Performances that Change the Americas

✍ Scribed by Stuart A. Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 249
• Series: Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This collection of essays explores activist performances, all connected to theater or performance training, that have changed the Americas—from Canada to the Southern Cone. Through the study of specific examples from numerous countries, the authors of this volume demonstrate a crucial, shared outlook: they affirm that ordinary people change the direction of history through performance. This project offers concrete, compelling cases that emulate the modus operandi of people like historian Howard Zinn. In the same spirit, the chapters treat marginal groups whose stories underscore the potentially unstoppable and transformative power of united, embodied voices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, art and politics.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: case studies in activist performance
Bibliography
2. Playing Creole: circus dramas, the theater marketplace, and urban society in Argentina and Uruguay
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
3. BASTA: reactivating bodies and the dramaturgy of femicides in Argentina
Femicides and the enactment of change
Expresión MoLE
Dramaturgy of femicides
Bodies as trash
Acknowledgment
Notes
Bibliography
4. Carnival in hell: kinetic dissidence and the new queer carnivalesque in contemporary Brazil
Carnival and the politics of queer performance in Brazil: from inclusion to refusal
Queer embodiment as performance training: choreographing for survival
Violence as a language lab: necropolitics and the carnivalesque of queer refusal
Notes
5. Absent bodies and melted weapons: art and social change in contemporary Colombia
The Pogue singers: longing for peace
The politics of performing
Bodies and Fragments: Doris Salcedo
Fragments: art and society
By way of conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
6. Queering Abiayala: personal and political cartographies of the Indigenous Americas
Diversidad sexual y pueblos originarios
Sexual diversity and the original inhabitants
Nonheteronormative subjectivities across Abiayala
Cha'anil and performance
Mediated audience participation
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
7. Music, poetry, and Créolité in the songs of Carole Demesmin, singer, troubadour, and activist
Haitian Creole, development, and Haitian identity
Carole Demesmin: poet-singer
Poetry and music
Carole Demesmin: poet, griotte, and cultural marker
Notes
Bibliography
8. An Island in crisis: theater groups and social change in Puerto Rico in the new millennium
Notes
Bibliography
9. Performing the revolution: Castro's Cuba
Prologue: Castro's unexpected acting career?
Act I: revolutionary performances: Castro's regime
Act II: "Revolutionary" performances: mass demonstrations and the state
Act III: queer performances
Act IV: performance art
Act V: oppositional demonstrations and the state(s)
Epilogue
Bibliography
10. The queer/muxe performance of disappearance: Lukas Avendaño's butterfly utopia
The political performance of muxeidad
Gore capitalism in the Tehuantepec Isthmus
Performing the search for Bruno Avendaño
The politics of visibility
The butterfly's utopia
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
11. "Why are the Canadian authorities afraid of this play?": Eight Men Speak and Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada
Notes
Bibliography
Index