Exorcising History

Exorcising History
Author: Jean Graham-Jones
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2000
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780838754245

"In Exorcising History, Jean Graham-Jones documents, contextualizes, and analyzes theater produced in Buenos Aires during Argentina's military dictatorship of 1976-83 and the nation's subsequent return to democracy. The plays discussed, while not necessarily constituting "political theater," are indeed political in that each is conditioned by sociopolitical structures present at the moment of creation. It is in this way that the plays lend themselves to Graham-Jones's examination of how personal and collective histories enter into theater production, in the creation of dramatic worlds that re-create and revise the "outside" world."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Competing Germanies

Competing Germanies
Author: Robert Kelz
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2020-02-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501739883

Following World War II, German antifascists and nationalists in Buenos Aires believed theater was crucial to their highly politicized efforts at community-building, and each population devoted considerable resources to competing against its rival onstage. Competing Germanies tracks the paths of several stage actors from European theaters to Buenos Aires and explores how two of Argentina's most influential immigrant groups, German nationalists and antifascists (Jewish and non-Jewish), clashed on the city's stages. Covered widely in German- and Spanish-language media, theatrical performances articulated strident Nazi, antifascist, and Zionist platforms. Meanwhile, as their thespian representatives grappled onstage for political leverage among emigrants and Argentines, behind the curtain, conflicts simmered within partisan institutions and among theatergoers. Publicly they projected unity, but offstage nationalist, antifascist, and Zionist populations were rife with infighting on issues of political allegiance, cultural identity and, especially, integration with their Argentine hosts. Competing Germanies reveals interchange and even mimicry between antifascist and nationalist German cultural institutions. Furthermore, performances at both theaters also fit into contemporary invocations of diasporas, including taboos and postponements of return to the native country, connections among multiple communities, and forms of longing, memory, and (dis)identification. Sharply divergent at first glance, their shared condition as cultural institutions of emigrant populations caused the antifascist Free German Stage and the nationalist German Theater to adopt parallel tactics in community-building, intercultural relationships, and dramatic performance. Its cross-cultural, polyglot blend of German, Jewish, and Latin American studies gives Competing Germanies a wide, interdisciplinary academic appeal and offers a novel intervention in Exile studies through the lens of theater, in which both victims of Nazism and its adherents remain in focus.

Nothing to Do with Love

Nothing to Do with Love
Author: Santiago Loza
Publisher:
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2021-12-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780857428974

This is the first anthology of Latin American drama to focus on a single major dramatist, Santiago Loza. "Nothing to Do with Love:" And Other Plays brings together, for the first time in English, several of Argentine playwright Santiago Loza's major works, along with visual documentation of the playwright's productions and their historical and thematic contexts. For nearly twenty years, Loza has written scripts that document the experiences of marginalized individuals who live outside Buenos Aires or in its overlooked barrios, exploring how rural, working-class, and otherwise marginal individuals inhabit a reality different from many of the urban audiences who flock to the nation's theater. Loza focuses his dramaturgy on individuals who lead lives as seamstresses, orphans, ranch hands, or disaffected adults talking about their problems without any expectation of resolution. His plays provide a sense of the richness of Argentina's contemporary theater by giving voice to individuals whose lives are complicated by the economic fallout caused by Argentina's adoption of neoliberal policies and the economic crash of 2001, as well as by the nation's rapidly changing viewpoints on race, gender identity, and sexuality. The first anthology of Latin American drama to focus on a single major dramatist, this book will draw attention anew to the contemporary theaters of Argentina, Mexico, Panama, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater
Author: Paola Hernández
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2021-04-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0810143380

Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies, Objects, Archives examines twenty‐first‐century documentary theater in Latin America, focusing on important plays by the Argentine director Vivi Tellas, the Argentine playwright and director Lola Arias, the Mexican theater collective Teatro Línea de Sombra, and the Chilean playwright and director Guillermo Calderón. Paola S. Hernández demonstrates how material objects and archives—photographs, videos, and documents such as witness reports, legal briefs, and letters—come to life onstage. Hernández argues that present-day, live performances catalog these material archives, expanding and reinterpreting the objects’ meanings. These performances produce an affective relationship between actor and audience, visualizing truths long obscured by repressive political regimes and transforming theatrical spaces into sites of witness. This process also highlights the liminality between fact and fiction, questioning the veracity of the archive. Richly detailed, nuanced, and theoretically wide-ranging, Staging Lives in Latin American Theater reveals a range of interpretations about how documentary theater can conceptualize the idea of self while also proclaiming a new mode of testimony through theatrical practices.

Politics and Violence in Cuban and Argentine Theater

Politics and Violence in Cuban and Argentine Theater
Author: K. Ford
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2010-02-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 023010522X

This book looks at Cuban and Argentine theater of the late 1960s and early 1970s to see how the idea of spectacle as violence was used to comment on and question the social and political violence that was unfolding offstage.

Dramatists in Revolt

Dramatists in Revolt
Author: Leon F. Lyday
Publisher: Austin : University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1976
Genre: History
ISBN:

Dramatists in Revolt, through studies of the major playwrights, explores significant movements in Latin American theater. Playwrights discussed are those who have made outstanding contributions to Latin American theater during the post–World War II period and who have been particularly sensitive to world currents in literature and drama, while being acutely responsive to the problems of their own areas. They express concern about communication, isolation, and solitude. On a more basic level, they concern themselves with the political and socioeconomic problems that figure importantly in the Third World. The fifteen essays deal with the playwrights Antón Arrufat and José Triana (Cuba); Emilio Carballido and Luisa Josefina Hernández (Mexico); Agustín Cuzzani, Osvaldo Dragún, Griselda Gambaro, and Carlos Gorostiza (Argentina); Jorge Díaz, Egon Wolff, and Luis Alberto Heiremans (Chile); René Marqués (Puerto Rico); and Jorge Andrade, Alfredo Dias Gomes, and Plínio Marcos (Brazil). These are dramatists in revolt, sometimes in a thematic sense, not only in protesting the indignities that various systems impose on modern man, but also in a dramatic configuration. They dare to experiment with techniques in the constant search for viable theatrical forms. Each essay is written by a specialist familiar with the works of the playwright under consideration. In addition to the essays, the book includes a listing of source materials on Latin American theater.

Information for Foreigners

Information for Foreigners
Author: Griselda Gambaro
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 1992-03-01
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0810133059

One of Latin America's most important and prolific writers, Griselda Gambaro has focused on the dynamics of repression, complicity, and violence--specifically, the terror of violent regimes and their devastating effects on the moral framework of society. Information for Foreigners is a drama of disappearance, an experimental work dealing with the theme of random and meaningless punishment in which the audience is led through darkened passageways to a series of nightmarish tableaux. The collection also includes The Walls and Antigona Furiosa.

The Film Industry in Argentina

The Film Industry in Argentina
Author: Jorge Finkielman
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2014-06-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780786483440

Argentina fell in love with movies as soon as they were first exhibited in 1896. Even before World War I, Argentina was one of the biggest film markets in the world and continues to be a major film market today. This history of the Argentine film industry--starting with the earliest film exhibitions in 1897--covers film music, broadcasting, the introduction of film with sound, the impact of the American film industry on the Argentine, the industrialization of Argentine film, Hollywood films in Spanish, the tango in film and local stars. Reference material includes filmographic information and reviews from numerous publications. Photographs offer a look at film stills, promotions, and the people involved in the industry, and an index provides quick access to names and titles.

Science Fiction in Argentina

Science Fiction in Argentina
Author: Joanna Page
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2016-03-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0472053108

This book examines an unprecedented range of science fiction texts-including literature, cinema, theater, and comics-produced in Argentina from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. These works address themes common to the genre across the industrialized world, including techno-authoritarianism, new modes of posthuman subjectivity, and apocalyptic visions of environmental catastrophe. At the same time, Argentine science fiction is fully grounded in the social and political life of the nation. The texts discussed here explore the impact of an uneven modernization, mass migration, dictatorships, crises in national identity, the rise and fall of the Left, the question of Argentina's indigenous heritage, the impact of neoliberalism, and the most recent economic crisis of 2001. Argentine science fiction is also highly reflexive, debating within its pages the role of science fiction and fantasy in the society of its day, and the nature of the text in a world of advancing technology. This book makes important contributions to our understanding of science fiction as a genre, as well as to materialist theories of cultural texts. It will also interest students and scholars researching the culture, history, and politics of Argentina and Latin America. Book jacket.