Between Pen and Sweat: An Account of an Encounter between a Director and a Dramaturg

In the world of theatre, especially in Latin America, most assume that creative work takes place between the director and actors. While others may also work on staging the play—for example, sometimes a playwright works on the text with the director and actors—it is unusual to discuss the relationship between these artists and the figure of the dramaturg. This position is uncommon in the world of Latin American theatre. While dramaturgy is a widespread profession in European theatre, especially in Germany, it has not earned professional status in Latin America. However, this does not mean that there have not been, and continue to be, people who conduct this work in Latin American theatre. This lack of documentation concerning the relationship between the director and a dramaturg within the context of Latin America is what led us to record our own experiences. We hope that this essay will spark an ongoing conversation on the uses of dramaturgy in Latin American theatre.

This essay gives an account of four years of collaboration between Claudio Valdés Kuri, the artistic director of Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes (Certain Inhabitants Theatre) and Analola Santana, a scholar and dramaturg living in the United States, as the company embarked on the production of a piece.¹ The fruit of this collaboration was the company’s most recent production: La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) an auto sacramental by Pedro Calderón de la Barca, a piece that had interested Kuri for more than twenty years.² Our production premiered at the Teatro Julio Jiménez Rueda as part of the “Festival de México en el Centro Histórico,” March 21–23, 2014. This was followed by a full season of fifty performances at the Teatro El Galeón (Centro Cultural del Bosque) between June and August 2014 in Mexico City.

What exactly is the work of a dramaturg? As many have discussed, this much-contested question encompasses many possible duties. Mark Bly defines it simply as the person who “serves as a resource and active collaborator during the planning stages of a production and throughout the rehearsal period,” as well as the artist “who functions in a multifaceted manner helping the director and other artists to interpret and shape the sociological, textual, acting, directing and design values” (xxiii). Based on this definition, Latin America’s long-standing tradition of devised theatre has always maintained the figure of the dramaturg, even if the person occupying this position was not labeled as such.

Within US scholarship, devised theatre is an under-recognized contribution of Latin American theatre, including individuals and companies like Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Enrique Buenaventura and the Teatro Experimental de Cali (founded in 1955 in Colombia), Teatro La Candelaria (1966, Colombia), Teatro Escambray (1968, Cuba), Teatro de los Andes (1991, Bolivia), Teatro Malayerba (1980, Ecuador), Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (1971, Peru), and many other groups who base their methods on collective creation. Theatre companies have used these performance processes in order to devise collectively created texts and performance pieces based, for the most part, on ethnographic materials collected by members of the troupes. Even though collective creation encompasses many different possibilities in the rehearsal space, at its core is a rigorous investigation process for the basis of stage representation. According to Buenaventura, who is credited with the formalization and theorization of the process of collective creation in Latin America, the aim was to overcome the authoritative figure of the director as the sole voice in the creation of a piece. Instead, the creative process must “fill the void left in the conceptions of the director. Thus, the analytical stage of this method came to be and it evolved, in the following pieces, as the most objective way—meaning the most collective possibility—of analyzing a text” (Buenaventura 128). In Latin America the traditional work of the dramaturg, as previously defined by Bly, became connected to the essence of risk-taking as these companies based their work on a dynamic exchange of...