Feeling the Gaze. Image and Affect in Contemporary Argentine and Chilean Performance by Gail A. Bulman (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Feeling the Gaze. Image and Affect in Contemporary Argentine and Chilean Performance by Gail A. Bulman
• Ilka Kressner

Bulman, Gail A. Feeling the Gaze. Image and Affect in Contemporary Argentine and Chilean Performance. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022. 350 pp.

Performances are live events, defined by their finiteness. But what do we remember after we leave the theater? Gail Bulman's Feeling the Gaze. Image and Affect in Contemporary Argentine and Chilean Performance explores the lingering impact of specific visual elements in eight contemporary Argentinean and Chilean performances staged since 2014. Situated at the crossroads of performance, affect, and memory studies, this book examines intentionally repeated images such as strategically positioned paintings, props, clothes, frames, and screens as means to provoke a deeper contemplation of personal, social, historical, and political backdrops.

In the two parts of this book, "Embodied Images" and "Seeing Through Screens," Bulman studies how seemingly ordinary props gain a deeper, affective potential in a carefully selected corpus of plays. The first chapter "Seeing Beyond the Props," discusses the meaning of heroism in the Chilean play O'Higgins, un hombre en pedazos (Tyro Teatro Banda, 2016) and the contemporary reality of immigration in Chile in Fulgor (Teatro Niño Proletario, 2016). While O'Higgins revisits the figure of Bernardo O'Higgins through the use of portraits, musical instruments, and clothes, Fulgor features a large frame that is moved around on stage by the characters that are alternately acting within or outside of it. The framing device conveys notions of exclusion and belonging and invites audiences to consider visuality as an interactive process.

The second chapter, "Images as Language," examines Manual de carroña (Ariel Hermosilla, 2016) and En la sombra de la cúpula (text by Agustín León Pruzzu; staged by Mario, Luiggi y sus fantasmas, 2019). In Manual, eight of the ten characters are disguised as animals that remain mute throughout most of the play. The only human beings, the ones that must put up with the eccentricities of the upper-class party animals, are their servants. Bulman explains how this visual animalization serves as a satirical critique of human boorishness. The images examined in En la sombra are shadows. An actualization of Roberto Arlt's work 300 millones, this play discusses economic hardship and an alternate dream reality in a neoliberal world. Staged on the rooftop of the cupola of the Bencich building in Buenos Aires, the strategic use of shadows introduces oneiric elements into the otherwise realistic narration. [End Page 107]

In the second part of the book, "Image(in)ing Feelings," Bulman examines four works that feature transmedia images. Her analysis of Los millonarios (Teatro la María, 2018) and Próximo (Claudio Tolcachir, 2017) focuses on the strategic use of images and the emotional impact of screens. The first play presents four lawyers who are forced to defend a Mapuche client accused of murdering an upper-class couple. Screened projections put prejudices and feelings "on display" to assess "still-life snapshot[s] of individual abuse" embedded "into a larger picture of national and global violations" (214). Próximo zooms in on two characters addicted to the screens of their devices. Instead of interacting directly with one another on stage, they rely entirely on their devices' cameras. The play juxtaposes the virtual and the convivial, intimacy and distance. The final chapter, "Emotional Archives," studies Tebas Land (Sergio Blanco, 2016) and Doble de riesgo (Lola Arias, 2016). The new Oedipus in Blanco's play is a prison inmate. The key visual images are a caged-in basketball court and a large video screen. The screen projects clips that include recordings of previous parts of the performance along with the audience's reactions. Viewers thus become active witnesses and participants. An installation in Buenos Aires' Parque de la Memoria, Doble de riesgo invited visitors to perform and to be recorded alongside historical videos of political speeches, using historical artifacts such as presidential chairs. Bulman shows how Arias' work questions notions of archive and fabricates new registers composed of specific affects, (post)memory technology, and performances (293) that she terms sensichives. This new multimedia archive, as Bulman argues, transcends...