Latin American Theatre Research Articles

El teatro cubano durante la Republica: Cuba detras del telon (review)

Matias Montes Huidobro. El teatro cubano durante la Republica: Cuba detras del telon. Boulder, Colo.: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2004.738 pp.Cuban writer, playwright, director, and critic Matias Montes Huidobro has been known among students of Latin American theater for his earlier extensive and fundamental studies in Cuban and Puerto Rican theater (Persona, vida y mascara en el teatro cubano, 1973; Persona, vida y mascara en el teatro puertorriqueno, 1986). In the work under review, he focuses in detail on the Cuban theater in the republican era (1902-1958).El teatro cubano is an impressive undertaking, nurtured by more than fifty years of intense and intimate involvement with Cuban theater and culture. Montes Huidobro was a prize-winning playwright and director in the 1950s and up to his exile in the late 1961. He then was student of theater, a playwright, and a director during his long exile. All the rich experience of a lifetime comes to fruition in this monumental work.In the still strictly partitioned world of Cuban studies, writing from exile imposes certain limitations (for example, inaccessibility of materials of potential value) and offers both ideological freedoms and pitfalls. Montes Huidobro's research in the period covered is exhaustive; it is hard to imagine that some of the indicated gaps (12) would substantially change the landscape as reconstructed by him (besides, some of the unpublished manuscripts appear to be lost for good). On the other hand, writing unapologetically from exile, as he is, he carves for himself a sensible space of dissidence, defying both the rituals of the now decrepit Marxist orthodoxy imposed on the island and the dulcified myths about the Republic fostered by some in exile. Montes Huidobro's principled yet dispassionate study points toward the unavoidable future space of encounter and dialog among the membra disjecta of the Cuban cultural universe.The book is organized in two parts: the first covers the foundational period of modern theater in the new Republic, 1902-1939, and the second studies the 1940s and 1950s. Montes Huidobro focuses on the modern serious theater coming from the late nineteenth century (Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov), in the first period, and from the Avant-Garde (Pirandello and later phenomena), in the second. Surviving forms of popular theater (teatro bufo) or revue theater (the famous Teatro Alhambra, 1900-1935, revived in Barnet's Cancion de Rachel, 1969, or the X-rated Teatro Shanghai, celebrated by Sarduy, in De donde son los contantes, 1967), are mentioned in passing.The theater in the first period reflects critically the vicissitudes of the nation-building phase of the Republic, centering on the social problems as mirrored within the family circle. …

Women's Solidarity in the Latin American Theatre Scene

Women's Solidarity in the Latin American Theatre Scene

Yes, and. . .

Yes, and . . . Stuart A. Day I have just inherited two important historical testimonials: a complete collection of the Latin American Theatre Review and a short but equally intriguing bibliography entitled "Studies on the Latin American Theatre, 1960-1969" by Leon F. Lyday and George W. Woodyard. My benefactor and dear friend, María A. Salgado, helped me to cart these documents to my office as she cleared out after more than three decades of teaching and research at UNC-Chapel Hill. She witnessed the first group of women graduate here with four-year degrees in 1967; she paved the way for women professors at our institution; and she is one of many people who made it unnecessary to answer the question Lyday and Woodyard cite, and hope to render obsolete, in the introduction to their above-mentioned bibliography printed in Theatre Documentation, II (1969-1970): "Does any theatre really exist in Latin America?" I did not have to answer this question when I presented my dissertation prospectus on Mexican political theatre. Nor did I have to answer it when I went into the job market. And I will not have to answer it next year when I turn in my tenure dossier. I will never have to do so, precisely because others have created space (in classrooms, on MA reading lists, in libraries, at conferences) in which we can perform our desire. Our field, in the end, is exemplified by the people—authors, teachers, students, critics, performers—who have made it possible to make a living out of that which we love. The collection of texts that we study and produce is somehow secondary, skeletal compared to the living stages of our profession, compared to the flesh and blood of the myriad mentors of the field who have made it acceptable to study Latin American theatre. Despite my acknowledgment of those who have come before, I lack the historical distance, not to mention the practical experience, to comment on how the field of Latin American theatre studies will evolve; I can only write about how I have been involved. My role, of course, is minor. Yet, perhaps there is a correlation between my experiences in a literature department and a more universal tension that is building as cultural and performance studies continue to work their way into the imagination of literary criticism. I wrote my first (and only) book on Mexican theatre. It is a piece of literary criticism grounded in literary theory, history, and economics. This manuscript came out of what had been, in many ways, a safe dissertation project; it paralleled the work that is expected, if not demanded, in many literature departments, and while it was informed by live plays, there was always a printed text to which I could turn, an academic touchstone that guaranteed a stamp of approval. It begged no questions of legitimacy, and elicited no disapproving frowns when I went into the job market. Conversely, I am increasingly aware that my next project will, in some quarters, educe a new question, the question that now faces many of us who work in literature departments: "What does your work have to do with literature?" Specifically, I am writing a manuscript on Mexican performance (covering everything from the Zapatista leader Comandante Ester taking the stage in the Mexican Congress to street demonstrations protesting the hundreds of brutal murders in Ciudad Juárez) that stretches what I consider to be the boundaries of literary criticism. I will, of course, include some plays in this study; however, many of the themes I [End Page 462] pursue will be fleeting, out of reach for those who consider studying life as performance to be alien, extradepartmental territory. Despite a growing interdisciplinary openness, there is no dearth of remarks questioning the validity, or the so-called proper place, of research that is not related to the written, preferably fictitious, word. Regardless of the challenges to what it is I do, or to what I'm trying to do, I know that the barriers I face pale in comparison to those faced by the people who established the field of Latin American theatre. Perhaps, though, the same spirit of the scholars...

The Theatre Journal Auto / Archive: George Woodyard

The Theatre Journal Auto/Archive:George Woodyard George Woodyard (bio) Growing up as the youngest of nine children in a monolingual family (with substandard English) on a farm in central Illinois was culturally challenging, to say the least. Because one-room country schools were infinitely flexible, I was accelerated through elementary school and entered high school when I was eleven, eagerly starting my first foreign language study. From about the age of six, I was fascinated by the concept of other languages, primarily because of an older sister who taught me words and phrases in Spanish and French. After studying Latin, Spanish, and French in high school, followed by a major in Spanish with minors in Latin and German in college, I started an MA in Spanish in Las Cruces, New Mexico in January 1954. Barely nineteen years old, I had, astonishingly, never met a native speaker of Spanish or seen a professional theatre performance. The year in New Mexico changed all of that. My very first night there, in neighboring El Paso, I saw the traveling company performance of John Brown's Body, little suspecting that I would spend the greater part of my life in northeastern Kansas, where John Brown launched his abolitionist crusade. Further, my New York roommate regaled me with tales of a theatrical world beyond my imagination. When I took my first teaching job in a suburban Chicago high school the next fall, it was not long before I had an airplane ticket (my first) to New York to see live theatre on Broadway. On that first visit I saw Flower Drum Song, which I was happy to see again a year ago in revival in New York. In the 1950s teachers were subject to military conscription, but I had the good fortune to be assigned to Puerto Rico, where there was good theatre—not to mention the superb Pablo Casals music festivals. My greatest regret was missing the 1958 premiere of René Marqués's Los soles truncos (The fanlights), a play that I have taught countless times through the years. After the military and several years of teaching (both high school and college), I was grateful for the National Defense Education Act Title VI foreign language fellowship that allowed me, in summer 1963, to return to graduate studies in Spanish at the University of Illinois, one of the finest programs in the country. The combination of my experiences in New Mexico and Puerto Rico inspired me to study theatre; my major professor, Merlin Forster, taught a pilot course for three of us that year. The plays we [End Page 547] read convinced me of the rich potential of this field, and I went on to write a dissertation on Latin American theatre under Forster's direction. After two years, I was appointed to a tenure-track position at Illinois, but the following year I could not resist an invitation from Kansas. One week after I graduated from Illinois in June 1966, I was teaching a summer graduate course in theatre at the University of Kansas. Less than a month later I had met Fredric Litto, a KU professor of theatre, at a cocktail party, where—perhaps well lubricated and in a festive mood—we conceived the notion of a specialized publication. Through the good graces of John Augelli, then director of the Center of Latin American Studies, we delivered a manuscript in fall 1967 with 1/1 on a designer cover and the title Latin American Theatre Review. My coeditor, whose guidance and insights were crucial in our formative years, neglected to return to Kansas after a visiting appointment at the Universidade de São Paulo, leaving me to handle the journal on my own. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Now completing its thirty-seventh year of publication, the journal has been the center of my academic life. It was not always easy, and many times I felt a bit like a juggler in the circus, trying to keep everything in the air at once. For over twenty years I worked in central administration at KU, which culminated in an appointment as dean of international studies. We raised millions...

Theatre as a Wild Weed

Theatre as a wild weed Teresa Marrero Years of incursion into the study of Latin American theatre and performance studies in the United States have taught me to stay clear of statements that attempt to unify, quantify, or encapsulate any understanding of knowledge. While I have participated in volumes that attempt to position various historical moments of Latin American and Latino/a theatre in the United States, my perspective has been constant: the compilation of knowledge in this field is necessarily fragmentary. To speak of Latin American theatre is to speak of the artistic production of nineteen countries that may or may not share a language. I am not only referring to the Portuguese spoken in Brazil in comparison to the Spanish spoken in most of the continent, but, for instance, also the Tzozil, the Tzeltal, and the Tojolobal (all indigenous Mayan languages) spoken in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico. To speak of religious archetypes in Cuban theatre is to speak of an incredibly complex syncretic mix of African animism/pantheism and Spanish Catholicism, which has little to do with Rome. To speak of the Mexican American immigrant experience during the past two centuries has little to do with the political violence that has motivated the migrations of Chileans, Argentineans, or Guatemalans. Thus, in a field as enormous as the region itself, to speak of "Latin American" theatre is to use a category imposed as a mean to suggest a homogeneity that does not exist. And while my Cuban birth and Southern Californian upbringing may sensitize me to some of these issues in a particular manner, often my contact with Latin American theatre is an armchair experience from the United States. There are many difficulties faced by scholars in this area, the most evident of which is the ephemeral nature of the theatrical performance experience itself and the distance [End Page 454] at which these events take place. To ameliorate the problem of distance, US academics historically have had a serious dependency upon travel grants. This institutional support depends upon the economic solvency of the particular institution and/or the economic solvency of the state, in the case of public institutions. The overall economic health of both the United States and of Latin America (remembering that Latin America is a multiplicity of countries) plays a tremendous role in our access to firsthand participation in events. Many countries undergoing severe economic restrictions, such as Cuba since the fall of the Soviet bloc, have had to curtail their productions, host fewer international festivals, and generate fewer hard-copy publications. In fact, the disintegration of the Soviet bloc has had such an impact on Latin American political and philosophical thought that some have called it a crisis. This crisis revolves around the loss of the utopian ideals generated in the 1960s and '70s by the now tired and struggling Cuban Revolution. This important notion, however, remains generally unknown outside Hispanist circles. Historically, the most interesting developments in Latin American theatre have emerged out of political, economic, and historical turmoil taking place in the streets, in communities, and within revolutionary social contexts that are not always and immediately attended to by theatre scholars. Thus, unlike the development of US and Western European theatre, largely driven by aesthetic and theatrical concerns, Latin American and Latino/a theatre emerges out of social struggles that can be as different thematically as the immigrant's search for an ethnic identity, political torture, the historical silencing of dissident voices, and cultural identity in a still-colonized island. Within the enclave of US academia, scholars of Latin American theatre are expected to publish in "reputable, refereed" journals. Important decisions such as promotion and tenure depend upon it. Without journals, anthologies, and electronic publications, our capacity to remain viable within our chosen professions as educators, performers, and communicators is impaired. Yet the number of such journals in the US dedicated to Latin American theatre and performance studies is limited. The language restriction varies: in some journals one can publish in Spanish or Portuguese, while in others it is "English only." Language matters, affecting not only which language we publish in, but the availability of classroom texts. If we are speaking...

Partial Knowledge: Challenges for Latin American Theatre Scholarship in the US

Partial knowledge:challenges for Latin American theatre scholarship in the US Amalia Gladhart The theatres of Latin America, traditional, experimental or (to borrow Augusto Boal's term) invisible, are a fertile yet contested space in which to approach key questions of history, memory, identity, and representation. The theatre may offer a space of freedom and resistance, but it may also reflect the relations of power and of violence that exist offstage. The same goes for scholarship. Our task as scholars and teachers is to expand the audience for those theatres and to explore the questions raised, recognizing at the same time—as so many plays remind us—that our knowledge and understanding of one another, both within and across cultures, must always remain partial and contingent, open to question. Within the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, theatre remains a somewhat less studied genre, in terms of numbers of courses offered, faculty specialists, and numbers of publications. Although the field continues to grow, there are still relatively few articles on Latin American theatre published outside the specialized theatre journals. Latin American theatre is not yet part of the canon—while its importance is often recognized, it is not yet an obligatory area of study. (This may not be entirely bad, as those texts supposedly elevated to obligatory status can be just as quickly reduced to the level of chore.) I write as one who has had great freedom to develop and teach courses on Latin American theatre at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. But to take just one example of a widely used anthology: Huellas de las literaturas hispanoamericanas (Traces of Hispanic-American literatures), edited by John Garganigo, et al., includes only one play, and only a portion of that (two scenes from Sabina Berman's Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda [Between Villa and a naked woman]). At the same time, there has been tremendous growth in the field in recent years, so that, far from feeling like an overlooked area of scholarship, the atmosphere is vital and collaborative, open to new approaches and to ongoing redefinitions of our objects and processes of study. Working in a department of literatures and languages, I find it crucial to make [End Page 452] connections between genres. My work engages with literature more generally and with interdisciplinary Latin American studies as well as with performance studies and performance theory. As one who has tended to work thematically rather than geographically, I also notice an increasing tendency toward geographic specialization. I see my own work—while continuing to focus on specifically theatrical production—moving also in the direction of studying theatre and narrative in concert with one another, examining the interrelationships between memory, the body, and representation in both. A challenge, for those of us working within language departments, is access to performances, particularly performances in Spanish, not only for ourselves but also for our students. In many areas there simply aren't that many performances of Latin American work available. Access to materials is a challenge for all scholars of international fields, but it becomes perhaps more pronounced within theatre and performance because the work is less portable (harder to slip in your pocket than a paperback novel). In the coming years, I expect to see more Latin American and US Latino/a plays—in Spanish, Portuguese, English or other languages—performed across the country, creating a growing awareness of that theatre among US theatre audiences and a closer link between Latin American and US Latino/a theatres. Portland's Miracle Theatre Group provides one example of local Latino/a theatre production. I recently spent ten days in Ecuador, a country with an increasingly active theatrical scene yet little known in the US. While there, I had the opportunity to meet with members of Movimiento Quinta Escena (Fifth stage movement), a loose confederation of five theatre groups working out of small, almost improvised spaces in the Casa de la Cultura in Quito. They described a continual struggle for resources and lamented that, while the audience is certainly there for free performances, the audience for experimental theatre is limited, though a house can often be filled through painstaking advance sales...

Theatre in Spanish? Where? Curricular Tensions Between Language and Theatre Departments

I focus here on US universities' institutional responsibilities regarding theatre in Spanish. Undoubtedly, discussions in the US academy about Spanish-language theatre differ completely from those related to theatre in French or German. The growing use of Spanish in the US mass media (newspapers, TV, Internet) and services (judicial, education, hospitals, etc.) has completely transformed the situation of Latin American immigrants in the last twenty years. It is no longer necessary and urgent for Hispanics [End Page 468] to learn English in order to adapt to their new environment. Maria Horne, in an essay published in the 2002 collection Theatre Without Frontiers, has detailed the growth of the Hispanic population in the US and its impact on academic life and, consequently, curricular changes. However, the increasing number of native speakers of Spanish does not seem to have greatly affected theatre and language departments. Professional groups perform in Spanish in New York, Miami, Washington DC, or Los Angeles, and amateur Spanish-language productions receive limited promotion by language departments, but there is no professional academic training for actors and directors interested in Spanish-language performance. Despite the increase in the number of potential Spanish-speaking spectators and in the Hispanic market, Latino playwrights do not seem interested either in the growth of Spanish in this country or in Latin American theatre as a cultural phenomenon. In the university, the debate on future curricular changes is just beginning, and, from my perspective, it is filled with problematic confusions and policy restrictions. Let me sketch out the curricular frame within which Latin American theatre in Spanish struggles. This will also allow us to visualize the abyss separating language and theatre departments. Both perspectives pose arguments requiring urgent debate. The Language Department's Perspective Language departments insist that their goal is to promote language and culture, as if theatrical production and diverse performative strategies were not part of a region and its culture. They concentrate on the literary dramatic text and disregard the specific theatrical context. Language programs sponsor theatre activities as cultural decoration, but they depend upon faculty members' good will and enthusiasm or leave it to a group of students, who—faced with a lack of appropriate spaces, technical resources, and schedule flexibility—can produce a show with pedagogically questionable results. Language students typically perform in a classroom, with few props and lacking suitable lighting and sound equipment, and often deficient acting training. Acting is then reduced to the physical illustration of a memorized and recited text. Consequently, audiences attending such a production leave with a disastrous impression. When compared to the technical precision achieved by theatre and media departments, these productions can create an inappropriate lack of appreciation for Latin American theatre in particular, and for Spanish-language theatre in general. Ironically, despite the enormous bibliography produced by language departments in the last twenty years regarding the body (its identity, resistance, submission, and perversion), these very same departments seem curiously uninterested in promoting courses where knowledge emerges from the body itself, in all its silences, rhythms, ruptures, and pleasures. Apparently, language departments can discuss the imaginary and symbolic dimension of the body in literature, but they refuse to deal with the body itself. Language departments resolve this contradiction by installing sophisticated language labs. They think that traditional classes—centered on the instructor's body and voice—require audiovisual enhancement. Thus, they spend a substantial budgetary amount in endlessly updating technology. It is obvious that there are no real changes here, only the illusion of change. Students remain rooted to their chairs, perhaps more paralyzed in front of the computer's screen than in the bodily dynamic of traditional classes. A weird paradox: language departments promote theatre as literature, but they want their students to approach literature through an audiovisual [End Page 469] experience. The Cartesian prejudice privileging reason over corporeal passion is exacerbated by the ideology of entertainment. Problematic theoretical and methodological questions emerge even at the content...

The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas (review)

Reviewed by: The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas Margarita Vargas The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas. By Yolanda Flores. New York: Peter Lang, 2000; pp. 132. $32.95 paper. In The Drama of Gender: Feminist Theater by Women of the Americas, Yolanda Flores embarks on the ambitious project of examining how issues of race, gender, and class are represented on the North and South American stages. To illustrate the theoretical and methodological approaches of her study, which entail the application of materialist and radical feminist concepts, Flores reads selected plays by primarily the following playwrights: Leilah Assunção (Brazil), Susana Torres Molina (Argentina), Carmen Boullosa (Mexico), and Josefina López (United States). Flores follows a critical practice she identifies as current among critics of categories such as Latin American theatre. According to her, critics continue to pursue two original objectives of the 1970s feminist agenda: first, the rescuing from oblivion of texts written by women and, second, the study of female characters in male-authored texts. Her main goal, indeed, is to demarginalize and thus introduce Latin American drama, especially that written by women, to North American audiences for whom these works remain a mystery. Flores points outs thatNorth American and European critics are partially responsible for the marginalization of this work. Her most vivid example comes from Diana Taylor's reference in Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics to a 1968 issue of The Drama Review in which the editor cited two US critics who described Latin American theatre as backward and a compendium of clumsily borrowed dramatic forms with dead shapes moving about onstage (15). That Latin American women playwrights are still not well known in the United States should not come as such a surprise, for as Flores reminds us, even though Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, which marks the birth of feminist literary criticism, appeared in 1970, dramatic studies had to wait until 1988 for the publication of Sue-Ellen Case's Feminism and Theatre, the first extensive feminist study on drama. Coincidentally, in 1988 the First International Conference of Women Playwrights—the brainchild of Anna Kay France, a professor of English and theatre—took place in Buffalo. Despite her investment in a project of recovery, Flores fails to mention that two of the playwrights in her study—Leilah Assunção and Sabina Berman—participated in this momentous event. In addition to the close readings of each of the plays, readers will find particularly informative the [End Page 526] sociopolitical and literary contexts that Flores provides at the beginning of each chapter. She contextualizes the work of the playwrights in terms of their place in the literary histories of their respective countries, discusses their introduction into the world of letters, and then proceeds to outline their particular projects within race, class, and gender. Flores positions herself within a postmodernist discourse that promotes pluralism over a universalized vision of woman as a single nonracial entity. At the same time, however, she recognizes that it is necessary to presume a signifier "woman" in order to be able to study its misrepresentation and exclusion from the hegemonic discourse, and to identify commonalties among women that will enable them to form coalitions and create social change. Thus, Flores recognizes that her study is caught in the eternal conundrum of the paradox: in order to speak of women as a group, she needs to define them in opposition to the fixed term "man," thus undermining her own postmodern aspirations. One of Flores's smartest moves was to include Chicano theatre in her book, for it affords her the opportunity to speak to questions of class and race and specifically what it means to be a woman of color writing in a first-world country. This materialist approach highlights a stark difference between Latin-American writers, who for the most part come from the upper classes, and Latinas in the United States, who often do not. Flores remarks that all the Chicana writers she has studied are of working-class background and therefore feel more akin to the oppressed groups in Latin America than to other writers. One example she offers is...

A Forum on the State of Latin American Theatre and Performance Studies in the United States Today

A Forum on the State of Latin American Theatre and Performance Studies in the United States Today Jean Graham-Jones In an effort to provide TJ readers with a broader view of contemporary Latin American theatre and performance studies, I invited scholars working in the United States to contribute brief personal essays setting forth their thoughts on the current state of Latin American theatre and performance studies. In my invitation, I posed several questions as possible points of departure, among them: the evolution of Latin American theatre and performance studies in the past twenty years, including the development of specific fields of scholarship within the larger context of Latin American theatre and performance studies; the success with which our field has engaged with other related disciplines; the intersections of Latin American and US Latino / a theatre and performance studies; the challenges facing the study of Latin American theatre and performance within today's US university, as well as those challenges specific to the study of our own field within the larger context of Latin American theatre and performance studies; and the future of Latin American theatre and performance studies in the US academy. While the thirteen fascinating essays that resulted from this invitation do not pretend to supply an exhaustive overview of Latin American theatre and performance studies, they demonstrate--often polemically--how far our field has come and how far it still has to go. Copyright © 2004 The Johns Hopkins University Press

On the Visibility of Latin American Theatre

On the Visibility of Latin American Theatre

The Theatre of Sabina Berman: The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays (review)

Reviewed by: The Theatre of Sabina Berman. The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays Sandra M. Cypess The Theatre of Sabina Berman. The Agony of Ecstasy and Other Plays. Translated by Adam Versényi with an Essay by Jacqueline E. Bixler. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003; 192 pages. $40.00 cloth, $21.00 paper. As one of the most active, original, and talented playwrights of Latin America, Sabina Berman merits a warm welcome among English-speaking audiences. Adam Versényi's translations of four plays by Berman and the informative introductions by Versényi and Latin American theatre critic Jacqueline Bixler provide the appropriate cultural context to appreciate Berman's work. She is one of the most prolific and commercially successful Mexican playwrights, winner of prestigious awards, and the most feminist in a distinguished group of Mexicans which includes Emilio Carballido, Vicente Leñero, and Hugo Argüelles. She is versatile in her creative efforts, known also as an accomplished poet, prose writer, essayist, and director of plays and movies. The plays selected for publication in English in this volume, The Agony of Ecstasy, Yankee, Puzzle, and Heresy, provide an overview of Berman's versatility and varied interests, which range from an exploration of the nature of identity as it links with ethnicity and gender issues, to revisions of the myths of Mexican history. She deals with heady and heavy topics with doses of humor and dramatic techniques that explore the performative nature of human behavior. As Bixler notes, Berman "has consistently defied and challenged the patriarchal order of things with penetrating and humorous studies of the battle for sexual or political power . . ." (xxi). The three brief one-acters of The Agony of Ecstasy (El suplicio del placer, 1977), for example, offer a playful yet thought-provoking exploration of social constructs of sexual identity and gender relations. Each playlet has two characters named "He" and "She," but even those generic terms offer no concrete clue to how they will behave. In the first playlet, "The Mustache," an effeminate man and a masculine woman share a mustache between them, using the artifact as a sign of masculinity, but showing how the sign changes, depending on context. Berman cleverly addresses contemporary societal ideas and misconceptions about bisexuality, transvestism, and androgyny. "The Love Nest" is more rooted in Mexican culture and machismo as it depicts a married man and his lover in their casachica, or love nest. What Berman unmasks here is the male's idea that he is in control of the sexual situation, for [End Page 522] "She" shows the audience by her behavior that "She" is playacting the role the male authority figure wants her to accept. "The Pistol," a demonstration of Berman's more sinister side, deals with yet another couple engaged in a battle of wits as they try to conceal a pistol from each other. The firearm is real, but the couple engages in playacting that forever defers a revelation of their "true" identities, the very existence of which is questioned. Berman highlights in these three plays the extent to which the idea of gender is a performance, a theatrical event. From her first published play, initially called Bill (1979) and then changed to Yankee, Berman has been concerned with the interrelationships between individual and national identities and the influences that affect their formation. The change in names of the play is a sign of the struggle she dramatizes: Bill is the name of the individual while "Yankee" is the national category to which Bill belongs. Berman analyzes patterns of human experience that go beyond the initial context of Mexican-US relations that the plot initially suggests. Although Bill may be a Yankee in Mexico, his individual struggle to understand himself, along with his changing relationships with the Mexican family that takes him in, problematize his stereotyped characterization as the "enemy" or "Other." Also, with this play Berman begins her deconstruction of official history and national myths that will be an essential subtext in Herejía (Heresy 1983), Aguila o sol (Heads or Tails, 1985), and Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Between Villa and a Naked Woman, 1995). Berman is a Mexican of Polish-Jewish...

Editorial Comment: On Attributions, Appropriations, Misinterpretations, and Latin American Theatre Studies

Editorial Comment: On Attributions, Appropriations, Misinterpretations, and Latin American Theatre Studies

Comments on Ofelia Schutte's Work in Feminist Philosophy

This paper on Ofelia Schutte's work discusses five main themes: gender oppression in the context of Latin American theories of social liberation; normative heterosexuality in Beauvoir and Irigaray; Schutte's analysis of women and capitalist globalization processes; her work on cultural identities; and the possibility of feminist transnational identities. 1 conclude with a comment on her postcolonial epistemological method in addressing cultural incommensurability and the possibility of a common agenda for transnational feminism.

Encyclopedia of Latin American theater

Latin American culture has given birth to numerous dramatic works, though it has often been difficult to locate information about these plays and playwrights. This volume traces the history of Latin American theater, including the Nuyorican and Chicano theaters of the United States, and surveys its history from the pre-Columbian period to the present. Sections cover individual Latin American countries. Each section features alphabetically arranged entries for playwrights, independent theaters, and cultural movements. The volume begins with an overview of the development of theater in Latin America. Each of the country sections begins with an introductory survey and concludes with copious bibliographical information. The entries for playwrights provide factual information about the dramatist's life and works and place the author within the larger context of international literature. Each entry closes with a list of works by and about the playwright. A selected, general bibliography appears at the end of the volume.

Comments on Ofelia Schutte's Work in Feminist Philosophy

This paper on Ofelia Schutte's work discusses five main themes: gender oppression in the context of Latin American theories of social liberation; normative heterosexuality in Beauvoir and Irigaray; Schutte's analysis of women and capitalist globalization processes; her work on cultural identities; and the possibility of feminist transnational identities. 1 conclude with a comment on her postcolonial epistemological method in addressing cultural incommensurability and the possibility of a common agenda for transnational feminism.

Revisitando la teoría del desarrollo bajo la globalización

ANALYSIS OF THE IMPACT OF NEOLIBERALISM ON LATIN AMERICA AND OF THE SITUATIONS THAT CONDUCTED TO ITS ADOPTION. THE AUTHOR EXAMINES THE GLOBALIZATION PROCESS, ITS IDEOLOGY AND THE WAY THESE NATIONS HAVE ENTERED INTO THIS DYNAMIC. LIKEWISE, HE STATES ECONOMIC STAGNATION AND POVERTY SERIOUSLY QUESTION THIS MODEL, AND HE SUGGESTS THE NEED OF REEVALUATING THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF DEVELOPMENT THEORY AND BUILDING NEW ALTERNATIVES. TO DO SO, HE MAKES A CONCEPTUAL REVISION OF DEVELOPMENT, WITH SPECIAL EMPHASIS ON THE LATIN AMERICAN THEORY CONTRASTING THE NEOLIBERAL POSITION. GUILLEN SUGGESTS STRATEGIES THAT ALLOW TO RECOVER GROWTH AND TO INCREASE EMPLOYMENT BY MEANS OF A BALANCED VISION AMONG THE STATE, THE MARKET AND THE CIVIL SOCIETY.

Comments on Ofelia Schutte's Work in Feminist Philosophy

This paper on Ofelia Schutte's work discusses five main themes: gender oppression in the context of Latin American theories of social liberation; normative heterosexuality in Beauvoir and Irigaray; Schutte's analysis of women and capitalist globalization processes; her work on cultural identities; and the possibility of feminist transnational identities. 1 conclude with a comment on her postcolonial epistemological method in addressing cultural incommensurability and the possibility of a common agenda for transnational feminism.

On-Line Simulations/Real-Life Politics A Discussion with Ricardo Dominguez on Staging Virtual Theatre

FUSCO: Electronic Disturbance Theater’s actions since 1998 have become the focus of intense interest in the field of performance studies. It would seem that EDT is being viewed as an ideal bridge between disparate worlds. Unlike other kinds of virtual performance that are fixated on the interface of bodies and machines in strictly formal terms, EDT’s work stresses how the Internet is a dramatic scenario that can facilitate social and political engagement with issues in the offline world. Whereas much Latin American performance and theatre that is celebrated as representative of a distinct cultural identity relies on ethnographic or folkloric representations of “nativeness,” EDT’s support for Zapatismo combines the political struggle for indigenous self-determination with a critique of neoliberalism. What is your point of view about the explosion of academic interest in EDT’s work? DOMINGUEZ: There has been a proliferation of analysis of EDT in different academic communities: in the fields of new media and robotics, art history, performance studies, electronic politics, virtual architecture, urban studies, and recently globalization studies. We have also been examined by experts on information war and security and the RAND Corporation. This is an outcome of EDT’s insistence that what we do is a type of performance that is similar to the agitprop theatre of the last century. The strange attractor for each of these academic groups is that EDT is not only using the latest technology, i.e., the Internet, but that our work negates the dominant ideologies that surround this technology’s politics, distribution, and “commodification.” EDT’s gestures offer a different form of social embodiment for the networks. We have also argued that we do not have to accept “communication and documentation” as the only options open to nonspecialists for interaction with the networks. We proposed that the Internet can become a “decisive” zone to articulate

The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater

The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater

Cristóbal Kay, Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment, Routedge, London and New York, 1989

Cristóbal Kay, <i>Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment</i>, Routedge, London and New York, 1989