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Performance and Migration website is designed to support any researcher, student or specialist in completing literature reviews, essays, publications or more in the field of Theatre and Migration by providing an easily accessible archive of research which has been compiled and sorted into several comprehensive collections

South America

Here are the works about Peru, Brazil, Argentina and Southern/Latin America as a whole.

Cuban migration to Europe and America (North, Central and South) has designed a creative and pedagogical map that expands its original theatrical geography into the new “lived spaces” – sometimes these being bilingual spaces. In the last fifty years Cuban migrants have processed their journeys of displacement by recovering their own cultural History through the generation of new Imaginaries and Institutions, creating in consequence new aesthetic scenarios articulated by a “frontal discourse” or a “rhetorical tissue” (Azor). These new aesthetic scenarios reveal the multicultural dialogue of a transcending “cubanidad”. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This dissertation explores how the theme of migration in Peruvian theatre and performance from the 1950s until the beginning of the twenty-first century constitutes a response to Western discourses on development and modernity. Framing the arguments with decolonial and postcolonial theory, the author posits performance and theatre as powerful tools for contesting the colonial aspects of modernity, development, and globalization. By analyzing works by Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Hernán Cortés, César Vega Herrera, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, Gervasio Juan Vilca, Javier Maraví Aranda, and Julio Ortega, along with two festivals from the city of Cusco, this dissertation interrogates how Peru’s theatre protested racial discrimination and helped to craft regional and provincial identities as a response to the increasing encroachment of globalized ways of life. (taken from the dissertation)

The Theatre of Luis Valdez focuses on the life and work of American playwright and director Luis Valdez, known for his play Zoot Suit – the first play by a Latinx playwright to appear on Broadway – and founder of El Teatro Campesino, the oldest surviving community theatre in the United States. Built around first-hand discussions of Valdez’s work, this collection gives an in-depth understanding of where ‘the godfather of Chicano theatre’ fits in the grand scheme of American drama and performance. This is a go-to resource for scholars, students and theatre practitioners looking for an introduction to this seminal figure in modern American performance. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

Emphasizing the resilience of theatre arts in the midst of significant political change, this book spotlights the emergence of new performance styles in the wake of collapsed political systems. Centering on theatrical works from the late nineteenth century to the present, twelve original essays written by prominent theatre scholars showcase the development of new work after social revolutions, independence campaigns, the overthrow of monarchies, and world wars. Global in scope, this book features performances occurring across Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The essays attend a range of live events—theatre, dance, and performance art—that stage subaltern experiences and reveal societies in the midst of cultural, political, and geographic transition. This collection is an engaging resource for students and scholars of theatre and performance; world history; and those interested in postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The concept of migration offers a useful organizing principle for an introduction to Latin American theatre, as it encompasses multiple theatre styles and practices. Issues of migration are often in the news (in Latin America and beyond), thereby offering a point of entry for students who may not have studied theatre in the past. Migration in its multiple forms (immigration, emigration, exile, return) has a long history in the theatres of the Americas, including not only contemporary plays set on the US-Mexico border, but also Puerto Rican and Argentine theatre from the first half of the twentieth century and recent theatre from Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina. As a liminal space, the stage offers unique possibilities for the representation of migration. Theatre is a privileged space for the consideration of the migrant’s experience of displacement, an intrinsically provisional space, continually redefined. Theatrical techniques used to evoke the displacements of immigration, exile, and return include: narrative and temporal disruption; multiple characters played by a single actor; the mixing of languages, with and without translation; the evocation of the absent or the disappeared; and satirical or grotesque exaggeration. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This dissertation rethinks applied theatre facilitation from a hemispheric perspective, to revalue its impact. A motivation for this research is the sparse dissemination of contemporary approaches to applied theatre coming from Latin America. Most of the existing texts in English are products of the Global North and inadvertently reproduce (neo)colonial epistemologies; a more decolonial framework is needed, from the perspective of the Global South, to allow a focus on experiential knowledge from below. The author looks at case studies in Latin American contexts of (de)humanization, from immigrant detention centers to victims’ groups, from displacement, disappearance and deportation to privileged detachment, in Colombia, Chile and California. Each case study generates distinct insights about negotiating complicity and resistance within violent state/institutional processes of isolation and confinement (understood here as dehumanizing enclosures). The main argument is that the impact of applied theatre is not only the effect on our ideas and (inter)actions, as in social change, but also a widened sense of what is possible in terms of ways of being and becoming in/with the world. (by the author – at the link above)

  • Henríquez, M. M. O. (2012). Mujeres mapuches migrantes en escena: Visualizando vidas desde la sombra. Letras Femeninas, 38(1), 43–54. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23345555

The provided academic article examines the portrayal of Mapuche migrant women in Argentine and Chilean theater and film productions from the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The analysis focuses on several Mapuche-created works that dramatize the migration experiences and challenges faced by these women in urban centers, serving as testimonies and resistance against the hostility and discrimination they encounter. Key findings include the presentations of Mapuche women’s perspectives across generations, as well as their efforts to retain cultural identity and community despite pressures of assimilation. The authors of these artistic works, many of whom are Mapuche, aim to raise awareness about the current realities and challenges facing Mapuche women in both rural and urban areas. (made by JSTOR AI)

This article explores the representation of migration and border crossing in Latina (1980), a play by Milcha Sánchez Scott that stages the difficulties associated with this journey. In 2010 Senate Bill 1070, one of the strictest anti-immigration legislative acts to be enforced, encouraged racial profiling in the identification of border crossers in the state of Arizona. Detained in the Desert (2011), a play by Josefina Lόpez, is a Chicana response to the passing of SB 1070, and contributes to a deeper understanding of the fraught experiences of migrant women’s lives. The study of the plays places an emphasis on transnational community building and audience engagement and builds on a range of recent critical work by border theorists and scholars such as Alicia Schmidt Camacho and Deborah Boehm, and theatre and performance critics such as Diana Taylor. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas is the first collection of essays to discuss the presence of Greek drama across the continents and archipelagos of the Americas from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. The classics have never been tied by geographical nor linguistic boundaries, and in the case of the Americas long colonial histories have often imposed those boundaries arbitrarily. This compendious volume tracks networks across continents and oceans and uncovers the ways in which the shared histories and practices in the performance arts in the Americas have routinely defied national boundaries. Lavishly illustrated and with contributions from Classicists, Latin American specialists, Theatre and Performance theorists, and historians, there are also interviews with writers. This 52-chapter volume seeks to define the complex contours of the reception of Greek drama in the Americas. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book is the first edited collection to respond to an undeniable resurgence of critical activity around the controversial theoretical term ‘interculturalism’ in theatre and performance studies. Long one of the field’s most vigorously debated concepts, intercultural performance has typically referred to the hybrid mixture of performance forms from different cultures (typically divided along an East-West or North-South axis) and its related practices frequently charged with appropriation, exploitation or ill-founded universalism. The collection offers case studies from Asia, Africa, Australasia, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe which debate the possibilities and limitations of this theoretical turn towards a ‘new’ interculturalism. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)   

This book is an ambitious project that aims to reclaim the agency of performers to facilitate cultural dialogue even within the globalized and decontextualized framework of the international theatre festival. Adopting a comparative approach that is fitting with the imperatives of the “Studies in International Performance” series, this book focuses on a specific transnational community—that of the Lusophone, or Portuguese-speaking, group of nations—in order to bring a new, transnational dimension to the discussions of global flows and local epistemologies that dominate festival scholarship. The author trains a sharp ethnographic eye on African performances staged at the festivals, revealing how festival productions and their aftermath can generate new perspectives on race and gender, colonial trauma, and the economics of cultural globalization. Featuring in-depth analysis of performances and artist interviews from Cape Verde, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique – countries with vibrant theatre practices and vexed colonial pasts – the book reveals how international festivals can be valuable platforms for new intercultural dialogues and diplomatic possibilities. (both from the review (https://journals-scholarsportal-info.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/details/00405574/v56i0001/124_.xml ) and from OMNI)

The Palgrave Handbook of Theatre and Migration provides a wide survey of theatre and performance practices related to the experience of global movements, both in historical and contemporary contexts. Given the largest number of people ever suffering from forced displacement today, much of the book centres around the topic of refuge and exile and the role of theatre in addressing these issues. The book is structured in six sections, the first of which is dedicated to the major theoretical concepts related to the field of theatre and migration including exile, refuge, displacement, asylum seeking, colonialism, human rights, globalization, and nomadism. The subsequent sections are devoted to several dozen case studies across various geographies and time periods that highlight, describe and analyse different theatre practices related to migration. The volume serves as a prestigious reference work to help theatre practitioners, students, scholars, and educators navigate the complex field of theatre and migration. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • Mendoza, R. (2010). Some No-Place Like Home: Thirdspace Production in Cherríe Moraga’s “Watsonville.” Confluencia, 26(1), 132–140. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27923482

The text explores Cherrie Moraga’s play, Watsonville: Some Place Not Here, and its critique of capitalist spatial practice. The play subverts dominant spatial regulations and creates a communal, resistant thirdspace in response to the alienating spatial regime imposed by capitalism. It addresses the spatial struggles of Chicanas/os / Latinas/os, particularly in response to border control and migrant worker exploitation. The play also challenges abstract space and the use of visual signs to impose abstraction onto nature. It creates a thirdspace within the theater itself, transforming the audience space and allowing workers to become “actors” and perform “themselves.” The text also discusses the transformative power of love in breaking through controls to find understanding and community. Additionally, it examines the role of nature, particularly in the context of an earthquake, in countering the abstract space of capitalism. The play presents a complex and multi-layered resistance to both capitalism’s abstract space and Catholicism. (provided by JSTOR AI)

  • Minvielle, R. (2015). L’Amérique du Sud ou l’émergence d’un nouveau théâtre des migrations africaines. Africa Development / Afrique et Développement, 40(1), 19–39. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/afrdevafrdev.40.1.19

The migration of Africans to Latin American countries has become a new trend in the migration pattern of Africans. From the 1990s, and especially since the 2000s, migrants, mainly from West Africa, have found a new migratory route in which Brazil and Argentina are the preferred destinations. These new routes are being explored not just as a response to the stern immigration policies of countries in the North but also because of the economic opportunities, favourable conditions and histories of groups and individuals. While the vast majority engage in street trading, driven in particular by the Senegalese Mourid community, others seek to make their mark in football and business. (from the abstract)

The Routledge Companion to Latine Theatre and Performance traces how manifestations of Latine self-determination in contemporary U.S. theatre and performance practices affirm the value of Latine life in a theatrical culture that constantly and consciously strives to undermine it. This collection draws on fifty interdisciplinary contributions written by some of the leading Latine theatre and performance scholars and practitioners in the U.S. The project reveals the continued growth of Latine theatre and performance, through essays covering, but not limited to playwriting, casting practices, representation, training, wrestling with anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, theatre for young audiences, community empowerment, and the market forces that govern the U.S. theatre industry. This book enters conversations in performance studies, ethnic studies, American studies, and Latina/e/o/x studies by taking up performance scholar Diana Taylor’s call to consider the ways that “embodied and performed acts generate, record, and transmit knowledge.” This collection is an essential resource for students, scholars and theatremakers seeking to explore, understand and further the huge range and significance of Latine performance. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • Murphy, K.M. (2018). Mapping Memory: Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas. New York: Fordham University Press. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/63128 

In this book the author investigates the use of memory as a means of contemporary sociopolitical intervention. She focuses specifically on visual case studies, including documentary film, photography, performance, new media, and physical places of memory, from sites ranging from the Southern Cone to Central America and the U.S.–Mexican borderlands. Murphy develops new frameworks for analyzing how visual culture performs as an embodied agent of memory and witnessing, arguing that visuality is inherently performative. By analyzing the performative elements, or strategies, of visual texts—such as embodiment, reenactment, haunting, and the performance of material objects and places Murphy elucidates how memory is both anchored in and extracted from specific bodies, objects, and places. Drawing together diverse theoretical strands, Murphy originates the theory of “memory mapping”, which tends to the ways in which memory is strategically deployed in order to challenge official narratives that often neglect or designate as transgressive certain memories or experiences. Ultimately, Murphy argues, memory mapping is a visual strategy to ask, and to challenge, why certain lives are rendered visible and thus grievable and others not. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This essay is an examination of the llanto (wail) as political performance praxis through documenting and reflecting on the collective work of Cherríe Moraga, Celia Herrera Rodríguez and approximately twenty-five artists to stage a PerformaProtesta at San Diego immigrant detention centers following the separation of migrant families during the summer of 2018. The following essay is a reflection on how Chicana/Latina/Caribeña storytelling and embodiment intervenes at the site of the colonial wound, and on how we rescript ourselves into old tales to learn (again) how to move through newly opened (old) wounds. As such, it tells its own story about migration, patriarchal motherhood, and colonial relations to land and water. (from the article)

This article trains a theater/performance studies lens on the struggle to control public perception of Elvira Arellano and coins the term “migrant melodrama” to describe how key media coverage, cultural production and social performance in Arellano’s case recycled nineteenth-century melodramatic tropes. On the one hand, melodramatic spectacles of suffering insist on a common humanity and make ethical claims for inclusion into an imagined community that may extend across national borders. Yet on the other hand, they can also backfire by unintentionally setting the price of inclusion at an impossibly high level of virtue. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the Latinx performing arts in what is now the U.S. since the sixteenth century. Volume II looks in depth at the experiences of Latinx individuals on theatre and performance, including Miguel Piñero, Lin-Manuel Miranda, María Irene Fornés, Nilo Cruz, and John Leguizamo, as well as the important role of transnational migration in Latinx communities and identities across the U.S. Overall this book offers an accessible and comprehensive understanding of the field and is ideal for students, researchers, and instructors of theatre studies with an interest in the diverse and complex history of Latinx theatre and performance. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the development of the Latinx performing arts in what is now the U.S. since the sixteenth century. Volume I provides a chronological overview of the evolution of the Latinx community within the U.S., spanning from the 1500s to today, with an emphasis on the Chicano artistic renaissance initiated by Luis Valdez and the Teatro Campesino in the 1960s. This book offers an accessible and comprehensive understanding of the field and is ideal for students, researchers, and instructors of theatre studies with an interest in the diverse and complex history of Latinx theatre and performance. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

While flight and exile are primarily associated with movement, this article aims to examine their static side, focusing on the element of waiting in the refugee and exile processes of theatre migrants. Examining the memoirs of the playwright, theatre manager and journalist, Heinrich Börnstein (1805–1892), and the documentary stage production What They Want to Hear (2018, Kammerspiele München) by the Argentinian director Lola Arias, it seeks to identify the subjective experiences of waiting of individual theatre makers and asks how they are configured in different settings and over time, in specific geographic and political locations. These subjective experiences of theatre migrants viewed through the analytical lens of waiting provide – as will be shown – crucial insights into social organising principles and power hierarchies. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

The book provides a new understanding of the vital role of performance in the Americas. The author reveals how the repertoire of embodied memory-conveyed in gestures, the spoken word, movement, dance, song, and other performances-offers alternative perspectives to those derived from the written archive and is particularly useful to a reconsideration of historical processes of transnational contact. Examining various genres of performance including demonstrations by the children of the disappeared in Argentina, the Peruvian theatre group Yuyachkani etc., the author explores how the archive and the repertoire work together to make political claims, transmit traumatic memory, and forge a new sense of cultural identity. Through her consideration of performances such as Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s show Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit, Taylor illuminates how scenarios of discovery and conquest haunt the Americas, trapping even those who attempt to dismantle them. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)

  • Ybarra, P.A. (2017). Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism. (1 ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Available at: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/55917

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism traces how Latinx theater in the United States has engaged with the policies, procedures, and outcomes of neoliberal economics in the Americas from the 1970s to the present. Ybarra analyzes the work of playwrights María Irene Fornés, Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, Caridad Svich, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Victor Cazares, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Tanya Saracho, and Octavio Solis. In addressing histories of oppression in their home countries, these playwrights have newly imagined affective political and economic ties in the Americas. They also have rethought the hallmark movements of Latin politics in the United States—cultural nationalism, third world solidarity, multiculturalism—and their many discontents. (provided by the publisher – at the link above)