Staging Reparation, Its Impossibility and the Diminutive in 20th century Latin American Theater

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

In this panel we will look at the ways theater has long dealt with the effects of violence in Latin American societies, staging trauma and memory, while using techniques of embodiment and disguise. Responses to violence, state terrorism and political repression in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia took different forms since the second half of the 20th century, when different facets of theater of protest began to develop. This explicitly political theater, although still present, has been slowly replaced by another type of contestation in response to a new type of unease with the neoliberal political climate and globalization. The papers in this panel will variously investigate the transformation of Latin American theatre’s political engagement since the 90s, through an exploration of both its topics and its staging strategies. The different analysis will thus examine how the idea of symbolic reparation is explored as a flawed process, and the diminutive, the local and the personal become intense sites of exploration as well as contestation to Human Rights discourse.

Sub Track

• Performance and Visual Studies

Chair

• Isadora Grevan de Carvalho, Oberlin College

Individual Presentations

• La más mínima (a)parte: Valorization of Smallness in Mauricio Kartun’s Terrenal - Laurie Lomask, Bronx Community College

• Beyond reparation: A response to the label “Theatre of Human Rights” in Colombia - Alejandra Marin Pineda, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Inconsolable Fragmented Memories in Vicente’s O Assalto and Tolcachir’ Tercer Cuerpo - Isadora Grevan de Carvalho, Oberlin College