Staging Words Performing Worlds

Staging Words presents new perspectives on Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela and their theater, by postulating that nation can be imagined and reconstructed through the deliberate performance of intertexts. The book shows how past artistic texts - other plays, stories, newspaper articles, songs, or paintings - can be manipulated and translated to create a new theatrical script, and that this new script can expose an innovative space for interpreting the nation. The introduction reviews theories of intertextuality, nation, and nationalism and applies them to Latin America. Each chapter studies two to three plays and shows how the intertexts open up hidden connections and border spaces within texts and between texts that the new writer and reader fill with significance, replacing the meaning of the pretext with their own. This new textual voice permits texts to be restaged, reconfigured, and imagined in a way that is purely Latin American.

Feeling the Gaze explores the visual elements in eight contemporary Argentine and Chilean theater performances. Gail A. Bulman shows how staged images can awaken spectators' emotions to activate their intellect, provoking nuanced and deep contemplation of social, historical, and political themes. Ranging from simple props, costumes, body movements and spatial constructions to integrated media and digital images, the aesthetic components in these pieces engage to forge multifaceted storytelling, stimulate the public's relation to memory, and create affective bonds that help build individual and collective social consciousness. Recent innovations in Southern Cone theatre aesthetics have been shifting traditional performance/spectator relationships and animating ideological discussions. The various works presented here give readers a holistic understanding of the emerging prominence of visuality and affect as a vehicle for political advocacy in Latin American theatre and performance. The book asks us to consider the formation of new spectator-performance bonds as authors, directors, and theatre groups increasingly turn toward alternative settings for their work. Lingering visual memories of the performances, together with the feelings that the performative experience stirs up, provide spectators with an enduring focal point through which to reflect on and judge what is "beyond" the performed scenes. Staged live in the Southern Cone and internationally since 2014, these plays demonstrate the transgressive power of the visual to make spectators see, feel, and potentially act against injustices and violence. This study offers comprehensive critical discussions of Teatro Banda's O'Higgins: un hombre en pedazos; Teatro Nino Proletario's Fulgor; Mario, Luiggi y sus fantasmas's Manual de carrona; Agustin Leon Pruzzo's En la sombra de la cupula; Teatro la Maria's Los millonarios; Claudio Tolcachir's Proximo; Sergio Blanco's Tebas Land; and Lola Arias's Doble de Riesgo.

Fluid Bodies traces the intersections of global movement with transgender and queer identities from authors and artists of the Hispanic Caribbean. Utilizing the theme of fluidity and travel, Fluid Bodies analyzes novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art. These works demonstrate how transgender and queer bodies redefine belonging, particularly national belonging, through global movement and community making practices. Through these genres, the text follows the movement of transgender and queer identities from textual spaces to spaces of the body. The gradual movement from text to body—as it occurs in these genres—demonstrates the variety of representational strategies that dismantle binary readings of gender, sexuality, and nationality. Transgender visibility is a pressing social issue, and today’s transgender moment will be a social and political necessity for years to come. Of particular importance are representations of transgender and/or queer people of color. The field of transgender representation is growing, and Fluid Bodies adds to the visibility of transgender and queer identity from the Hispanic Caribbean. By investigating the relationship between novels, graphic novels, theatre, and performance art, Fluid Bodies emphasizes how each work plays on and against the separation of language and the body, and how Hispanic Caribbean authors and artists represent transgender and queer identity in order to redefine cultural and national belonging in various geographic spaces.

Since Argentina's transition to democracy, the expression of human fragility on the stage has taken diverse forms. This book examines the intervention of theatre and performance in the memory politics surrounding Argentina's return to democracy and makes a case for performance's transformative power.

"This book defines and exemplifies a major genre of modern dramatic writing, termed historiographic metatheatre, in which self-reflexive engagements with the traditions and forms of dramatic art illuminate historical themes and aid in the representation of historical events and, in doing so, formulates a genre. Historiographic metatheatre has been, and remains, a seminal mode of political engagement and ideological critique in the contemporary dramatic canon. Locating its key texts within the traditions of historical drama, self-reflexivity in European theatre, debates in the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism, and currents in contemporary historiography, this book provides a new critical idiom for discussing the major works of the genre and others that utilize its techniques. Feldman studies landmarks in the theatre history of postwar Britain by Weiss, Stoppard, Brenton, Wertenbaker and others, focusing on European revolutionary politics, the historiography of the World Wars and the effects of British colonialism. The playwrights under consideration all use the device of the play-within-the-play to explore constructions of nationhood and of Britishness, in particular. Those plays performed within the framing works are produced in places of exile where, Feldman argues, the marginalized negotiate the terms of national identity through performance."--Publisher's website.

A History of Latinx Performing Arts in the U.S. provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the Latinx performing arts in what is now the U.S. since the sixteenth century. This book combines theories and philosophical thought developed in a wide spectrum of disciplines—such as anthropology, sociology, gender studies, feminism, and linguistics, among others—and productions’ reviews, historical context, and political implications. Split into two volumes, these books offer interpretations and representations of a wide range of Latinxs’ lived experiences in the U.S. Volume I provides a chronological overview of the evolution of the Latinx community within the U.S., spanning from the 1500s to today, with an emphasis on the Chicano artistic renaissance initiated by Luis Valdez and the Teatro Campesino in the 1960s. Volume II continues, looking more in depth at the experiences of Latinx individuals on theatre and performance, including Miguel Piñero, Lin-Manuel Miranda, María Irene Fornés, Nilo Cruz, and John Leguizamo, as well as the important role of transnational migration in Latinx communities and identities across the U.S. A History of Latinx Performing Arts in the U.S. offers an accessible and comprehensive understanding of the field and is ideal for students, researchers, and instructors of theatre studies with an interest in the diverse and complex history of Latinx theatre and performance.

This collection offer a series of new essays authored by leading scholars of Latin American and U.S. Latino theater as well as the performance script Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, written by Guillermo Gomez-Pena. The fourteen essays focus on contemporary Latin American and U.S. Latino plays and performances and challenge the meanings of genre, gender, race, cultural identity, and performance itself in the context of globalization and shifting borders. The concept of trans/acting, a term that connotes negotiation and/or exchange, provides the framework for essays that include such topics as tansculturation, transnationalism, transgender, transgenre, translation, and adaptation. These individual studies of contemporary theater and performance arts are complimented by trans/actor Gomez-Pena's Mexterminator vs. The Global Predator, a striking transgressive script that underscores the performance nature of territorial and symbolic border crossings. Jacqueline Bixler is Alumni Distinguished Professor of Spanish at Virginia Tech. Laurietz Seda is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Connecticut-Storrs.

This study explores how Spanish American modernista writers incorporated journalistic formalities and industry models through the crónica genre to advance their literary preoccupations. Through a variety of modernista writers, including José Martí, Amado Nervo, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera and Rubén Darío, Reynolds argues that extra-textual elements – such as temporality, the material formats of the newspaper and book, and editorial influence – animate the modernista movement’s literary ambitions and aesthetic ideology. Thus, instead of being stripped of an esteemed place in the literary sphere due to participation in the market-based newspaper industry, journalism actually brought modernismo closer to the writers’ desired artistic autonomy. Reynolds uncovers an original philosophical and sociological dimension of the literary forms that govern modernista studies, situating literary journalism of the movement within historical, economic and temporal contexts. Furthermore, he demonstrates that journalism of the movement was eventually consecrated in book form, revealing modernista intentionality for their mass-produced, seemingly utilitarian journalistic articles. The Spanish American Crónica Modernista, Temporality, and Material Culture thereby enables a better understanding of how the material textuality of the crónica impacts its interpretation and readership.