Abstract:
This article aims to deploy the notion of "installation" through an analysis of Brote: instalación escénica en el espacio público, which was staged in Valparaíso in 2021 by the Laboratorio de Creación Teatral and directed by Stefany Duarte. The staging was a political response to both the de-naturalization of public spaces and the plight of women in Chilean society. Duarte began by working with testimonies by women that revolved around their connection to nature. The result is an interdisciplinary, ecofeminist installation that congregates women inside a greenhouse. Granting primacy to image and space over language, Brote is an immersive proposal that depends on spectators for its completion. A politically disruptive event, the premiere of Brote was purposely scheduled to coincide with the 2019 Women's March (M8) and other manifestations staged to call attention to the plight of women in contemporary society.
Abstract:
The theatre of Selfa Chew (Mexico City, 1962) takes ownership of historical events to add fictional but feasible possibilities within the represented political reality to which it belongs as a descendant or heir. The docudrama The Salt of War is an example of such theatre. The possible scenarios of this dramatic text, written in 2014, are constructed with the same subjectivity as the official U.S. versions of the exploitation of natural resources after the demarcation of the Mexico-U.S. border in 1848, the Apache extermination (1861-1886), and the conflict over the exploitation of salt between the residents of the town of San Elizario and the Texan authorities (1877). For the analysis, I focus on the main components of the text: 1) Documentary: the actual reference; 2) Archive/repertoire: the deficit of documentary sources and the use of the collective memory of the people involved; 3) Female characters: the relevance of the way in which women are portrayed; and 4) Cross-border region: the geographic coordinates where the factors that afflict its inhabitants take place: marginalization, racism, xenophobia; and other issues that, in a timeless way, persist in this liminal zone, facilitating the connection of the plays with their ideal audience.
Abstract:
Since the 1980s, playwrights in the Mexican Northwest/US Southwest have responded to the steadily increasing militarization of the US-Mexico border by dramatizing the fraught identity choices forced upon borderlanders by geopolitical forces beyond their control. In the US, the term "border play" is commonly used to describe such works. In this essay, I argue that the border play, as a regional form, has roots far deeper than the late twentieth century. I offer as an example Los Tejanos, a nuevomexicano secular drama dated to the 1840s, which tells the story of an invasion of the then Mexican department of New Mexico by the neigh-boring Republic of Texas. While the play's plot conveys an explicitly patriotic tale of New Mexican solidarity in the face of Anglo aggression, an analysis of its characters reveals that national, ethnic, and racial identities were far less settled at that time than the script suggests. I contend that the categorization of Los Tejanos as a border play reveals the form to be a deeply historical and regionally-specific artistic response to the ambiguous nature of borderland identities. Additionally, the appearance of a prominent Native American character in Los Tejanos speaks to the centrality of indigeneity to regional identity formation in the past, thus drawing attention to the relative lack of Indigenous presence in recent US border plays.
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