Posted by Margaret Carson on May 04, 192003 at 19:44:11:
In Reply to: final class posted by Diana Taylor on May 01, 192003 at 15:53:41:
Each week we faced the challenge of closely reading new, sometimes historically remote texts and framing them in a meaningful way in comments on the web-board and in class discussion. In the true spirit of theater, I felt it was a collaborative effort: each of us in the seminar came to terms with the texts and then contributed a unique perspective. I liked the flexibility and eclecticism of our approaches and the fact that there was no sort of rigid doctrine that we were working under or against.
The seminar introduced me to plays that I would never have known, much less have read, on my own. The breathtaking scope of the reading -- 500 years, nearly 20 plays -- was indeed a journey across a stage of continuing conflicts and struggles. It’s impossible to group all the readings together under any one theme but I’d like to suggest these areas of convergence:
Power and authority (exercised and imposed by the colonizer, church, independent state, institutions, competing factions or by one individual over another) was clearly identifiable and overtly performed. Domination and submission were recurring events and were often the culminating moment of the play (especially those from the pre-independence era).
The space between the narrative and the performance: especially in the earliest plays, we often speculated in class and in our webcomments about how an imposed text (such as Final Judgment or The Destruction of Jerusalem) or a choreographed performance (such as Moros y cristianos) could function on at least two levels: the official story was told, but there was room for unofficial, coded message that could be read by the indigenous audience. For example, the King of the Moors might have been played by a character identifiable as Hernán Cortés, or the evangelical plays would include dance and music sequences that asserted older, unassimilable rites and traditions.
Omnipresence of war, military expeditions, battles, looting, capture and executions. Against the backdrop of Operation Shock and Awe we didn’t need to make huge imaginative leaps to experience the images depicted in plays such as “The Tragedy of the Death of Atau Wallpa” and “Los comanches.” In the words of the plunderer Barriga Dulce:
Give no quarter, comrades, smite them
Do your duty, have no fear,
Strike them, smite them without mercy,
I’ll attend to what is here.
Subversiveness and Troublemaking. By the mid-twentieth century, playwrights are critiquing the powers-that-be in their countries. It is still a risky enterprise but a space opens up for it as social and political upheavals such as the Cuban Revolution bring conventional forms of theater into question. Subversiveness comes into its own; this is a victory worth celebrating.
Gender Issues. As I read I was prone to focus on how women were represented in the plays -- were they silent or did they speak, did they have significant lines, were they depicted in conventional ways, were they disruptive? Were patriarchy and heterosexuality affirmed or destabilized?
Translation. I must also put in a plug for translation as I find it extremely exciting that these texts have entered another language and as a result can cross over and be read and discussed by a new audience (and perhaps performed) -- which is what translation enables. The texts have become more mobile. A dialogue in English has begun in this seminar and although I can’t prove it, I am certain that we have raised questions in class that may not ever have been raised before.
I look forward to hearing about your research projects and Anthony’s 5 de mayo tomorrow.