Rebels with a Cause in Contemporary Spanish Women Playwriting

Rebels with a Cause in Contemporary Spanish Women Playwriting
Author: Anthony Pasero-O’Malley
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 222
Release: 2022-09-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527587584
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This book examines a selection of plays from four innovative women playwrights of the first two decades of 21st century Spain. By foregrounding female characters as the subjects and protagonists of their plays, Mar Gómez Glez, Carolina África, Lucía Miranda, and Marta Buchaca reinscribe the stage as a space for the productive exploration of female autonomy and individuation. This book further investigates the use the platform of the theatre and the expressive possibilities therein to portray the realities of gendered oppression and efforts to define subjectivity within a social context where confining patriarchal and dominant cultural conditions place severe strictures on women’s open search and development of selfhood and identity. The diversity of genres deployed in their respective approaches, spanning the subversion of realist conventions, the framework of historical drama, the communal potentialities of forum theatre, and experiential site-specific production, point to important innovations in contemporary stagecraft and performance.

The Entremés for Performance

The Entremés for Performance
Author: Kerry Wilks
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 602
Release: 2024-02-29
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1802075194
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This bilingual anthology brings together a collection of Spanish entremeses, the comic interludes that were performed between the acts of a comedia. Penned by authors such as Lope de Rueda, Cervantes, Calderón, Quevedo, and Quiñones de Benavente, many of these plays appear here for the first time in English. Translated for performability, these plays create a panoramic view of one-act plays from Spain’s classical theater period. Presented with discussions of dramaturgical and performance possibilities and difficulties, including relevant historical, cultural, and social information for the plays, the collection opens with two precursors to the entremés, moves through the breadth of the entremés form, and concludes with works from the 18th century, including a sainete. There are also examples of trans-adaptation that show how these works can be interpreted through strong directorial concepts that relocate the plays in historical time and location. The selected titles raise challenges to social mores and expectations, surprise with their humor, and delight with their stagecraft. Whether aimed at the classroom or the stage, the collection is valuable for research, pedagogy, and performance.

The Necropolitical Theater

The Necropolitical Theater
Author: Jeffrey K. Coleman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2020-05-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810141876
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The Necropolitical Theater: Race and Immigration on the Contemporary Spanish Stage demonstrates how theatrical production in Spain since the early 1990s has reflected national anxieties about immigration and race. Jeffrey K. Coleman argues that Spain has developed a “necropolitical theater” that casts the non-European immigrant as fictionalized enemy—one whose nonwhiteness is incompatible with Spanish national identity and therefore poses a threat to the very Europeanness of Spain. The fate of the immigrant in the necropolitical theater is death, either physical or metaphysical, which preserves the status quo and provides catharsis for the spectator faced with the notion of racial diversity. Marginalization, forced assimilation, and physical death are outcomes suffered by Latin American, North African, and sub-Saharan African characters, respectively, and in these differential outcomes determined by skin color Coleman identifies an inherent racial hierarchy informed by the legacies of colonization and religious intolerance. Drawing on theatrical texts, performances, legal documents, interviews, and critical reviews, this book challenges Spanish theater to develop a new theatrical space. Jeffrey K. Coleman proposes a “convivial theater” that portrays immigrants as contributors to the Spanish state and better represents the multicultural reality of the nation today.

Latin American Women On/In Stages

Latin American Women On/In Stages
Author: Margo Milleret
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2004-11-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780791462218
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While a feminine perspective has become more common on Latin American stages since the late 1960s, few of the women dramatists who have contributed to this new viewpoint have received scholarly attention. Latin American Women On/In Stages examines twenty-four plays written by women living in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. While all of the plays critique the restraints placed on being female, several also offer alternatives that emphasize a broader and healthier range of options. Margo Milleret, using an innovative comparative and thematic approach, highlights similarities in the techiques and formats employed by female playwrights as they challenged both theatrical and social conventions. She argues that these representations of women's lives are important for their creativity and their insights into both the personal and public worlds of Latin America.

Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System

Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System
Author: Caoimhe McAvinchey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2020-02-06
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1474262562
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Applied Theatre: Women and the Criminal Justice System offers unprecedented access to international theatre and performance practice in carceral contexts and the material and political conditions that shape this work. Each of the twelve essays and interviews by international practitioners and scholars reveal a panoply of practice: from cross-arts projects shaped by autobiographical narratives through to fantasy-informed cabaret; from radio plays to film; from popular participatory performance to work staged in commercial theatres. Extracts of performance texts, developed with Clean Break theatre company, are interwoven through the collection. Television and film images of women in prison are repeatedly painted from a limited palette of stereotypes – 'bad girls', 'monsters', 'babes behind bars'. To attend to theatre with and about women with experience of the criminal justice system is to attend to intersectional injustices that shape women's criminalization and the personal and political implications of this. The theatre and performance practices in this collection disrupt, expand and reframe representational vocabularies of criminalized women for audiences within and beyond prison walls. They expose the role of incarceration as a mechanism of state punishment, the impact of neoliberalism on ideologies of punishment and the inequalities and violence that shape the lives of many incarcerated women. In a context where criminalized women are often dismissed as unreliable or untrustworthy, the collection engages with theatre practices which facilitate an economy of credibility, where women with experience of the criminal justice system are represented as expert witnesses.

The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers

The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers
Author: Nieves Baranda
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 787
Release: 2017-08-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317043626
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In Spain, the two hundred years that elapsed between the beginning of the early modern period and the final years of the Habsburg Empire saw a profusion of works written by women. Whether secular or religious, noble or middle class, early modern Spanish women actively composed creative works such as poetry, prose narratives, and plays. The Routledge Research Companion to Early Modern Spanish Women Writers covers the broad array of different kinds of writings – literary as well as extra-literary – that these women wrote, taking into consideration their subject positions and the cultural and historical contexts that influenced and were influenced by them. Beyond merely recognizing the individual women authors who had influence in literary, religious, and intellectual circles, this Research Companion investigates their participation in these circles through their writings, as well as the ways in which their texts informed Spain’s cultural production during the early modern period. In order to contextualize women’s writings across the historical and cultural spectrum of early modern Spain, the Research Companion is divided into six sections of general thematic interest: Women’s Worlds; Conventual Spaces; Secular Literature; Women in the Public Sphere; Private Circles; Women Travelers. Each section is subdivided into chapters that focus on specific issues or topics.