Author: Maria Mercedes Carrion PhD

Thank you Jan-Mar for prompting discussion last week.  Your blogposts were terrific!

This week we are going to continue our discussion about performance, adding one new term to the mix: performativity.  Tomorrow we are going to bring up for discussion the main arguments of Diana Taylor’s chapters “The New Uses of Performance,” “Performative and Performativity,” “Knowing Through Performance,” and “Artivists (Artist-Activists).”  I would like for Kyle to take the first one, Jan-Mar the second, and Abram, the third.  With the concepts and arguments from those three chapters, we will put our heads together to discuss arts and activism, as Taylor presents in the fourth chapter.  For instance, how can simulated environments and scenarios used to treat PTSD be used further to deactivate militarism?  What role does performance play in such activist proposal?

Please, come to class prepared to present for five minutes what is the central argument (or what are the main arguments) brought forth by Taylor in the respectively assigned chapters.  Think how do new uses of performance relate to performance and performativity (an urgently needed connection in this day and age), and how in turn those connections contribute to knowing through performance.  With that network of knowledge, we’ll return to H.I.J.O.S. and their installations.

By Saturday at 5pm, I would like for you to choose one of these connections, and to think of how that connection mobilizes both art and activism.

This week we began a three-week series of readings and discussions about the audiovisual languages of theatre, film, and performance art.  The last two weeks we discussed basic vocabulary of the three media, jointly and separately (acting, performance, stage, camera work, sound, and so on), and now we begin to work with larger building blocks.  What characterizes the audiovisual language of theatre, specifically?  We established the importance of acting, set and costume design, and movement/proxemics.  We discussed the importance of separating the written text (dramatic literature) from the staged performance (spectacular dimension, theatre, hecho teatral), being fully aware that these two dimensions of theatrical semiotics cannot be understood properly unless they are seen interactively.  We analyzed Lope de Vega’s New Art of Writing Plays, the Comedia manifesto in which the playwright established his debt to Ancient theatre, and his thorough knowledge of current theatrical practices: units of space, time, and rhyme; the three acts; the interludes or entremeses; the distribution of the dramatic conflict; and the casos de honra and the difficulty of staging uxoricide.

Wednesday we are going to discuss Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre and Invisible Theatre.  These two concepts are key to understanding the relationship between the audiovisual language of theatre and its development in LatinoAmerica.  Without understanding this, we cannot fully grasp Latinx Performance Art.  Bring your questions, lacuna, comments, epiphanies, and so on to the table in class during our discussion, and here thereafter.

This is the first mandatory post.  It is due on Saturday September 22 at 5PM at the latest, although you can blog at whatever time you want before that.

This week we began the comparative discussion of Performance (as a general, overarching concept that will sustain our interpretation of the three artistic media we are studying this semester), Theatre, and Film.  We considered Diana Taylor’s concept of “Spect-Actors” drawn from Augusto Boal’s theory of the teatro del oprimido (theatre of the oppressed),  as well as “Artivists (Art-Activists),” and Adam Versényi’s question “What Latin American Theatre?”  We talked about escrache and H.I.J.O.S., and how social dramas inform performance in Latin America not merely as dramatic literature, but as an artistic form and plateau of individual and social agency.

If you wrote any comments, notes, or questions about these matters, please blog them here for further discussion.

On Wednesday, September 3 we discussed the origins of theatre, film, and performance art as we understood them to have happened separately.  Chronologically first, theatre originated in Antiquity, especially Ancient Greece, and then in  the sixteenth- seventeenth-centuries in the Hispanic world with the Spanish Comedia (the first professional theatre of Spain, which Margaret Wilson’s reading helped us see better in a world of ‘controversy’).  Second, film in the nineteenth century as a result of developments of imaging machines, which the reading by Amy Villarejo helped us understand, and we will return to throughout the semester.  Finally, we tapped on the matter of the origins of Performance Art, led by Diana Taylor’s  reading “Performance Histories.”  We talked about the installation Mujeres en la plaza by Patricia Ariza (Bogotá, 2009), which Taylor interprets as an intertext between women and violence in Colombia.

If you have any comments to this piece, or have any doubts, questions, or concerns about anything we discussed in class on this day, please blog away.

On Wednesday August 29 we gathered for the first time and discussed preliminary definitions of our main terms–Theatre, Film, and Performance Art.  We talked a bit about our interest in these media and their relationship to various definitions and understanding of the terms ‘Hispanic,’ ‘Latino American,’ and ‘Latinx,’ among others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhEbM-Cz-AA

We discussed a clip from Blood Sign, an installation by Ana Mendieta, and its inscription of iconography, gender, materials, and a deconstructed sense of identity.  If you would like to comment on the terms we discussed, or Mendieta’s installation, please respond to this prompter.

 

NOTE: I ask that you inscribe your posts on the particular string of discussion we are going to establish, according to the weeks of the semester.  If you have a thread DIFFERENT from what we are discussing, you can start a different thread; however, if your post relates to what you have read and we have discussed in class, please choose the respective week/thread, so we can keep these as a sort of virtual conversation.  I am going to upload a prompter like this every week, so you can add your blogpost to the thread.  Let me know if you have any questions or concerns about it.

Welcome to Emory WordPress Sites.  This is our Scholarblogs Site for the seminar “Hispanic Theatre, Film, and Performance Art” (CPLT 333) this semester.  I look forward to reading your comments about our readings and class discussions.