Latin American Performance Art
Limpiza Social
2006 Performance
Marrero (2000) claims there are three models for Latinos: the first model is a community based theatre or organizations. Second model offers Latinas an opportunity for furthering their professionalization projects which aim to introduce Latino plays into mainstream, Anglo theatres. The third model, offers independent performance artists whose performance structure rejects traditional notions of dramatic structure and production to function in their art more freely (Marrero, 262).The third model is the most appropriate for the kind of performance that Galindo engages in and creates consistently. The techniques she has adapted surfaced in the 1960’s well through the 1990’s, this type of performance gained popularity among Latinas during the rise of the theatre arts independence, as they were now able to graduate from college.
Marrero, uses the term insertion, defined as both the act of inserting or introducing something without forcing or artifice, and also with force or artifice. She claims this is an equivocal definition for the case of Hispanic/Latino women in theater, because the act of insertion into center stage as decision makers has taken two forms (263). One form takes place during the first half of the twentieth century, the women employed tactics of insertion that were available at the time. For example, many women were employed in theaters because they were married to the owners or directors. The women had a huge advantage to being on stage and acted upon their opportunity to later run and direct their own theaters. Further hypothesizing, Marrero continues that university and other institutional arts programs existing since the 1960’s have altered the model of insertion, particularly for Latina playwrights. Latinas were no longer relying on outside sources, such as marriage, to feel an independent force to their role in the theatre. The discourses within Universities provided interested Latinas the opportunity to study and gain education, to be center stage as Latina performance artists.
The two terms Hispanic and Latina, the use of either is appropriate as Marrero explains it, to refer only when a performer refers to their selves that way. The term Hispanic most commonly associated with description of a theatrical activity in the historical past. Latina offers the benefit of being gender specific, which connotes politicized point of view regarding questions of identity and gender (Marrero, 263). Her claims that today’s researchers must develop numerous interdisciplinary skills, from archival recovery to journalistic and anthropological techniques of fieldwork is necessary because the field of Latina performance is relatively new and not properly documented. Whether that be due to the lack of professional performers or the lack of published works of art, or literature, the need to continue studies in the field of Latina Performance Art is essential.
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Teatro Campesinos, which Marrero claims is inextricable from the development of Chicano/Latino Theatre emerges. One key player in the Teatro Campesinos was at the height of her career in 1980’s, Socorro Valdez, her ability to have played to the audience as stock ‘male’ character, Huesos. It was when she was seen backstage after playing Huesos, who was the joker type character, controlling the audience and the motion on stage (Marrero, 275). This was the beginning of the period called the Teatro Movement. This movement showcased many women who were tired of playing the stereotypical Latin characters. Female roles remained consistent, (Arrizon, 352), they were either cast by age or a familial role such as mother, sister, grandmother or wife/girlfriend. She further describes the designations of the familial role as fitting into two categories, la Puta and la Buena, the whore or the virgin (Marrero, 252). Rodriguez’s points to certain conflicts she has with stereotypes, she claims;
The stereotypical roles continued within Teatro, the dichotomy of whore/virgin characterizes the female roles even after the period of the early actos. Actos, according to Arrizon, were political skits about farm workers crisis (238). These actos further inspired other Chicanos to form their own teatros, collectively creating actos relevant to their particular struggle (Huerta, 38). The struggle through war and repercussions of violence against women, is directly the struggle that Galindo performs against. According to Huerta, every Chicano play or adaptation produced to date can be termed political theatre, for they all assert a commitment to the Chicano community by revealing injustices in such institutions as the schools, the police system, the courts, and the workplace while also often exposing a search for identity within the dominant culture (Huerta, 39).
Marrero introduces the Teatropoesia as a newer form of teatro, which was gender based, alternative created by Chicanos to deal with the overall lack of concern for Chicanas in general in the artistic arena of the Chicano Social movement (275). The impact, of Teatropoesia, on the freer form of the combination of poetry and performance left ineffaceable marks on the limitations of Chicana Performance artists. Chicana performance artists claim the centrality of writing as an activity of self-creation and a way out of a psychological underclass: and the willingness and freedom of women performers to experiment with their own bodies as artistic and socio-cultural metaphors outside the limitation set by the proscenium stage (Marrero, 276).
The requirement of a proscenium stage, for Performance Artists, which subsequently rids away with the established hierarchies inherent in the sociology of traditional theatre, is not a requirement of this form of art. Around the world, an increasing number of Chicanas and Latinas who are using this art form are finding new ways to be bold in their performative techniques. Border Boda developed around the 1990’s was said to be a reflective junction between the teatropoesia of the late 70’s and early 80’s (Morrero, 276). Moraga & Anzeldua assert that Border Boda presents itself in Chicano theater history as a formal insertion that threatens the status quo. This urge has emerged individual performance artists to create a space for their often transgressive art forms.
During the rise of Teatropoesia, in a small country in Central America called Guatemala is at the beginning of what becomes a thirty-six year war. Under the power Military Leader Efraín Montt, the issues of human right violations became part of the forefront. It is in 1974 that Regina José Galindo, was born, in Guatemala City, Guatemala. As she grew up the descriptions and memories of the images Galindo recalls, “my head is filled with hallucinated, surreal, tragic and inconceivable images. I have seen many faces, characters, moments and places in my country. It is part of what it means to be Guatemalan. It is, in part, what makes us.” While she was recognized for her poetry at an earlier age, she claims to have begun to writing in a journal at the age of nine. “When I had my first period. The first page of it is a tormented narration of my bleeding body (Goldman interview)”.
It was three years after the war, in 1999, that Galindo began to experiment with Performance Art. One of her very first performances 1999, Lo voy a gritar al viento, Alludes to the fact that no one listens to women’s voices, that they’re effectively lost in the wind. This was a woman on the verge of throwing herself space, a woman protesting violence, one more crazy person. (Goldman Interview) Daniel (1996), claims that silence and speechlessness is one effect of violence, but political and legal agencies demand “words (or other signs) so that justice may be done.” On June 10, 2002, Benson marks the beginning of the post-war period that Galindo identifies her art within. According to Benson, by setting a historical backdrop for the June 10 protests situating the event within an emerging democratic public sphere where being seen or heard can be politically empowering and potentially dangerous. (439). What does it mean to be seen and not heard? The duration of Galindo’s performance was no longer than an hour altogether, not a single word was spoken by her. The people who were not witness to the performance, did not miss a word, missed the action and had only human footprints to see.
Anzeldua’s (1987) concept of Mestiza is a new Chicana consciousness that straddles culture, races, languages, nations, sexualities, and spiritualities, that is, living with ambivalence while balancing opposing power. Chicana’s within this consciousness refer to it as it reflects the understanding that as people, continuation of daily living to experience effects of multiple colonization’s, including the Spanish legacy, United States imperialism, Mexican nationalisms, and global patriarchy and heterosexism. Arrizon states that, in Gloria Anzeldua’s terms of the new Mestiza, the Chicana has a “plural personality,” thus “not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. Ambivalence, then, becomes the process that enables, in practical ways, the necessary struggle for one’s self-identification within the enactment of power relations. This method of Mestiza, according to Fay (1996), is not only an engagement in the social sciences that explores the way subjects “positively respond to knowledge of, and interaction with, those who are different. However to take on this type of methodology, Simon and Giroux (1998), or mode of learning and conception of knowledge may enhance the possibility of collectively constituted thought and action which seeks to transform the relations of power that constrict people’s lives.
Olivia Gessella Perez
Copyright ©
2001 by University of North Texas. All rights reserved.
Revised:
10 Nov 2007 20:31:11 -0600
"I am giving a pressure wash
with a hose, the method used to quell demon-strations and also wash newly
arrived prisioners."
Regina Jóse Galindo, 63
Isla
2006 Performance
"I remain immobile on a reef forming a puddle with my own urine around me."
Regina Jóse Galindo, 67
"¿Quién
poder borrar las huellas?"
Return to Regina Jóse Galindo's Index
*What distinguishes Latin
American Performance Art from
Feminist Body art?
*What makes Galindo's
Performance feminist body art?
*What kind of performance should be
expected Galindo's next project?
"A performance delivered with the participation of one of the most highly regarded plastic surgeons in Venezuela, Dr. Billy Spence, who marked on my body all the areas that should be operated on in order to achieve the perfect body, according to the aesthetic codes adopted by our society."
Regina José Galindo, 77