Spectacles of Disappearance: Migration, Man, and Machine

In October 2017—as the Trump administration began testing multiple prototypes of the president's promised "big, beautiful" new border wall on the United States' southern border—the Mexican theatre troupe Teatro de Línea de Sombra (TLS) presented Amarillo in Chicago Shakespeare Theatre's new venue on Navy Pier, as part of the inaugural Chicago International Latino Theatre Festival Destinos. The production is a poignant meditation on the lives and deaths of migrants who traverse the increasingly dangerous borderlands between the USA and Mexico.

Amarillo will be considered here in tandem with Article 13, an immersive installation first created in 2012 by TLS in collaboration with the French group Cie Carabosse and performed outdoors in March 2016, as part of the Kimmel Center's Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts. Both productions examine the plight of migrants moving from the Global South to the North as they search for economic opportunities and better lives. The use of the actors' bodies, scenery/machinery, media projections, and pyrotechnics bring into focus the various uses of spectacle, the long maligned "lowest" of Aristotle's six elements of theatre. From the massive fireball of Article 13 to the minimal stage aesthetics of Amarillo, these are not only spectacles of extravagance and excess (as spectacle is usually understood), but they are also spectacles of disappearance: they use visual imagery and non-narrative texts in ways that allow the spectator to see absence and the lack of the body. By seeing the unseen, they bear witness to the invisible spectacle of the suffering migrant and they focus the audience on the migrant body and its labors, which are usually hidden through misinformation and misrepresentation in politics and popular media.

The stage at the beginning of Amarillo is mostly bare, with only a few industrial shelving units on either side. These shelves hold gallon-sized plastic water bottles, miscellaneous items of clothing, and handheld flashlights. Posted on the front of some of these shelves are the pictures of migrants who went missing on their journey to—or within—the United States. Throughout the performance the plastic water bottles are a central image, calling attention to the human body's most basic need, reminding us that on the long journey made by many migrants across deserts and oceans the access to fresh drinking water can often mean the difference between life and death. A large plywood wall constructed at the back of the stage defines the performance space and is also an allegorical border wall for the cast members to collide against as they run, jump, dance and climb on it throughout the performance. The wall reminds us of how walls force migrants to the USA into more desperate and dangerous places, like the perilous desert landscapes in the Southwest or the coyote smuggler's airless box truck.

As I sat in the theatre before the beginning of the performance, taking in the minimal stage aesthetic, I was struck by how it seemed to typify the concept of poor theatre championed by Polish theatre-maker and director Jerzy Grotowski. The program note confirmed that TLS artistic director Jorge A. Vargas studied with Grotowski in Poland and was greatly influenced by the poor theatre concept "that strips down the art form to its essential elements in order to purify and refresh the theatre" (program note). This bare aesthetic is intended to draw the spectator's attention away from extravagant sets and costumes, back to the most elemental aspect of theatre, the body of the actor: its presence, its physicality, and—in this performance—its absence. Through the simple set and physical staging of the show, we become acutely aware of the effects that the journey of migration has on the body of the migrant and those bodies (often of the women) left behind.

The precise "beginning" of Amarillo is hard to pinpoint, as both male actors (Jesús Cuevas and Raúl Mendoza) are present onstage long before the audience is ever directly addressed. Even after Mendoza, the main actor in the play, utters his provocative opening line "¿Qué? ¿Qué me ven? Yo soy nadie...