Historia del teatro y las teatralidades en América Latina: Desde el periodo prehispánico a las tendencias contemporáneas by Juan Villegas (review)

Juan Villegas’ Historia del teatro y de las teatralidades en América Latina is an expanded and updated second edition of his 2005 Historia multicultural del teatro y las teatralidades en América Latina, published by Galerna. The book remains a praiseworthy and ambitious project in three ways. Not only does it aim to present a new history of Latin American theater, but in the process it brings to bear a lifetime’s worth of research and theater-theorizing from one of the most well-known critics of the Latin American stage. Finally, staying faithful to the promise expressed in the first edition, the author also manages to comply with his self-imposed limit of keeping the text to less than three hundred pages.

While rethinking the theater history genre is the book’s primary objective, the second and third are notable enterprises as well. Readers familiar with Villegas’ work will recognize his key concepts throughout the first chapter, titled “Algunos fundamentos teóricos,” but the uninitiated will find the Historia del teatro to be a welcome synthesis of his approach, as well as a rigorous demonstration of how it can be applied. The index of plays cited, as well as the extensive critical bibliography to which Villegas regularly refers, are useful for newcomers and specialists alike.

As such, the Historia del teatro represents a considerable display of virtuosity, but this feat is always heavily understated. Rather than narrativize or hint at grand arcs, Villegas opts instead to foreground the tireless diligence required to assemble a Latin American theater history that is both reliably systematic and flexible, “una guía, pero no una camisa de fuerza” (17). The chapters and their subheadings are accordingly organized first by four varieties of discursos teatrales, understood as acts of communication between producers and addressees that privilege the visual construction or perception of the world. These historical (and not essentialist) expressions are, namely, 1) hegemónicos, 2) marginales, 3) desplazados, and 4) subyugados. Villegas subsequently arranges these building blocks as they appear in larger historical and cultural groups of theater discourses (macrosistemas, sistemas, and subsistemas). A few examples of these “systems” are pre-Columbian indigenous cultures, the enlightened bourgeoisie, or modernity.

The text’s organization often makes it read like a reference work, since under a chapter titled “El sistema colonial: las teatralidades y los discursos teatrales de la legitimación del poder,” one can reliably find subheadings like “los discursos teatrales de los sectores dominantes para los sectores no hegemónicos: la Iglesia y el teatro de conversión.” However, these divisions are frequently balanced by Villegas’ versatile acknowledgement that his history, like any other, requires a selection of texts. Therefore, the author also features subheadings dedicated solely to one work, practice, or topic of interest such as “Ollántay o la reutilización de la historia,” “La reivindicación de la mujer,” or “Teatros independientes.”

While this layout makes the book easy to search, one notable trend is the way Villegas’ categories appear to give way to less systematization in the last third of the study. Chapters 8 through 12 cover, respectively: the production of ethnic sectors since modernity; the role of theater groups; the theatrical discourses of postmodernity and globalization; and their accompanying “lenguajes escénicos.” This is the section of the text where previous content was reshuffled and where most of the new material was added, especially in the final unit on the diverse “scenic languages” of postmodernity. This chapter explores the way the contemporary theater interfaces with marionettes, film, acrobatics, cybernetic culture, painting, or dance—that is to say, its relationship with “signos corporales, escénicos y visuales tradicionalmente considerados específicos de prácticas no teatrales.” All of these practices “obligan al espectador a una participación más activa y de un espectador con una fuerte competencia cultural...