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Lowell Fiet, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras

Theatre in Puerto Rico reflects social tendencies that revolve around the syncretism apparent in all Caribbean cultures, with the creative impulses of inclusion and innovation, on the one hand, and the exclusion, rigidity, and violence of authoritarianism, on the other hand. In this precarious interplay of inventiveness and destruction, five historical markers serve as guideposts of a distinct theatrical tradition that extends over more than 500 years:

(1) Spanish chroniclers confirm that the pre-Columbian Taino areyto, a highly developed form of ritual, dance, and cultural performance, coincided during the first two to three decades of the 15th century with the popular medieval carnival-theatre of the Spanish conquistadores and the music and performances of the arriving Africans (text: Fernández de Oviedo);

(2) the popular creolized Iberian tradition continued to evolve, often over the objections of church and state, but by 1737, a Spanish colonial theatre with “luxurious” performances of Golden Age plays, including those of Calderón de la Barca, flourished during fiestas in San Juan (text: López de Haro);

(3) Spanish and European immigration in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries created an expanded audience for touring companies, and new theatres such as the San Juan Municipal (now Alejandro Tapia y Rivera) Theatre (1830) were built in cities throughout the Island (text: José Luis González);

(4) in the mid-19^th century a national literary tradition emerged that included plays that focused on the abolition of slavery, racial equality, and political autonomy and/or independence from Spain (texts: de Hostos and Tapia y Rivera); and

(5) after the US invasion and takeover of Puerto Rico in 1898, an extensive workers’ theatre movement took root and remained prominent in Puerto Rico until it was suppressed around 1920 (text: Dávila Santiago).

After 1920, the theatre became a less representative form, with Spanish touring companies performing for privileged audiences and amateur and university drama groups staging more serious and local drama. However, by the early 1950s, a group of talented young playwrights began to create the literary basis for the contemporary Puerto Rican theatre.

Lowell Fiet (PhD Theatre, Wisconsin 1973) has taught at Michigan State University (1973-76), the University of Oregon (1976-78), and at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras since 1978. Widely published in the field of Caribbean theatre, drama, and performance, he is also the founding editor of Sargasso (since 1983) and the author of El teatro puertorriqueño reimaginado (2004) and Caballeros, vejigantes, locas y viejos: Santiago Apóstol y los performeros afropuertorriqueños (2007). He directed the experimental theatre group Taller de Imágenes (1987-1995), the Caribbean 2000 Research Center (1995-1999), writes theatre criticism (since 1992) for the weekly newspaper Claridad, and leads the independent theatre-in-education project másTaller (mas[k] Workshop). He currently chairs the Interdisciplinary Studies Program in Humanities and the “Art, where and for whom?” institutional grant at UPR.

Active Muses in Contemporary Puerto Rican Theatre

Jessica Gaspar Concepción, University of Puerto Rico-Cayey

The essay Active Muses in Contemporary Puerto Rican Theatre presents the most important contributions of six seminal figures in contemporary Puerto Rican  theatre: Victoria Espinosa, Gilda Navarra, Myrna Casas, Rosa Luisa Márquez, Maritza Pérez and Teresa Hernández. Also, it analyzes the multiplicity of roles that these women have assumed in the practice of  theatre on the “Island.”

Jessica Aymeé Gaspar Concepción is an alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she did her dissertation “Resistance and Transformation in the ‘Other’ Puerto Rican Theatre: Performances of Rosa Luisa Márquez 1986-1998.” She currently teaches  theatre arts at the University of Puerto Rico-Cayey Campus and heads the educational-artistic project Radiografías artísticas de manifestaciones de violencia y paz (artistic x-rays of expressions of violence and peace), which is sponsored by the UPR-Cayey Commission for Violence Prevention. She headed the research project Luisa Capetillo y la palabra activa: El teatro como herramienta de creación investigación y educación (Luisa Capetillo and the active word:  theatre as a creative, research and educational tool), sponsored by the UPR-Cayey Inter-Disciplinary Research Institute and wrote the play Luisa Capetillo: La musa activa (Luisa Capetillo: the active muse) about the contributions of this feminist and anarchist Puerto Rican woman writer of the beginning of the 20th Century. This production toured in Puerto Rico and abroad.

At UPR-Cayey, Gaspar-Concepción has directed artistic projects such as Ellas y su dramaturgia del cuerpo y del espacio (women and their physical and spatial playwriting) and Expresión, acción y reflexión: No más violencia contra las mujeres (expression and action and reflection: no more violence against women), both sponsored by the UPR-Cayey Women Studies Program. She has also participated as an actress in several professional  theatre and film companies such as Teatro del Sesenta, Cimarrón e Isla Films, Ágora Teatral, and Corporación de Teatro Latino.

Theatre and Performance in the Puerto Rican Diaspora

Rosalina Perales, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras

Despite being a “small’ country, Puerto Rico has citizens living all over the world and drawing international attention to their creative work. Arts and literature provide an outlet of expression for not only Puerto Ricans living on the island but for the Puerto Rican Diaspora that consists of people born in the US and others that move off the island for primarily economic reasons –half of the Puerto Rican population now lives in the United States. During the 20^th Century, there were many examples of Puerto Rican theatre in the US, especially in New York. It was in the 1950s that the enormous success of René Marques‘ The Oxcart started the real presence of Puerto Rican theatre there. Succeeding generations of Puerto Ricans have contributed to the development and expansion of this movement, which has included poets and storytellers who also perform their texts to reach a wider audience. The theatre of social rage during the 1960s and 1970s has now evolved into a more subtle expression of social and political protest and is often modernized and packaged to compete with mainstream American theatre. Some playwrights have seen their plays produced on and off-Broadway, but the majority must continue to struggle to get their plays produced and to receive recognition in the US as well as on the island of Puerto Rico, where they believe they also belong. I propose to present a brief overview of the work of these emigrants and focus on their concerns within the theatre world.

Rosalina Perales is a Puerto Rican scholar, historian, critic, and full professor in the Drama Department at the University of Puerto Rico. She studied for her Doctorate in Europe, in the United States, and in Latin America. Since 1987, she has dedicated herself to theatre research, especially in Latin American countries, and has published Contemporary Hispanic American Theatre (volumes I and II) on the subject. She has also published numerous essays and articles. In 1996, she published a theatrical biography, Fifty Years of Puerto Rican Theatre: The Art of Victoria Espinosa. In 2002, she published Anthology of Puerto Rican Children’s Theatre and most recently, Children’s Theatre of Eugenio Maria de Hostos (2009). She is also awaiting publication of her book, Theatre and Performance of the Puerto Rican Diaspora and a collection of essays she is editing about Puerto Rican theatre under the title of Ollantay, a Latino theatre journal in New York.

She founded Bambalinas, the first theatrical journal at the University of Puerto Rico.  She has received many awards for her essays and short stories. In 2003, she was honored with the prestigious Eugenio María de Hostos Honorary Professor Award to conduct an international theatre project on Hostos’ children’s theatre. She created and continues to preside over the Puerto Rican Alliance for International Theatre Exchange and has organized an international theatre festival on the theatre of Hostos and several symposiums on theatre education.  At the moment, she is working on establishing a theatre research center at the University of Puerto Rico and trying to design a new Master’s Degree in the Drama Department.

Cultural Cartographies of Contemporary Puerto Rico:

Art, cultural action, and transformations in the public space

Mareia Quintero Rivera, University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras

What has been the place of art in producing significations of Puerto Rican social experience? What is the role of metaphor in collective action and political configurations? How are art and social mobilization in contemporary Puerto Rico transforming the public sphere? This presentation aims at exploring the ways in which art and cultural action relate to some of the historic processes that articulate our contemporary notions of the Puerto Rican experience and challenges, in particular, economic dependency, ideologies of progress and urban development, and political subordination.

The last decade has seen the generation of new forms of social mobilization that inform political practice. The struggle of Peace for Vieques is the most evident expression of the reconfigurations that emerge in political discourse and action. Art and performance have played a vital part in developing metaphors that demand a more democratic public sphere, including community resistance to expropiation and displacement, the defense of the right access to public lands and the shoreline, and more recently, opposition to the current devastation of the public sector launched by the present government. This analysis pays special attention to the resignification of place or site through the mobilization of aesthetics and political action. It looks at urban spaces that have gained a symbolic density that transforms them into sites where people affirm their rights, defy inequalities, and unveil relationships of power.

Mareia Quintero Rivera is a professor and researcher of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at the University of Puerto Rico, where she currently coordinates the Masters in Cultural Agency and Administration and directs a collaborative research project in Cultural Cartographies in Contemporary Puerto Rico. Quintero has a PhD in Social History from the University of São Paulo in Brazil, and she is the author the book A cor e o som da nação: A idéia de mestiçagem na crítica musical do Caribe Hispânico e do Brasil (São Paulo, Annablume, 2000) [The Color and Sound of the Nation: The idea of mestizaje in music criticism in the Hispanic Caribbean and Brazil] as well as of diverse of essays on cultural history and cultural policies.

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You may have been hearing in the news recently about the particularly deep effects of the economic crisis in Puerto Rico (which led to widespread and sudden layoffs, which in turn led to a general walkout on Thursday, October 15) – and wondering how this may affect our time during the conference.

At the moment, there are no plans for further protest action, nor is this likely to have an effect on hotel life; in fact, we are likely to be even more welcome than before. With the help of our Puerto Rican colleagues from the Island, Sonja and I are watching the situation and will keep you posted.

In the meantime, you can learn more about the context of recent events by reading the attached letter to President Obama, drafted and signed by 100 intellectuals on the Island, which describes in more detail their view of the circumstances that underlie both the layoffs and the public responses to them.  Background on the protests can be found at http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN1529874320091015 and at http://www.topix.com/world/puerto-rico/2009/10/census-figures-show-island-poverty-rate-hits-44-8-puerto-rico-daily-sun-03-10-09 .

How apposite that we gather together under the theme of “DestiNation,” precisely at a time when many Puerto Ricans are reanimating discussions of Island life relative both to local government and to the United States. We are fortunate to have as a member of our Program Committee Lowell Fiet, of the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, who will be leading a plenary of local intellectuals who can help us understand particularly how this affects cultural and intellectual life on the island.

Until then, we will post any important updates on the ASTR website.

All best,
Tamara Underiner, with Sonja Kuftinec

Co-Chairs of the 2009 Conference