- Latin American Performance Studies:Random Acts or Critical Moves?
Body. Presence. Present. Act. Interact. Advocate. Provoke. Power. Critical. Urgent.
These terms encapsulate key components and driving forces of the embodied practices of performance. Their use in narrative about what Richard Martel terms performance's "incursions into the tissue of languages and habits" stands in opposition to the notion that performance can be confined or stabilized within the dictates of academic discourses. In performance studies we move into the center the sociopolitical and artistic interventions generated on the margins and in opposition to dominant [End Page 459] systems. While we might—and often do—criticize such appropriations, the evolution of performance studies reveals as much about systems of power and domination within academic structures as performances expose the structures they criticize.
Latin American performance studies, in large part, has grown out of Spanish departments, where it experienced additional levels of marginalization. Traditionalists often cast performance as an invalid object of critical inquiry. The politics of publishing, hiring, tenure, and departmental budgets weigh on these forms that resist clean definitions: not theatre but at times theatrical; not literature but an important cultural manifestation; not official or elite yet culturally embedded; bodily practices that explore the minds and souls of society as good art and literature do. Material and symbolic production considered within Latin American societies, as among the most indigenous of artistic forms, is ironically shunned by the traditionalists. Nonetheless, within language and literature departments, studies of performance and performative actions emerged as literary scholars trained in the "isms" (postmodernism, feminism, etc.) of the last half of the twentieth century noticed what I have elsewhere referred to as this treasure trove of actions loaded with embodied traces of the past. Many of us looked outside our immediate fields at a time when, in many institutions, conflict over control of the study and practice of theatre—between traditional literature departments and drama programs—remained unresolved. Conservative Spanish departments experienced this tension even more intensely: the more than nineteen countries of Spanish America struggled for budgetary parity with Spain. In spite of (or because of) this tension, like performance itself in Latin America, this new field of inquiry continued to flourish, often nourishing the literary inquiry to which, according to some, it existed in opposition. In many cases, this dynamic relationship mirrors how cultural production in the margins—obscured for a long time from critical attention and the mainstream view—reflects mutual dependence between those margins and the centers of the myriad configurations of social organization.
I was fortunate. I received my PhD and was hired and tenured in departments that supported expanding critical tools to more accurately approach and analyze cultural production. My mentors encouraged me to study related disciplines essential to the contextualization of the subject or object under consideration: political science, history, visual arts, economics, women's studies, and geography, among others. From this base, my work situated itself within performance studies even before many of us in languages and literatures knew of its existence. The need to develop new ways of thinking and writing about cultural production became even clearer when confronted with the work of numerous artists: artist and activist Jesusa Rodríguez, performer Denise Stoklos, visual artists Maris Bustamante and Rubén Valencia, performer Astrid Hadad, visual and performance artist Felipe Ehrenberg, and Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani; as well as social activist Super Barrio and Latin American politicians, subway performers, street vendors, and religious leaders and icons that populate Latin America's social and cultural landscapes.
Scholars trace US performance art and studies to the visual arts, particularly the movements of the early twentieth century. Some (among them Latin Americans) contend that Latin American performance (and theory, design, etc.) imitates that produced in the US and Europe. The concepts and acts of early moments in Western [End Page 460] performance (Dadaism, Viennese Actionism, and Fluxus, for instance) did inspire some Latin American artists of the 1950s and '60s. Many Latin American performance practices, however, are homegrown, deeply rooted in cultural traditions and theatrical styles not recognized by elite culture but which nevertheless have existed for centuries as modes of expression for the peoples of the Americas. These...