The academic team from Chile

We, the academic team from Chile, aimed to place local phenomena in a global context for the participants of the seminar. The seminar gave us the chance to comparatively examine historical contexts of specific political processes and artistic discourses. This moved us to think about local manifestations of global aesthetic matrixes in a new light during our discussions.

One such case are the interpretations of Bertolt Brecht’s theatre in Latin America at large, as well as in the case of Chile. This influence goes beyond the mere production of Brecht’s plays in Chile or the Americas. The circulation of discussions on political theatre around the 1950’s found in Brechtianism a milestone that informed the development of local artistic practices. Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed in Brazil and Isidora Aguirre’s politically engaged theatre in Chile during the 60’s, for example, engaged with aspects of Brechtian theatre.

Moreover, analyzing the global circulation of popular spectacles allowed seminar participants to challenge the idea of “influence” as a unidirectional phenomenon, and to surpass dichotomies such as lowbrow and highbrow cultural productions. One of those cases is the touring of Josephine Baker, who went from her natal Missouri to New York to become an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance, and later traveled with her transgressive show to France, Germany, and Latin America, including Chile. The tour of her dance and vaudeville spectacle sparked discussions on race and racism, sex, gender, and otherness wherever she performed. The discussion of Baker, by students and scholars from three different continents, was emblematic of a network of racial and sexual discourses, in which each interaction informed and enriched the other.

Studying popular performance such as circus, vaudeville, and spectacles of physical dexterity from all the three countries participating in the seminar also opened up avenues for further academic research in our local context. From a disciplinary viewpoint, the discussion of popular spectacle with colleagues from different academic systems made evident the scarcity of systematic approaches to those kinds of performances in our theatre studies syllabi. 

Another aspect we developed during the seminar, made possible by its synchronous transnational model, was to compare the reception of specific artistic productions in different contexts. The interpretation of Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman’s play Widows, was particularly enlightening. Dorfman’s play, written as a reflection on forced disappearances during the Chilean military-civic dictatorship, gained an impressive new meaning in its Indian production, set in the context of post-colonial Kashmir. 

With a couple of sessions remaining, the goals of the seminar as a whole are coming to fruition. The seminar’s first half, which focused on the historical contexts in the three countries, foregrounded the discussions of the second half, which was related to Contemporary Performance and process of democratization. One particularly interesting case that we are eager to discuss is the global phenomenon that has become the performance, A rapist in your path created by Chilean feminist art collective Las Tesis. Shared across social media, the performance created in Valparaíso during the 2019 social uprising in Chile to denounce gendered police brutality has been replicated in big cities as well as small villages worldwide. The prospect of hearing the reactions from our colleagues in India and Germany to the local renditions of the performance in their countries, highlights once more the endless paths that a collaborative, international teaching model such as the one made possible by IVAC, has yet to offer.