Abstract

This essay considers the many Buenos Aires theatrical and sociocultural performances arising out of and in response to Argentina’s early-twenty-first-century socioeconomic crisis. It first turns to strictly theatrical examples from the crisis before moving to what have been called “social and cultural performances,” and then finally examining the convergence of the theatrical and the sociocultural in two twenty-first-century theatrical phenomena: the success of the Buenos Aires festival Teatroxlaidentidad (Theatreforidentity), founded and organized by the children of the 1976–83 dictatorship’s disappeared; and the rapid and sustained development of the teatro comunitario (community-based theatre) movement. All stand as potential models for horizontalist, self-generative approaches to cultural practices that accompany the political, economic, and social restructuring attempted in response to crisis, and thus they encourage us to rethink the relationship between theatrical and sociocultural performances, and to reexamine the complexities in such a relationship. Performance’s very fluidity renders it a particularly fruitful venue for reconsidering economic and cultural modes of production across the geographic landscape of a rapidly transforming national capital.

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