Theater

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Theater

The history of the theater in Latin America is significantly longer than the period of the occupation by the Europeans. Before Columbus's arrival the great civilizations of the New World had developed drama and theatrical forms which satisfied ritual and aesthetic purposes. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega refers to the comedies and tragedies of the Incas; the Aztecs had developed forms of dance and spectacle in a theatrical mode. Regrettably, none of these survived the Conquest. The only extant pre-Columbian theater piece is the Rabinal Achí, a curiously repetitious Maya drama elaborated by the K'iche' (Quiché) of Guatemala. After centuries of oral transmission it was transcribed in 1850 as the Dance of Tun and later translated into French by the Abbé Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg. The play recounts the capture, questioning, and death of the K'iche' warrior. Although the cast is large, there are only five speaking parts and the notable feature is the parallelism that marks the principal interaction between the two warriors.

Theater may have contributed little to the conquest of the Americas, but it was vital to their colonization. The Spanish cleverly adapted indigenous artistic forms to hasten the process of converting the Indians to Catholicism, one of the two major objectives of the Conquest. The earliest recorded theatrical forms in the New World are, in fact, short religious pieces (known as autos, loas, or mojigangas) developed by the clergy, who at times distorted indigenous concepts in order to convey the tenets of Christianity, primarily for the purpose of catechization. Little evidence remains because of the ephemeral nature of these plays and the severe ecclesiastical censorship of the times. In sixteenth-century Brazil, Padre José de Anchieta wrote autos sacramentales incorporating the flora, fauna, and ethnology of the new land, in combinations of Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and indigenous languages.

In the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, the antecedents for theater can be found in the Corpus Christi festivities of European influence and in the religious festivities of the African slaves. These celebrations originated in the slave barracks at first, then in the meeting places of free blacks where they planned their yearly Three Kings Day celebration (January 6). On that day, the Afro-descendants filled the streets with their wemileres, chants, and dances.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, a secular theater responding to the needs of the growing population began to flourish, especially in Lima and other major centers. In Hispaniola, Cristóbal de Llerena (1540–1610) wrote socially critical and comedic entremeses as early as 1588, thus becoming the first criollo playwright. In Mexico, Fernán González De Eslava wrote both religious and secular pieces, some in honor of viceregal celebrations and special events. The rapid growth and development in the theater in Spain during the golden age of Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, and others, provided impetus for writers in Latin America.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

In the seventeenth century the theater of Latin America continued to reflect the literary traditions of Europe, and there was regular interaction between the two continents. The celebrated Spanish play-wright Pedro Calderón de la Barca visited the New World, whereas the Mexican-born Juan Ruíz De Alarcón established residency in Spain; his twenty-four plays, although claimed by Mexico as a national legacy, show little evidence of the New World in language or customs. Known as the moralist of his time, he valued human dignity, and his best plays, Las paredes oyen (1628) and La verdad sospechosa, (1634) are both didactic and entertaining.

The literary genius of the era is the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz, a prodigy whose superb gift for language combined with a powerful sense of social and sexual equality to produce works with lasting value. El divino Narciso (1690) is written as an auto sacramental, and Los empeños de una casa (1683) represents the American baroque in theater. In 1990 a play attributed to Sor Juana, La gran comedia de La segunda Celestina, was discovered in the Mexican archives.

In Brazil the theater of the seventeenth century is marked by a decline of the activities of the Jesuits in presenting drama. In general the representations are linked to religious festivals or to other popular feasts or public occasions. Manuel Botelho de Oliveira is known as one of the first Brazilians to publish his works, but they are Spanish in spirit, technique, themes, and even at times in language.

Throughout the Americas the theater movement reflected the tastes and interests of the privileged classes. The theatrical artists who toured in the New World with Spanish-based productions stimulated local activity, and writers and plays in the Americas tended to echo the themes and styles of European theater.

Just as Spain failed to shine in the eighteenth century after the literary splendor of the baroque had passed, the New World showed little originality with regard to theatrical trends. In Brazil, "O Judeu" (the pen name of Antônio José da Silva) wrote satirical works caricaturing both the nobility and the church, which led to his persecution and burning at the stake. The earliest theater pieces from Argentina are Siripo (1789), by Manuel José de Lavardén, and the anonymous El amor de la estanciera (ca. 1792), which is recognized as a humble precursor of the gaucho drama. In Mexico, Eusebio de Vela (1688–1737) wrote comedias for his Coliseo de Mexico.

NINETEENTH CENTURY

The Wars of Independence that rumbled across Latin America between 1810 and about 1825 did little to break the cultural ties with Spain. Theater fare often consisted of adaptations or translations of European works, and the neoclassical tendencies of the period served didactic purposes, with an emphasis on reason rather than on emotion. In Buenos Aires the Sociedad de Buen Gusto was founded in 1817 to develop an autonomous theater in this fledgling provincial capital, but it survived only two years. As both playwright and actor, Luis Ambrosio Morante (1775–1837) was responsible for its first production, Cornelia Bororquía (1817), one of several plays that dealt with conflicts between civil and religious power. In Mexico the celebrated novelist José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi (1776–1827) wrote didactic, neoclassical plays. However, an examination of indigenous texts transcribed and published in this century demonstrates that indigenous theater was kept alive through memory and oral tradition and used techniques of subterfuge, linguistic plays, and double entendres to protest colonial rule. An example of this is Nicaragua's El Güegüense (El macho-ratón), a satirical drama considered to be one of Latin America's most distinctive colonial expressions. Written probably in the seventeenth or eighteenth century in a mixture of Spanish and Nahuatl, and performed with music and dance, it was first published in English in 1883 based on Karl Herman Berendt's fusion of two versions owned by Dr. Juan Eligio de la Rocha, Nicaragua's first linguist. The most reliable source available is Carlos Mantica's 2001 edition, transcribed directly from españahuat (a mixture of Spanish and Nahuatl) to contemporary Spanish. UNESCO declared this "play" a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005.

Throughout the colonial period (1500s–1800s), indigenous theater coexisted with other theatrical trends. Late twentieth-century publications in colonial studies have unearthed previously unpublished dramas, revised outdated translations, and worked with new sources and critical tools to provide more reliable transcriptions. These revisionist scholarly works begin to show the literary/artistic qualities of these dramas as well as the ways in which they provide access to the indigenous colonial experience. Moreover, borrowing from performance studies, these publications show how indigenous colonial theater can be used to study the expressive culture of the colonized. As a result, rather than focusing on these performances solely as tools for catechization, they demonstrate how the indigenous lived in a contact, hybrid zone characterized by the negotiation of power and authority between the cultures of the conqueror and the conquered. An excellent example of this work is the four-volume series-in-progress Nahuatl Theater, edited by Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart.

In Brazil, King João VI ordered the construction of the Royal Theater after his flight from the Napoleonic invasion, in order to transplant his favorite Italian operas to Rio de Janeiro. The first play by a Brazilian with a national theme is Antônio José, ou O Poeta e a Inquisição (1838) by Domingos José Gonçalves de Magalhães, written as a classical tragedy to express his disgust with the new school of romanticism.

While romanticism was sweeping the European continent, its arrival in Spain and Latin America was arrested by political issues in both sites. In 1833 the Mexican expatriate Manuel Eduardo de Gorostiza (1789–1851) brought his masterpiece, Contigo pan y cebolla, back to Mexico as a satirical view of the excessive sentimentalism and idealization of the romantic mode. When the Cuban playwright (born in the Dominican Republic) Francisco Javier Foxá (1816–1865) wrote Don Pedro de Castilla in 1836, he became the first Romantic playwright of Latin America. In Lima in 1837, Father Antonio Valdez reportedly "discovered" an ancient Inca text, Ollantay, but its European structure led critics to conclude that he had written the text based on ancient themes and legends. From the 1830s to the 1870s the theater was still nourished largely by European themes and techniques. There was a cleavage between exotic and chivalric revivals of European inspiration and incipient efforts to identify customs, deeds, and values of the Americas. The new political and literary freedom of the period generated polemical initiatives to use the stage for propaganda.

The most representative Mexican playwrights of the period reflected both tendencies: Fernando Calderón (1809–1845) generally escaped Mexican boundaries in a search for esoteric European fancies, while his compatriot Ignacio Rodríguez Galván (1816–1842) looked to the traditions and legends of the New World, as in Muñoz, Visitador de México (1838). The brutality of the Juan Manuel de Rosas dictatorship in Argentina stifled a free theater development, but while in exile in Bolivia, Pedro Echagüe (1821–1889) staged his version of Rosas (1851), full of political invective and recrimination. At home the theater tended to be adulatory or to follow the sentimental, exotic, or satiric-regionalistic models of the romantic period. In Cuba, the most important playwright of the period, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814–1873), is also claimed by Spain given that many of her plays were written and staged to great success there. While influenced by the Romanticism of the period, her works (Baltazar and Saul, for example) question and invert the Romantic hero and heroine.

The monarchy in Brazil created an entirely different political climate, and Brazilian works ranged from escapist theater to social commentary, advocating, for instance, the abolition of slavery. The most important was Martins Pena, who with wit and grace developed the comedy of manners, leaving a dramatic legacy that captured the essence of Brazilian customs and values in the mid-nineteenth century.

The disparities in the latter part of the century are even more pronounced throughout the Americas. Just as neoclassic modes survived into the Romantic period, the Romantic modes continued well into the period in which realism characterized the novel and a new psychological base, inspired by Sigmund Freud and Henrik Ibsen, underscored the Spanish theater known as the alta comedia, which tried to capture a realistic view of life. The Mexican playwrights José Peón Contreras (1843–1907) and Manuel José Othón (1858–1906) exemplified the period with facile verses and Romantic excesses. In Brazil a new theater modeled on the Gymnase in Paris, where the repertoire of French realism triumphed, enjoyed a brief period of enthusiastic support for its thesis plays on important social issues of the time, but it was superseded by the success of the revista (review), a light and comical form popularized by the prolific Artur Azevedo (1855–1908), whose talent for spontaneity, improvisation, and popular psychology ensured success for his farces and satires about Brazilian customs and politics.

The Caribbean saw the apogee of the highly popular teatro bufo or vernáculo (humorous/vernacular theater) in contrast to the European realistic tradition. This blackface theater started around the 1850s in Havana with Francisco Covarrubias (1755–1850), considered the father of Cuban theater. The plays present stock characters—the learned free black, the Spanish merchant, and the mulata—and through the use of choteo, or humor and political satire, they aimed to critique the petite bourgeoisie that wanted independence from Spain while maintaining slavery. Puerto Rico also had a popular tradition of comedy and satire with plays presented in open-air corrales. Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1826–1882) became the region's first important playwright. In La Cuarterona he started a long tradition of plays dealing with racial difference.

In the latter part of the century, in the Río de la Plata region, there developed the sainete criollo (creole burlesque or farce), a theatrical form driven by the moral values, social problems, and ethnic complications of an area rapidly settled by European immigrants, and derived from the indigenous and gaucho traditions. When Eduardo Gutiérrez's novel Juan Moreira was adapted for the circus by the Uruguayan clown José Podestá in 1884, the door was opened to a new combination of the Spanish picaresque traditions and local elements full of both life and sadness. Likewise, the Dominican Virginia Elena Ortea (1866–1903) transformed the Spanish zarzuela to advocate equal rights for women in Las feministas.

TWENTIETH CENTURY

The foregoing emphasis on Mexico, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Río de la Plata in no way is meant to suggest a lack of theatrical activity in other countries, all of which have their own rich histories, reflecting the strong influence of European models. It is really in the twentieth century that the theater of Latin America took on a unique and original quality that allowed it to stand with the best of world drama. Latin American theater staged its multidimensionality as it navigated the difficult waters of negotiating aesthetic and political interests. On the one hand, there was a search for and enrichment of a Latin American specificity within this continent's different historical and economic moments. On the other, there was a continuous and sustained process of devouring and transforming the European avant-gardes in order to avoid the divide between the aesthetic and the political.

In much of Latin America the nineteenth-century traditions continued well into the new century. The exception was the Río de la Plata area, where the picturesqueness of the European migration fused with the national atmosphere to provide raw material for the modernized sainete, embodied in the plays of the Uruguayan Florencio Sánchez. In such dramas as La gringa (1904) and Barranca abajo (1905), he mel-ded the concerns of people struggling with their ambience and their own shortcomings into dynamic models that set the standards for his generation. Roberto Payró (1867–1928), Gregorio Laferrère (1867–1913), and Ernesto Herrera (1886–1917) continued the sainete tradition.

The impetus for a modernized theater originated in Mexico in 1928 when Salvador Novo and Xavier Villaurrutia, with the patronage of Antonieta Rivas Mercado, launched the Teatro de Ulises, a vanguard theater that brought to Mexico the latest techniques in staging, lighting, and direction. Earlier efforts by the Grupo de los Siete Autores had made some progress, but had not succeeded in breaking the old traditions of the prompter's box or the domination by the primary actor or actress. The new experimental format required a small theater, electric lighting, memorized text, and coordination by the director of all elements of the performance. Other Mexican groups, such as Orientación, quickly followed suit in the effort to establish these universal phenomena in the national aesthetic consciousness.

During the 1930s and into the early 1940s, similar initiatives of modern/national theater projects sprang up throughout the Latin American republics. Theater rejected the outmoded realist tradition that characterized the previous decades of the century. In Argentina the work of Leónidas Barletta with the Teatro del Pueblo had the double objective of modernizing theater craft and delivering a social message. With this group Roberto Arlt, a major playwright long undervalued, staged such plays as Saverio el cruel (1936), which incorporates metatheatrical concepts with elements of class conflict.

The renovation occurred in Puerto Rico in 1938 when the Ateneo Puertorriqueño presented three plays selected by Emilio Belaval for their national themes. The national conscience of Puerto Rico was awakened by the desire for social reform for the displaced jíbaro (hillbilly) or the immigrant to New York. Belaval's short-lived group, Areyto, was soon followed by others with the same objectives. In Cuba, the staging of Virgilio Piñera's Electra Garrigó in 1948 marked the beginning of a modern theatrical trend. His False Alarm, published in 1949, predates Ionesco's The Bald Soprano and is thus considered the first absurdist play in Latin America.

The Brazilian theater was characterized during these years by revues, farces, operettas, and burlesque, represented by authors continuing the traditions of Artur Azevedo. Although the Semana de Arte Moderna in 1922 revolutionized Brazilian letters, its impact was not felt in the theater. During the 1930s the theater of Jo racy Camargo explored sociopolitical theories of class struggle. Change came through Os Comediantes's brilliant staging of Nelson Rodrigues's multilevel Vestido de noiva (1943) by the Polish-emigré director Zbigniew Ziembinski, who had been trained in German Expressionism.

A curious aspect of the Chilean theater movement was that the renaissance occurred through the universities. In 1941 at the University of Chile and in 1943 at the Catholic University of Santiago, semiprofessional theater companies were established to bring to the Chilean stage the principles espoused by Margarita Xirgú with her touring productions of Federico García Lorca's plays.

All of these experimental and independent initiatives, combined with those of other countries, laid the groundwork for the boom in Latin American theater that took form in the 1950s and 1960s. The play by the Argentine Carlos Gorostiza, El puente, which premiered in 1949, moved from the experimental stage to the commercial stage in 1950, marking the beginning of a new era. Throughout the Americas, conditions favored an expansion in the theater, and playwrights and directors responded to the challenge with exciting new plays in imaginative stagings. Their numbers were legion. Their objectives, however, were amazingly cohesive: to bring to the Latin American theater a new sense of its own identity, capturing the national and human spirit through believable characters who manifested the social, political, religious, and personal conflicts of individuals in modern societies.

Not all plays, naturally, were masterpieces, but the new generation included those who produced the contemporary canon: Emilio Carballido and Luisa Josefina Hernández (Mexico), Osvaldo de Dragún and Griselda Gambaro (Argentina), Jorge Díaz and Egon Wolff (Chile), René Marqués and Francisco Arriví (Puerto Rico), José Triana, Abelardo Estorino, and Antón Arrufat (Cuba), and a host of others. Their experiments with lights, music, sound, and movement were inspiring to a new generation of directors, including Jorge Lavelli and Jaime Kogan (Argentina), Julio Castillo and Juan Tovar (Mexico), Isaac Chocrón (Venezuela), José Lacomba (Puerto Rico), Orlando Rodríguez (Chile), Zbigniew Ziembinski, Luciano Salce, and José Celso (Brazil), and many others.

This expansion continued virtually unchecked into the 1960s, national differences duly noted, when Latin Americans began to seek inspiration not so much from the traditional European or American sources as from within Latin America itself and to develop the creación colectiva (theater developed by the group). The year 1968 marks a critical juncture when theater festivals were organized in Lima, Peru; San José, Costa Rica; Mexico City; and Manizales, Colombia, the latter an event that has continued into the twenty-first century. These festivals developed a sense of solidarity within the Latin American theater community, providing groups with the opportunity to be seen and to see and to draw from the best of their counterparts.

At the same time, in contrast with the "well-made plays" of the 1950s and early 1960s, the theater again became more experimental, reacting against bourgeois standards in favor of a more egalitarian system. Directors assumed a less authoritarian role in order to allow actors to create their own works collectively, especially in those cases where groups felt that plays capable of expressing their sociopolitical aims were not available. Drawing on the models set by the Living Theatre and the Berliner Ensemble, the manifestations of the creación colectiva in Latin America are as varied as the groups that represented them, but some are exemplary. In Brazil, Augusto Boal established the Teatro de Arena in 1965 using the teatro de coringa, a form that allowed great flexibility in putting actors into direct contact with the staging and the public. Boal, at times in exile, later developed a journalistic theater, an invisible theater, and an image theater under the broad rubric of "theater of the oppressed." Teatro Aleph (Chile), Libre Teatro Libre (Argentina), CLETa (Mexico), Yuyachkani and Cuatrotablas (Peru), and many others experimented with similar politically oriented theatrical forms. The most developed activity was in Colombia, where the TEC (Teatro Experimental de Cali) under the direction of Enrique Buenaventura and La Candelaria (Bogotá) founded by Santiago García, Patricia Ariza, and Carlos José Reyes, developed coherent methodological systems for inverting traditional bourgeois structures.

The Cuban theater followed the typical Latin American patterns until the revolution of 1959 transformed theater not only in Havana but throughout the island. In 1961 the Conjunto Dramático de Oriente was founded. They worked within the tradition of the teatro de relaciones, a mode of popular street theater dating back to colonial times. This theater uses tragicomic elements and simple scenery, and it borrows music and dance elements from the carnival as expressive forms. Afro-Cuban playwrights such as Eugenio Hernández Espinosa became active participants in the nascent revolutionary theater scene. His first play, María Antonia, gained critical attention in 1967. A tragedy set within the revolution with a marginalized Afro-Cuban woman as a protagonist, the play staged for the first time elements of Afro-Cuban culture previously absent in the theatrical tradition. By the late 1960s, Cuban cultural policies were dictated by the hard-liners, and the revolution began to use the theater as an instrument for social change. Writers such as José Triana and Antón Arrufat fell from favor and were replaced by the collectives such as Teatro Escambray, a group formed in the mountains to address social issues at a popular level within the new government structure. Some playwrights such as Matías Montes Huidobro, Eduardo Manet, and Julio Matas went into exile, while many who remained in Cuba were ostracized until the early 1980s. With major funding for art schools and theater academies throughout the island, the theater movement has flourished in Cuba. In spite of ideological constraints, Cuban theater is extremely reflexive and offers a critical outlook of national problems while it experiments with new forms.

By the mid-1970s, the Southern Cone found itself under authoritarian, military regimes. Dictatorships and their subsequent neoliberal economic policies profoundly transformed theater activity. On the one hand, repression and censorship forced many playwrights into exile and decimated independent theater movements by transforming a number of theater practitioners into "disappeared." On the other, official policies favored and supported a commercial theater that focused primarily on entertainment. Alternative theaters resisted and contested official discourse and fought to keep the memory of the disappeared alive through plays characterized by oblique, indirect language. In Chile, Oscar Castro, one of the few survivors of El Aleph theater group, was able to stage plays in detention camps during the first years of the dictatorship. Later, Juan Radrigán focused on disenfranchised groups through stagings in places outside of the professional theater scene. The theater group ICTUS was able to present plays by Marco Antonio de la Parra, David Benavente, and Isadora Aguirre after 1979. Ramón Griffero founded the group Fin de Siglo after returning from exile in 1983. He staged a number of his plays at El Trolley, a clandestine space that used to be the union hall for Santiago's trolley workers. In Argentina, the experiment with Teatro Abierto in Buenos Aires in 1981, spearheaded by Oswaldo Dragún, was a collaboration originally among twenty playwrights and twenty directors of different generations and political affiliations who rejected the military regime. They staged Argentina's psychological and sociopolitical reality of the 1980s by recuperating first theatrical spaces that the dictatorship had transformed into commercial theaters and then public spaces with street theater and other popular community art forms, thus giving a new impetus to the Argentine theater. Uruguay's Teatro El galpón returned from exile in 1984.

The politicization of the theater in Latin America throughout the 1970s and 1980s did not replace other forms entirely. While the influence of Bertolt Brecht was ubiquitous, Artaudian strains of total theater were also common, as were occasional remnants of theater of the absurd. Some playwrights experimented with ritual and game-playing, and metatheatrical forms kept pace with a new insistence on documentary-style drama. A new generation of playwrights emerged, including Vicente Leñero, Oscar Liera, and Oscar Villegas (Mexico); José Ignacio Cabrujas and Román Chalbaud (Venezuela); Eduardo Pavlovsky, Ricardo Talesnik, and Diana Raznovich (Argentina); Marco Antonio de la Parra (Chile), Roberto Ramos-Perea (Puerto Rico); Reynaldo Disla (Dominican Republic); Roberto Athayde, Naum Alves de Sousa, and María Adelaide Amaral (Brazil); and many others.

By the early 1990s and into the new millennium, the restoration of democratic governments in most countries relieved some political problems, but the crushing economic issues brought on by inflation and the debt crisis, coupled with overpopulation, inadequate social programs, and the narcotics traffic, produced a paradoxical situation whereby, on the one hand, greater imbalances in Latin America's social spheres were accentuated and, on the other, the cultural sphere tried to be homogenized. Theater as a reflection or abstraction of its surroundings in the early twenty-first century is trying to find a new voice and a place from which to create. Several expressions of "testimonial theater" were produced, such as Uruguay's plays by Marianela Morena that try to reconstruct the lives and keep alive the memory of the disappeared. Chile's Teatro de la Memoria and Argentina's Teatro por la Identidad focused on those who do not know their past because they were taken away from their parents by the military regimes.

Perhaps the most important innovation since the early 1990s has been the encounter of theater with other cultural forms such as film, video, and dance. Whether it is performance, intermediality, image theater, or what many call postdramatic theater, the written word is replaced by the image. Rather than theater being a representation rooted in a dramatic text, these new expressions are based on performativity and on the body's relationship to other spaces. In Argentina, Daniel Veronese, Alejandro Tantanian, and Ricardo Bartis with El Periférico de Objetos transform the stage into a lab in which they work in a border zone where the objects become object texts, object gestures, and object sounds. In Cuba, this break occurred in the late 1980s with Flora Lauten's Teatro Buendía and its emphasis on experimentation as an essential principle of artistic creation. Víctor Varela in 1987 presented in his living room La cuarta pared, a nonverbal piece that marked a radical rupture in Cuban theater and prompted discussions that went beyond aesthetics to ethical and ideological concerns. Incorporating Afro-Caribbean religious elements, Tomás González developed "acting in trance," in which "actors" follow a powerful psy-chophysical training until they assume or "mount" their "characters" as in a Santería ritual. Fátima Patterson works in the same tradition with Teatro Macubá in Santiago de Cuba, a project that focuses mainly on Caribbean women. In Colombia, Heidi and Rolf Abderhalden's Mapa Teatro uses nonconventional spaces and transforms architecture into the dramatic, thus breaking away from traditional notions of representation. Rosa Luisa Márquez and Antonio Martorell from Puerto Rico also work between theater and the visual arts, transforming materials and audiences through play and creative activities, thereby turning passive viewers into active participants in utopian mini-societies. Tanya Bruguera (Cuba), Diamela Eltit (Chile), Jesusa Rodríguez and Astrid Haddad (Mexico), Elia Arce (Costa Rica-U.S.), Josefina Baez (Dominican Republic-U.S.), and Coco Fuscó and Carmelita Tropicana (Cuba-U.S.) are some artists who use performance to intervene politically as they challenge patriarchy, hetero-normativity and repressive regimes. In all of these instances, the classic actor's role of "as if" is transformed into the performer's "being in" the present; representation gives way to presentness and performativity.

DOCUMENTATION AND WORKSHOPS

Documentation on theater has become increasingly sophisticated in the early twenty-first century as critics and scholars respond to new challenges. A rash of new journals regularly publishes analytical and informational items, including Conjunto and Tablas (Cuba), Apuntes (Chile), Teatro (Argentina), Revista Teatro (Colombia), Tramoya (Mexico), Latin American Theatre Review, Ollantay Theater Magazine, Gestos, and Diógenes: Anuario Crítico del Teatro Latinoamericano (United States; now defunct) and La Escena Latinoamericana (Canada), not to mention Primer Acto, which provides excellent coverage of Latin America. Some of these include Latino theater in the United States. There are also many online journals in such as Dramateatro Revista Digital, Revista Digital de la Escena, Teatro en Línea, Revista Telón, and e-misférica. Digital theater and performance archives are also being developed. The most important ones are the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (Diana Taylor and New York University), the Cuban/Latino Theater Archive (Lillian Manzor and University of Miami), and the Hugo Salazar del Alcázar Video Theater Collection (Luis Ramos-García and University of Minnesota).

Many of the above artists and critics have led the workshops offered by the Escuela Internacional de Teatro de América Latina y el Caribe (EITALC). Founded in Havana in 1987 by Oswaldo Dragún, it is a Latin American nongovernmental institution with a pedagogical and itinerant nature. Since its first workshop in Machurrucutu, Cuba, in 1989, the school has offered workshops in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as well as Denmark, Germany, Italy, and the United States, thus fostering development and exchange among Latin American theater practitioners. In 1995 the EITALC was recognized as a UNESCO chair in Latin American Theater. The EITALC has been coordinated by Ileana Diéguez from Mexico since Dragún's death in 1999.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The standard works in the field are eight companion volumes titled Historia del teatro hispanoamericano; see especially José Juan Arrom, Época colonial (1966); and Frank Dauster, Historia del teatro hispanoamericano (siglos XIX-XX), 2nd ed. (1973). Leon F. Lyday and George Woodyard edited a volume of essays on major playwrights, Dramatists in Revolt: The New Latin American Theater (1976).

An indispensable four-volume overview of the field was published in Spain by the Centro de Documentación Teatral: Moisés Pérez Coterillo, ed., Escenarios de dos mundos: Inventario teatral de Iberoamérica (1988).

The rate of growth in documentation is evident in several excellent publications: Severino João Albuquerque, Violent Acts: A Study of Contemporary Latin American Theatre (1991); Ronald D. Burgess, The New Dramatists of Mexico, 1967–1985 (1991); Gerardo Luzuriaga, Introducción a las teorías latinoamericanas del teatro (1990).

Additional Bibliography

Alder, Heidrun, and George Woodyard, eds. Resistencia y poder: teatro en Chile. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2000.

Alder, Heidrun, and Adrián Herr, eds. Extraños en dos patrias: Teatro latinoamericano del exilio. Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2003.

Pelletieri, Osvaldo, ed. Itinerarios del teatro latinoamericano. Buenos Aires: Galerna, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 2000.

Pelletieri, Osvaldo, ed. Teatro, memoria y ficción Buenos Aires: Galerna: Fundación Roberto Arlt, 2005.

Rizk, Beatriz J. Posmodernismo y teatro en América Latina. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2001.

Rizk, Beatriz J. Teatro y diáspora: Testimonios escénicos latinoamericanos. Irvine, CA: Gestos, 2002.

Rizk, Beatriz J. "Imagining a Continent: Recent Research on Latin American Theater and the Performing Arts." Latin American Research Review 42, no. 1 (2007): 196-214.

Rizk, Beatriz J. "The Patriarchy Problem." Latin American Research Review 42, no. 2 (2007): 238-252.

Taylor, Diana. Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991.

Taylor, Diana, and Juan Villegas, eds. Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in Latin/o America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Taylor, Diana, and Sarah J. Townsend, eds. Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater and Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, forthcoming.

Villegas, Juan. Para la interpretación del teatro como construcción visual. Irvine, CA: Ediciones de GESTOS, 2000.

Villegas, Juan. Historia multicultural del teatro y las teatralidades en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2005.

George Woodyard

Lillian Manzor

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture