Partial Knowledge: Challenges for Latin American Theatre Scholarship in the US

The theatres of Latin America, traditional, experimental or (to borrow Augusto Boal's term) invisible, are a fertile yet contested space in which to approach key questions of history, memory, identity, and representation. The theatre may offer a space of freedom and resistance, but it may also reflect the relations of power and of violence that exist offstage. The same goes for scholarship. Our task as scholars and teachers is to expand the audience for those theatres and to explore the questions raised, recognizing at the same time—as so many plays remind us—that our knowledge and understanding of one another, both within and across cultures, must always remain partial and contingent, open to question.

Within the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, theatre remains a somewhat less studied genre, in terms of numbers of courses offered, faculty specialists, and numbers of publications. Although the field continues to grow, there are still relatively few articles on Latin American theatre published outside the specialized theatre journals. Latin American theatre is not yet part of the canon—while its importance is often recognized, it is not yet an obligatory area of study. (This may not be entirely bad, as those texts supposedly elevated to obligatory status can be just as quickly reduced to the level of chore.) I write as one who has had great freedom to develop and teach courses on Latin American theatre at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. But to take just one example of a widely used anthology: Huellas de las literaturas hispanoamericanas (Traces of Hispanic-American literatures), edited by John Garganigo, et al., includes only one play, and only a portion of that (two scenes from Sabina Berman's Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda [Between Villa and a naked woman]). At the same time, there has been tremendous growth in the field in recent years, so that, far from feeling like an overlooked area of scholarship, the atmosphere is vital and collaborative, open to new approaches and to ongoing redefinitions of our objects and processes of study.

Working in a department of literatures and languages, I find it crucial to make connections between genres. My work engages with literature more generally and with interdisciplinary Latin American studies as well as with performance studies and performance theory. As one who has tended to work thematically rather than geographically, I also notice an increasing tendency toward geographic specialization. I see my own work—while continuing to focus on specifically theatrical production—moving also in the direction of studying theatre and narrative in concert with one another, examining the interrelationships between memory, the body, and representation in both.

A challenge, for those of us working within language departments, is access to performances, particularly performances in Spanish, not only for ourselves but also for our students. In many areas there simply aren't that many performances of Latin American work available. Access to materials is a challenge for all scholars of international fields, but it becomes perhaps more pronounced within theatre and performance because the work is less portable (harder to slip in your pocket than a paperback novel). In the coming years, I expect to see more Latin American and US Latino/a plays—in Spanish, Portuguese, English or other languages—performed across the country, creating a growing awareness of that theatre among US theatre audiences and a closer link between Latin American and US Latino/a theatres. Portland's Miracle Theatre Group provides one example of local Latino/a theatre production.

I recently spent ten days in Ecuador, a country with an increasingly active theatrical scene yet little known in the US. While there, I had the opportunity to meet with members of Movimiento Quinta Escena (Fifth stage movement), a loose confederation of five theatre groups working out of small, almost improvised spaces in the Casa de la Cultura in Quito. They described a continual struggle for resources and lamented that, while the audience is certainly there for free performances, the audience for experimental theatre is limited, though a house can often be filled through painstaking advance sales...