Events
Stages in Movement: Teatro Línea de Sombra on the Migrant Trail

Tuesday, December 5, 2023 | 3PM EST
The Hemispheric Institute welcomes Teatro Línea de Sombra (TLS), one of Mexico’s leading theater companies, to New York University in December 2023.
Teatro Línea de Sombra is an internationally renowned collective of theatermakers, researchers, and actors. The company produces theatrical pieces, exhibitions, and other performance experiences. TLS was founded in Mexico in 1993. Its Directors, Jorge A. Vargas and Alicia Laguna are currently Mellon Artists in Residence at the Hemispheric Institute.
On December 5, 2023, the Institute will host “Stages in Movement: Teatro Línea de Sombra on the Migrant Trail,” a symposium celebrating the 30th anniversary of this Mexican theater company. The event will focus on the company's exceptional works on migration, as well as the research and archival methodologies that guide their creative process. Participants include Rodrigo Parrini (UAM-Xochimilco), Paola Hernández (UW-Madison), Jill Lane (NYU), Alicia Laguna, Jorge A. Vargas, and Eduardo Bernal (TLS), Marcial Godoy and Ana Dopico (Hemispheric Institute).
This event is co-presented by Hemispheric Encounters.
Bios
Paola Hernández
Paola S. Hernández is Mellon-Morgridge Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre and performance as well as Latinx Studies. She has published numerous articles on Southern Cone theatre, US-Mexico border performance and memory politics, sites of memory, human rights, and documentary theatre. She is the author of Staging Lives in Latin American Theater: Bodies-Objects-Archives (Northwestern UP, 2021), where she examines the role of the "real" in theatre and visual arts with an emphasis on contemporary documentary theatre in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.
She has also authored El teatro de Argentina y Chile: Globalización, resistencia y desencanto (Corregidor, 2009), and is co-editor (with Analola Santana) of Fifty Key Figures in Latinx and Latin American Theatre (Routledge, 2022), as well as (with Pamela Brownell) of Biodrama/Proyecto Archivos: seis documentales escénicos by Vivi Tellas (Papeles Teatrales, Universidad de Córdoba, 2017), and of Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives (with Brenda Werth and Florian Becker, Palgrave, 2013). Hernández is currently Director of Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies.
Rodrigo Parrini
Rodrigo Parrini has a doctorate degree in Anthropology through UAM-I and a masters degree in Gender Studies from El Colegio de México (College of Mexico). He is a professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Metropolitan Autonomous University), Xochimilco. His most recent books are Falotopías . Indagaciones en la crueldad y el deseo (Phallutopias. Inquiries on Cruelty and Desire) (2016, IESCO/CIEG-UNAM) and Deseografías. Una antropología del deseo (Desireographies. An Anthropology of Desire) (2018, UAM/CIEG-UNAM). For the last twelve years he has carried out an ethnography of the border between Mexico and Guatemala (Tenosique). His project Deseografías explores the ethnographic environs of desire and the possibility of formulating an anthropology of desire. He has collaborated with the company Teatro Línea de Sombra and the collective Teatro Ojo on a project exploring the ethnographic potential of artistic practices and a methodological outlook capable of inaugurating a dialog between theater and anthropology.
Eduardo Bernal
Eduardo Bernal estudió la licenciatura en arquitectura en la Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México (UAEMéx), la Maestría en Artes Visuales en la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) y concluyó el Doctorado en Ciencias Sociales en la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM-X). Se ha desempeñado como académico, dibujante, museógrafo, curador, editor, promotor cultural y dramaturgo. Ha sido colaborador de la Compañía Teatro Línea de Sombra desde el año 2004. Es coautor de Baños Roma, Pequeños Territorios, Durango 66 y Zona Clausurada . Fue director de la Casa de Cultura de la UAEMéx, en Tlalpan, donde desarrolló un proyecto de “exhibiciones escénicas” y puso en operación un programa de residencias para artistas, investigadores y estudiantes de las artes escénicas. Fue curador del Pabellón Mexicano en la Cuadrienal de Escenografía 2015, en la ciudad de Praga. Participó como creador adjunto en el proyecto escénico Filo de caballos , pieza que fue comisionada por el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Chicago (MCA). En 2017, en colaboración con Pendiente Teatro, escribió, dirigió y estrenó la pieza Sin Ítaca . Actualmente, es Profesor Investigador de Tiempo Completo en la Facultad de Arquitectura de la UAEMÉX.
Alicia Laguna
Alicia Laguna has been artistic co-director of Teatro Línea de Sombra since 1993. She is a performing artist, manager, producer, and curator, trained at the University of Nuevo León. With Teatro Línea de Sombra, she has produced plays that speak to the contexts of Mexico's social and political reality. Among them are Amarillo, Baños Roma, Pequeños Territorios en Reconstrucción, Filo de Caballos, Artículo 13, and Danzantes del Alba.
Over the past seven years, she has collaborated on the design and production of "Amarillo en la ruta migrante," which has brought this work to migrant shelters throughout Mexico.
During her residency, she will collaborate on the curation of the Teatro Línea de Sombra Collection in the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), and will participate in the presentation of Danzantes del Alba at NYU Skirball and the symposium “Stages in Movement: Teatro Línea de Sombra on the Migrant Trail.”
Learn more about Alicia Laguna here.
Jorge A. Vargas
Jorge A. Vargas is stage director, co-founder, and artistic co-director of Teatro Línea de Sombra. He studied at the École du Mime Corporel in Paris and has directed more than 50 stage plays.
Since 2009 his projects have been oriented towards research-based theater and critical realism of a collaborative and transversal nature. Over the course of 20 years, he has developed the visual and embodied dramaturgy that is visible in plays such as Galería de moribundos, La oscura raíz, La mirada sorprendida, El síndrome de ulises, La forma que se despliega, and Amarillo.
Vargas's activities as a creator have been linked to his teaching practice. His productions have participated in festivals and in have been presented in some of the most important theaters in Europe, Asia, and America. On two occasions, has received the award for Best "Research" Theater (Teatro de Búsqueda) Director, and is a member of Mexico's National System of Art Creators.
During his residency, he will collaborate on the curation of the Teatro Línea de Sombra Collection in the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL), and will participate in the presentation of Danzantes del Alba at NYU Skirball and the symposium “Stages in Movement: Teatro Línea de Sombra on the Migrant Trail."
Learn more about Jorge A. Vargas here.
Jill Lane
Jill Meredith Lane is Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she pursues teaching and research on Latin American theater and performance art, on art and activism, and on comparative approaches to race and performance in the Americas. Her book-in-progress is entitled Political Gesture: a genealogy of Latin American performance art . She is author of Blackface Cuba, 1840–189 5 (UPenn Press), and co-editor with Peggy Phelan of The Ends of Performance (Routledge). She is immediate past Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at NYU (2012–2021); she is former Deputy Director of the Hemispheric Institute (2007–2011), and former co-editor with Marcial Godoy-Anativia of the journal emisférica (2008–2018).
Marcial Godoy
Marcial Godoy is a sociocultural anthropologist and the Managing Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University.
Ana Dopico
Ana Dopico is Director of the Hemispheric Institute at NYU. She is a comparative scholar of the Americas, Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Global South and Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University (NYU). From 2014-2019, she was Director of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at NYU. Professor Dopico works on the cultural and intellectual history of the American hemisphere.
She has published, lectured and shared public scholarship on photography, empire, and the Caribbean; art and Latin American politics; the Latin American novel; uneven development and political insurgency in the Americas and the Global South; Latinxs and American identity; José Martí; Cuban national and diasporic imaginaries and political emotion; and the work and legacies of Jean Franco and Edward Said.