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Origins of theatre, film, and performance art (September 3)

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.

Patricia Ariza.
Hemispheric Institute 7th Encuentro: Staging Citizenship, Cultural Rights in the Americas (Bogot‡á, Colombia, August 2009)

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.

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Introduction to the seminar (August 29)

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.