Latin American Theatre 1950-2000: An Anthology and A Critical Reader

FAIN: HR-20172-01

Gustavo Geirola
Whittier College (Whittier, CA 90601-4446)

No project description available

Associated Products

¡Todo a pulmón! Entrevista a diez teatristas argentinos. (Book)
Title: ¡Todo a pulmón! Entrevista a diez teatristas argentinos.
Editor: Lola Proano
Editor: Gustavo Geirola
Abstract: It is a collection of ten interviews conducted in 2015 among Argentine playwrights with an uninterrupted work in the theater scene in their country. They all work as actors, directors, playwrights and producers, sometimes with all these roles at once. Several respondents also fulfill teaching tasks that usually end in a show and almost everyone assumes any active participation in the production and promotion thereof. For this reason, it difficult for them to demarcate where one role ends and when other begins. However, these artists do not live this situation as problematic, but as a healthy exchange of knowledge and perspectives that each role, because of its own specificity, puts into play, how it nourishes and interrogates the other ones.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: https://www.amazon.com/%C2%A1TODO-PULMON-Entrevistas-teatristas-argentinos/dp/1944508015/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1470410607&sr=8-7&keywords=geirola
Access Model: The book can be bought at Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
Publisher: Argus-a Artes y Humanidades/Arts & Humanities
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 9781944508012
Copy sent to NEH?: Yes

Performing Torture in Argentina and Chile (Article)
Title: Performing Torture in Argentina and Chile
Author: Henry James Morello
Abstract: In an attempt to reduce the chance of torture as spectacle, many Latin American plays including those by Gambaro, Mario Benedetti, and Eduardo Pavlovsky pushed much of the torture offstage or redirected it in some way. Nevertheless, there are some performances in Latin America that have surfaced recently as the next generation of what may be called vicarious victims attempt to understand and take ownership of what happened during the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. These artists present a challenge to the concept of distancing those acts of torture from the viewer. There are two events or cultural products, “Tortured Body/Recuperated Body” by Silvio De Gracia and Diana Torres’s Pornoterrorismo performance of “Perfo Luddite” that are considerably more overt in their depiction of the torture that occurred during the Southern Cone dictatorships These two acts of spectacle and concomitant looking problematize the way in which traumatic historical events are witnessed. While they offer a means through which the traumas of the past can be viewed and perhaps ameliorated, they cannot completely distance themselves from the problems arising from the fetishization, commercialization, and position as mere spectacle. Furthermore, even if they allow viewers the possibility of a shift in their position from passive object to active subject, they run the risk of distorting the events to the point of unknowability. Though it is difficult to make any ethical judgment on ways of addressing traumatic pasts, in some cases there seems to be a disconnect between intention and execution caused perhaps by a distorted sense of empathy, economic concerns, or perhaps some combination of those issues.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://www.argus-a.com.ar/teatro-latinoamericano-latin-american-theater/1159:performing-torture-in-argentina-and-chile.html
Access Model: Online publication. Free access online
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Argus-a Artes y Humanidades/Arts & Humanities V.21 (2016)
Publisher: Argus-a Artes y Humanidades/Arts & Humanities

La másmínima (a)parte: Valorization of Smallness in Mauricio Kartun’sTerrenal (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: La másmínima (a)parte: Valorization of Smallness in Mauricio Kartun’sTerrenal
Author: Laurie Lomask
Abstract: In his latest play, Terrenal (2014), Argentine writer and director Mauricio Kartun presents a modern-day rewriting of the myth of Cain and Abel. The elaboration of the Biblical story transforms into a critique of capitalism and industrialization, the source of the ambition and greed that provoke Cain’s ultimate fratricide. Throughout the work, the moral force and thematic universality of the play is filtered through details of smallness, from the scale of the staging (three actors, no set, and only a few props) to the dedicated labors of the two brothers (Cain, who cultivates red peppers, and Abel, who gathers beetles). Through an exploration of the aesthetics of the diminutive and the concentrate, drawn from Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space and other critics, this paper reflects on the ethics of neo-liberal market forces and the value of the local. It will highlight select differences in the means of theater production in Buenos Aires as compared to other cultural capitals, such as New York. It furthermore identifies a shift, specifically in Argentina, but more generally in contemporary Latin American theater, that is suspicious of global institutions and reminds the public of the importance of protecting even a small portion of oneself apart from the forces of globalization. This paper also invites reflection and debate on the economic conditions that foster or inhibit artistic production in the U.S. and Latin America.
Date: 05/27/2016
Conference Name: Latin American Studies Association New York, New York, May 27 - 30, 2016

eyond reparation: A response to the label “Theatre of Human Rights” in Colombia (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: eyond reparation: A response to the label “Theatre of Human Rights” in Colombia
Author: Alejandra Marin Pineda
Abstract: Colombian theatre gained some relevance since the second half of the 20th century through a successful insertion in the “Nuevo Teatro Latinoamericano”. This Nuevo Teatro was defined as essentially political, meaning an explicit engagement with social reality expressed in denouncing social injustices, uncovering the truth of State violence, reconstructing the memory of the acts of State terror, and calling their audiences to a public debate about the transformation of an unjust social order. In this paper, I propose that, since the 90s, face to the consolidation of neoliberalism and a long and deteriorated armed conflict in the country, this political commitment seems to have given way to a different kind of engagement: In the absence of effective State policies of truth, justice, and reparation, “Theatre of Human Rights”, as termed by the Corporación Colombiana de Teatro, would work as a cultural medium for symbolic reparation. Thus conceived, the political task of theatre would be to restitute the victims’ name, their dignity, their place in the social contract that binds the nation together, and of course, the humanity they have been stripped of by violent acts. I aim at interrogating this humanitarian approach, first by examining it in the light of a critique of Human Rights discourse, and second, by contrasting it with two contemporary plays that reflexively address the experience of violence and dehumanization beyond the idea of reparation: La técnica del hombre blanco by Víctor Viviescas and Donde se descomponen las colas de los burros, by Carolina Vivas.
Date: 05/27/2016
Conference Name: Latin American Studies Association New York, New York, May 27 - 30, 2016

Guillermo Cacace’s Mi hijo sólo camina un poco más lento and the praxis of forcework (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Guillermo Cacace’s Mi hijo sólo camina un poco más lento and the praxis of forcework
Author: Shannon April Sweeney
Abstract: Guillermo Cacace’s Mi hijo solo camina un poco más lento by the Croatian playwright Ivor Martinic has been one of the most successful and striking stage productions of the 2014-2015 theater season in Buenos Aires. Since its opening as part of the 2014 Festival Internacional de Dramaturgia Europa + América it has been sold out and continues to be so through October 2016. Although this new festival had very little publicity and no budget, the production seems to have evoked a powerful response. There is something uniquely Argentine happening here. A sensibility: not only in how the work translates into a specific cultural space, but how the theatrical praxis creates a specific type of work in the making. I propose to exam Cacace’s production, exploring both his directorial choices and the acting style and technique. In doing so, I will examine theater’s unique capacity to present a concentrated form of what Krzysztof Ziarek has called art’s forcework. By analyzing the praxis of the performer in relation to the event as a whole, I will investigate the dual nature of theater’s transformative forcework.
Date: 05/30/2016
Conference Name: Latin American Studies Association New York, New York, May 27 - 30, 2016

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