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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 24.2&3 (2003) 87-103



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Performance Artist María Elena Gaitán
Mapping a Continent without Borders (Epics of Gente Atravesada, Traviesa, y Entremetida)

Yolanda Broyles-González

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The One Woman-Show: Post-Movimiento Women's Voices

A survey of Chicana/o theater topography from the mid-twentieth to the twenty-first centuries—from the Chicana/o civil rights movement to the present—reveals three major performance strands. The first is the 1950s and 1960s working-class itinerant tent-shows (carpas ) and then dozens of movimiento (civil rights movement) collectives, virtually all of them now defunct. Performance collectives featured low-budget and highly-mobile oral creations conceived through the collective improvisational process, stored in the memory through oral tradition, and performed anywhere possible: the streets, the fields, classrooms, or stages. These highly-topical creations ranged from the usually male-centered one-act actos (skits) to the full-length epics, such as Teatro Campesino's Gran Carpa de la Familia Rasquachi. 1 A second strand is the mostly post-movimiento, individually-authored dramatized literary works characteristic of Chicanas/os "breaking into print." 2 These individually- authored works mark the move from an alternative theatrical movement into the establishment mainstream of proscenium theater, ranging from small theaters to the high-tech, monied performance venues. Examples range from Cherríe Moraga's plays from as early as the 1980s, such as her Giving Up the Ghost (1984), to Teatro Campesino/Luis Valdez's Zoot Suit (1978-1979), and the Latino Theater Group's August29 (1990). 3 A third distinguishable strand is the more contemporary proliferation of one-woman (or one-man) performance pieces presented anywhere possible, some existing earlier in the Raza (Chicana/o) movement of the 1980s. These early solo performances include the relatively rare one-woman, multi-voiced poetry performances, such as Carmen Tafolla's Los Courts and Denise Chávez's Novena Narrativa. 4

Although these three strands are distinct and historically specific, there is some degree of kinship, exchange, and even a causal relationship among the [End Page 87] three. The shoestring collectives emerged in times of intense social movements during the 1960s and 1970s, while the high-tech, individually-authored performance pieces arose with the emergence of a Chicana/o middle class. Today's one-woman performance creations show much kinship with the creations of the struggling itinerant 1960s collectives that could perform virtually anywhere, but, when feasible, today's women performance artists also incorporate high-tech elements. The historical specificity of the contemporary one-woman show's emergence has to do with the rise of women and gay/lesbian liberation movements as much as with the alienation so many women, gays, and lesbians faced in the movimiento teatro (and other political) collectives. 5 There is even a causal relationship between the collapse of the male-centered, misogynist, and often homophobic collectives and the rise of women's and men's solo performance art. Collectives characteristically featured an entrenched male leadership, and as an extension of the sexist leadership, movimiento theater collectives also featured performance pieces with universalized maleness as the center of all dramatized human experience. Many of today's Chicana one-woman shows grew from the negative patriarchal legacy of the civil rights movement. Veteran women activists carry deep scars and have waged protracted battles to manifest their voices. The one-woman show has experienced a boom in the last fifteen years and yet has received little critical attention, although one of Los Angeles's major live mainstream theaters venues, the Mark Taper Forum, acknowledged the strong presence of solo performers during an evening showcase titled "Diva L.A." 6

In terms of their visibility and numbers, these women solo performers have come to represent contemporary Chicana/o theater, just as the dozens of alternative theater collectives—the now defunct Teatristas —represented the Raza movement during the 1960s through the 1970s. Although the staging of individually-authored plays in proscenium theater houses has dramatically increased, performances still remain...

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