work. We used to do exercises based on the steps of the Mayan Pyramid that would build some part of your character as you climbed each step of the pyramid. You would listen to your heart, or simply your breathing. These rigorous exercises made me look inside and learn to follow my heart and listen to my instincts. It was instrumental in shaping my rostro, the Nahuatl concept of face or character. When did you leave ETC and why? Honestly, the resources began to change in the 80s with Reagan and it just felt like it was time to move on. The money wasn’t there to support a full time ensemble so we had to think about what we were going to do. It was a natural evolution and so we packed up our stuff and left, it always makes me sad to think about it though. I wrote a testimonial about it called “Searching for Sanctuaries: Cruising through Town in a Red Convertible.”2 It was very hard and traumatic, I came of age in the ETC and I learned how to create work on my own which was very empowering because I had to create the work, no one was going to create it for me and I’ve carried that through my whole career. When you left ETC for Los Angeles what did you hope to do? I was going to be an actor. I was very...

On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González

FALL 2009 159 On Collaborating: An Interview with José Cruz González Susan Vaneta Mason José Cruz González is a playwright, director, musician, lyricist, creator of the Hispanic Playwrights Project at South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, California, and Professor of Theatre Arts and Dance at California State University, Los Angeles. His parents and grandparents were farm workers and he grew up on California’s central coast. He went to college during the Mexican American Civil Rights movement where he was among the first generation of Chicano Studies students who defined and shaped Chicano theatre. González has a prolific career as a writer of youth and adult plays and has received numerous awards (Kennedy Center, NEA, TCG and others). During his development as an artist and throughout his professional career with commissions by numerous theatre companies, he has been committed to exploring diverse approaches to artistic collaboration. González’s latest play, Sunsets and Margaritas, was recently produced at the Denver Arts Center in Colorado. Susan Mason is González’s colleague at California State University, Los Angeles. She has collaborated with him on professional and academic projects. When and where did you first begin studying theatre? I did my undergraduate work at University of California San Diego in the late 1970s where I majored in U.S History/Chicano Studies and minored in Theatre. Why theatre? I knew I wanted to go to graduate school and thought theatre would help my communication skills. So I began by taking beginning, intermediate and then advanced acting. Eventually the teacher asked me to help coach ac- 160 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW tors. I was also tapping into the creativity in my childhood: painting, sketching, making things with my hands. How did theatre and Chicano Studies come together for you? Were you aware of Chicano theatre at that time? I first became aware of Chicano theatre by taking a class at UCSD from Jorge Huerta. We studied Teatro history and read plays. With that course I found my calling. Besides that, companies such as Teatro de la Esperanza toured to the university with bilingual productions. I also got to see the work of Carlos Morton who was an MFA student there. He had worked with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Tony Curiel was a graduating senior who went on to Stanford and then El Teatro Campesino. Silvia Cortez, Olga Villanueva, and Goyo Flores, a Vietnam vet, were undergrads in the program. So I got involved with the teatro group Jorge created on campus. After UCSD I went to Arizona State University and worked on my MA in theatre. I poured over everything I could find on Latino theatre, the history of the movement, when, how, Nuyorican writing. I started a teatro there. We performed with local actors and created some of our own work. At this time my focus changed to directing. I directed The Hands of God by Carlos Solórzano that became my thesis project. I was also introduced to theatre for young audiences. At that time my overall goal was to work with El Teatro Campesino or Teatro de la Esperanza: to take my training and experience back to the theatre. So after ASU, I applied to the MFA program at UC Irvine for more training in directing. What kinds of directing opportunities did you have when you completed your professional training at Irvine? How did your employment at South Coast Repertory (SCR) come about? While I was at Irvine, I had a summer internship with El Teatro Campesino. I also directed a student production of a Mexican play, Los Fantoches (The Effigies), that we took to the Edinburgh Festival. At Irvine I also worked with EOP [Education Opportunity Program] that had participated in a project called Second Lives at South Coast Rep. Second Lives was about immigrants and refugees of Orange County. I met with the project director, Michael Bigelow Dixon who invited me to assist him at SCR. And that lead to full-time employment at SCR? I began reading plays in Literary at SCR while I was still a student at Irvine. And I directed a play, Terra Nova, in a black box theatre...

Antonio Ocampo-Guzmán: Actor, Director, Professor and Linklater Voice Teacher

FALL 2009 175 Antonio Ocampo-Guzmán: Actor, Director, Professor and Linklater Voice Teacher An interview by Carlos Manuel Antonio Ocampo-Guzmán is an actor, director and teacher, originally from Bogotá, Colombia where he trained as an actor with the Teatro Libre. He came to the US in 1993 to train at Shakespeare & Company and with renowned voice teacher Kristin Linklater — “Freeing the Natural Voice.” Antonio was the first Spanish-speaker to become a Designated Linklater Teacher and has adapted the practice into Spanish. He serves as a consultant for the Center for Voice Studies (CEUVOZ) in Mexico City and teaches annually at the Estudio Corazza para el Actor in Madrid, Spain. Antonio is a member of VASTA (Voice & Speech Trainers Association). He earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Directing at York University in Toronto, Ontario in 2003 and currently serves on the faculty of the Department of Theatre at Northeastern University, Boston. When did you start to get involved in voice training, ¿cómo comenzó todo? When I was a student-actor at Teatro Libre in Bogotá, my teacher took a workshop with Kristin Linklater at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, and then began to use some of the voice exercises in class. En esa época my teacher asked me if I could translate the introduction of the book so other students could read it. She also asked me to be her apprentice. Were you always interested in voice? Yes. I always have loved singing and music. I love the physical sensation of sound. In 1993 I came to Shakespeare & Company, and what I learned was that even though I had trained as an actor for four years in Bogot á, I had never felt that the characters or the plays had anything to do with 176 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW me. They were something always in front of me; I was always behind my characters. When I went to S&C and discovered this voice training process, suddenly everything became clear. It was me who was expressing myself through these different characters. I wasn’t inventing a character, putting on a character. It was me expressing myself, all my stories, my thoughts, feelings, memories, my imagination through my voice, through the speaking of the words. That was an incredible shift in my understanding of what theatre is. I used to think theatre was me pretending to be somebody else but through the Linklater voice practice I learned that theatre can be a vehicle of my personal self-expression through the characters I play and the words I speak. The Linklater voice practice is based on freeing the person that speaks and not just about making a beautiful perfect sound. It’s about finding who you are and how you can fully express yourself through your voice. That made perfect sense to me, to my intellect, my emotional life, and to my desire to be an actor. At the end of that workshop I decided that I wanted to learn how to teach the Linklater practice and I ended up staying with Shakespeare & Company for three years. How does a person become a Designated Linklater Teacher? In order to teach this work, people must first do a lot of work to free their own voice: spend at least one year observing one of the Master Teachers teaching, while taking private lessons. After that you are invited to take a workshop with Kristin Linklater — we call that the “Designation Workshop ” — where you work very intensively for five weeks, teaching and training and getting feedback on your teaching. Eventually Kristin decides if you’re good enough to become a Designated Linklater Teacher. During the time I was with S&C working as an actor, once in a while I would take a workshop with Kristin in Boston. I also took private lessons with a master teacher twice a week for those three years. Then I began to teach at S&C. Later, Kristin invited me to move to Boston to focus more consistently on my training. She was teaching at Emerson College. I began to observe her classes and eventually I was hired to teach there. It took me five years from the moment I arrived at...

Home is Where the (He)art is: The Family Romance in Late Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine Theater (review)

216 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW Throughout Memory, Allegory, and Testimony, Puga passionately defends a resistant, counter-hegemonic theatre that makes productive use of both allegory and testimony, and that has resulted in politically and aesthetically “transformative” works. The project is slightly marred by a somewhat alarming number of typographical and diacritical errors, and by what I found to be the introduction’s unnecessarily essentialist rejection of a politicized postmodernism, a concept crucial to understanding the work created by the generations of Southern Cone theatre practitioners who followed the playwrights Puga discusses in such productive detail. Such concerns aside, Memory, Allegory, and Testimony is a most welcome contribution to Southern Cone theatre studies and to Routledge’s growing series on Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies. Jean Graham-Jones The CUNY Graduate Center Magnarelli, Sharon. Home is Where the (He)art is: The Family Romance in Late Twentieth-Century Mexican and Argentine Theater. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008: 293 pp. Sharon Magnarelli’s study treats a wide range of plays from Mexico and Argentina, by well known playwrights such as Griselda Gambaro, Sabina Berman, Roberto Cossa, Hugo Argüelles, and Marcela del Río. With the exception of Luisa Josefina Hernánez’s Los huéspedes reales (1956), the plays treated date from the 1980s and 1990s. Magnarelli asks what anxieties (on the part of the audience) are assuaged or aggravated, and what images of family and home — often unexamined or unacknowledged — are reinforced or challenged in these plays. Equally important are the possible implications of the theatrical representation of family for what she terms “ the larger sociopolitical body” (12). The plays studied encompass a variety of styles; some are highly comical while others are violent, and the realities presented on stage vary in their degree of stylization. “Family” covers a multitude of relationships; the plays in this study tend to address the mother-daughter relationship, or to recast in some way the mother-child (most often adult child) bond. The mythology surrounding the mother-child dyad is wide ranging, and Magnarelli draws on those myths (such as that of Medea) explicitly evoked within the plays as well as on the ways in which interpretive frameworks, such as Freudian psychoanalysis, that draw on classical mythology (and theater) can constitute one more mythologizing strand. In her use of the term family romance, Magnarelli stresses, “the embedding of narrative within the experience of family and the quest to invent, imagine better parents/origins” (15). Magnarelli demonstrates the many ways in which the families in these plays are both home and art (or artifice) for character and spectator alike. The theater shows us how some families are, or might FALL 2009 217 be, and at the same time teaches us how to constitute and interpret our own families, or how to rebel against particular understandings of family or home. Magnarelli further underscores the spatial continuity whereby the intimacy of the domestic space is apparently, though often deceptively, mimicked by the theatrical space. Magnarelli rightly stresses the importance of memory to the family as imagined community; the role of memory can be seen in those plays that draw on historical events, such as Griselda Gambaro’s La malasangre, with its highly stylized evocation of the Rosas dictatorship inArgentina, and also in those plays centered on contemporary domestic relationships. Manuel’s negotiations with his dead mother in Eduardo Rovner’s Volvió una noche rehearse his recollections of the way things “always” were as much as they attempt to move forward. But memory is also central to the spectator’s experience in the theater. As Magnarelli observes, “any reaction to an art form, but perhaps particularly to theater because of its ephemeral character, is already necessarily a memory as we re-member ... what we saw or what we think we saw” (21-22). Highlighting aspects of the plays that have not been treated elsewhere, Magnarelli’s readings are consistently perceptive. Several of these plays (such as Berman’s Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda) have already been widely studied, but the emphasis on the family romance within them is new and illuminating. In her discussion of Los huéspedes reales, for example, Magnarelli convincingly challenges previous interpretations of...

Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater. By Gail A. Bulman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 276 + illus. $55 Hb.

Staging Words, Performing Worlds: Intertextuality and Nation in Contemporary Latin American Theater. By Gail A. Bulman. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Pp. 276 + illus. $55 Hb. - Volume 34 Issue 2