Traditions Contested, Traditions (Re)Claimed: Performance, Politics, and the Cultural Turn of the New Popular Latin American Theater

Abstract

This dissertation considers the complex performance genealogies and relationships to tradition of three different contemporary Latin American theater collectives vis-à-vis the specific cultural matrices in which they operate and whose myriad traditions they alternatively engage, revive, contest, modify, replace, and, in some cases, annihilate. Tradition is not given; it is not a static cultural inheritance. Rather, it is a contextually determined battleground for adjudicating truth claims around communities engaged in often-violent political, economic, and cultural struggles. Through three case studies -Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani in Peru, Grupo de Teatro Catalinas Sur in Argentina, and Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya in Mexico-, this dissertation project examines the tensions between how these groups stage the past and present ever with an eye toward the future, their shared concerns about social memory, the revaluation or recovery of lost or marginal performance traditions, and the creation of a poetics that celebrates the theater as an inclusionary and reflective space. Taking as its point of departure the idea that traditions -specifically seen through the intra- and intercultural hybridity of performance practices in these three Latin American case studies-function as epistemologies that create genealogical lines of intergenerational communication and enable alternative historical claims to be made by marginal groups, this thesis seeks to understand the cultural turn of the New Popular Theater in Latin America. To do so, it views this phenomenon through the lens of performance studies, which offers the multi-systemic framework (drawing from such disparate fields as cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology, sociology, historiography, and literary and dramatic theory, among others) that such analysis requires.