The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater
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THE LEPER IN BLUE: COERCIVE PERFORMANCE AND THE CONTEMPORARY LATIN AMERICAN THEATER Amalia Gladhart University of Oregon The Leper in Blue: Coercive Performance and the Contemporary Latin American Theater Amalia Gladhart CONTENTS Introduction: The Blue Leper 1 1. Performance, Textuality, and the Narration of History 25 2. Feigned Paralysis: Performance and Games 86 3. Playing Gender 133 4. Torture on Stage 190 5. Nothing's Happening: Performance as Coercion 240 Conclusion: Displacement, Replay 273 Works Cited 288 self-archived postprint; please cite published edition Introduction: The Blue Leper My first experience of Latin American theater was a truly amateur production in northern Ecuador--the actors and producers were local, at any rate; I don't know where the script originated. My Spanish at the time was still provisional: the only word of the play I clearly understood was "leprosa, leprosa," shouted vigorously by a girl in a blue dress. My father explained she had found pus on her hotel sheets and believed herself infected. There was something about a place she'd visited some time ago, a danger she didn't fully notice at the time. None of it made much sense. It was a school performance, in honor of the local patron saint--another fiesta, La Santísima Virgen de la Caridad--and an auspicious beginning, I suppose, to my study of theater. The disgust of that image of pus-smeared sheets, and the absolute confusion of a play performed in Spanish barely six weeks into our stay in Mira, eclipsed all other aspects of the spectacle. I have a clear picture of the girl, dressed to represent a woman twice her age--I say girl, but to my eleven- year-old's eyes she looked fully grown, sophisticated in that close-gathered, shiny blue dress. And I can see the dress, the wavy hair just past her shoulders, can hear her crying "¡Leprosa, leprosa!" as she rushes across the stage (and me whispering to my father, "That's leprosy, right, Dad?"), but I have no memory of how the play turned out, whether she became ill, whether the hotel management was to blame, who she was, anyway. It was the only time I went into that school auditorium, in all the fifteen months we lived there. Nor have I returned on later visits. The locked gate across the entrance--somewhat separate from the school, outside its patio walls--was a place for boys to congregate, a gauntlet of whistles to run in Gladhart, The Leper in Blue, 1 self-archived postprint; please cite published edition pursuit of an errand, not a place to enter. It was, in effect, a space of contagion, a private quarantine demanded by the character's apparent illness and, more significantly, by the privacy of the nuns who ran the school, the girls (my friends) who had to stay indoors or risk their parents' wrath. It was one of the boundaries that, despite my privileged status as a guest in town, I was unable or unwilling to traverse. The isolation of that stage, entirely cut off from the rest of my life in Mira, resonates with the weird image of the screaming leper. The blue leper, as I think of her, is joined by five or seven other offset memories retained from the time before the village began to make sense, before I had my own internal map and the words with which to talk about it. Images, for me, of what I have since come to associate with the instability of performance: a sense of repetitive motion that is never quite the same, of slippage from one version to the next as each teller reshapes the tale in her own image. Those unassimilated memories reflect as well the stubborn demarcation of the stage, and not only the concrete stage of the nuns' colegio. Despite all efforts to erase the boundaries between the theater and whatever might take place "out there," the simple need to mark this, here as stage, as something else, establishes a separation. The girl's dress is a fixed star, a point of reference that echoes the distorted femininity of Lupita in Rosario Castellanos's El eterno femenino (Mexico, 1974) [The Eternal Feminine], the desperate reinventions of El and Ella in Sabina Berman's El suplicio del placer (Mexico, 1978) [The torture of pleasure], and Gabriel's stymied performance in Isaac Chocrón's La revolución (Venezuela, 1971) [The revolution]. That blue dress is doubled in the blue cape worn by the final Mama Negra of Latacunga's annual fiesta. I will return Gladhart, The Leper in Blue, 2 self-archived postprint; please cite published edition to the Mama Negra in my conclusion, in order to consider the connections between staged performances--of which the blue leper is emblematic--and the theatricality represented by the procession of the popular Ecuadorian celebration. Like the school girl's exuberant performance, the fiesta pushes the borders of theatricality, drawing that which had been offstage into the precincts of the performance. In both, the play of unassimilated excess is unavoidable. The blue leper is a number of things: a point of reference in my own observation of myself seeing, the inevitable self-reflexiveness that conditions all writing about performance just as it shapes the performance being viewed. A reminder that the audience is always vulnerable, that the auditorium is a narrow room filled with live bodies, audible (even when attempting a polite silence) in the involuntary hiss of breathing or the deliberate reproduction of a soundtrack broadcast across the show. Or a rejoinder that things aren't always what they seem, that repetition breeds contempt but equally brings comfort, reassurance, and that the sense of no first time means no first danger, either. The girl stands trapped in the nonperformance of this observer's faulty memory--as I've noted, I couldn't say what happens next-- unable to escape the pull of a dimly recalled hotel. Like a video loop on interminable playback, she hurtles across her stage toward the agent of infection, her voice bound in the single word of a desperately truncated text, stalled by an audience that won't quite hear but can't quite leave. My individual difficulties as spectator at the school play had to do with language, with imperfect simultaneous translation and my own inability to grasp local speech. But in a somewhat similar manner, the audience is always in some way separate from the stage, divided, different. And there is Gladhart, The Leper in Blue, 3 self-archived postprint; please cite published edition nearly always something that remains only partially understood. I was only provisionally part of that community, but an audience, as community, is intrinsically provisional, because it is constituted by an immediate and unique event. The episode further suggests that the performance space is potentially dangerous for both performer and spectator. The blue leper's reduced text (¡leprosa! ¡leprosa!) also points to the link between the dramatic text and its eventual (or possible) performance. Such texts are rewritten in performance, but also in each individual reading, in each night's rendition and in each spectator's recollections of the show. There is no last word, no definitive version, and this contingency is deeply tied to the problems of compulsion and of staged violence that arise in so many plays. The play as oppositional mechanism is inexact, and it is difficult to know what has been or will be said. The escape offered by the performance is at best provisional, even if the violence is (at some level) illusory. The blue leper is but one example. Coercive performance, however, is evident in many contemporary Latin American plays. Playwrights such as Vicente Leñero, Sabina Berman, Mariela Romero, Griselda Gambaro, Eduardo Pavlovsky, and Rosario Castellanos, among many others, depict the freedom of performance within a framework of compulsion. Performance is invoked to address social realities, such as the production and interpretation of history, ritual game playing, and gender identity, which can be thought of as a series of performances. A phenomenon at once liberating and coercive, performance is not limited to the theater space but may be used in strikingly similar fashion on and off stage. The plays I will discuss reveal a distinct ambivalence toward the theater. On the one hand, the theater works as a Gladhart, The Leper in Blue, 4 self-archived postprint; please cite published edition space of freedom and oppositional action, but on the other, it may mimic the operations of power and compulsion that characterize extra-theatrical reality. Performance is a broad concept that goes beyond the play within the play or self-referentiality of metatheater to encompass individual actions and social realities. In her introduction to Radical Street Performance, Jan Cohen-Cruz writes that performance "indicates expressive behavior intended for public viewing" (1). This definition provides a useful point of departure for the representations of performance I will address, all of which require an audience and entail conscious action. The viewing public, however, is often highly circumscribed, and does not in all cases recognize itself as audience. Performance is intrinsically contingent and unstable, and citational in the widest sense--that is, citing not only the (a) text, but social norms, gender roles, cultural in-jokes, and historical narratives. As Elin Diamond argues, "Every performance, if it is intelligible as such, embeds features of previous performances: gender conventions, racial histories, aesthetic traditions-- political and cultural pressures that are consciously and unconsciously acknowledged" (1). Performance may be imposed or freely chosen and is not automatically playful or liberating. It is therefore a double-edged figure with which to critique social elements such as gender, game playing, and state terror that themselves contain (outside the theater) elements of theatricality.