Disonancias musicales: violencia y performance en Cuarteto de Eduardo Rovner

Music is a powerful presence in Eduardo Rovner’s dramatic production that resists being considered merely part of the background. In “Disonancias musicales: violencia y performance en Cuarteto de Eduardo Rovner” I aim to show that music assumes a key role in this Argentine play, by allowing the audience to connect diverse political and historical spaces and times, from the world of Beethoven and his Ninth Symphony, to the present-day performance of four inept and cruel string musicians that unsuccessfully play Beethoven’s work. In Cuarteto, the violent acts of the members of the quartet connect the historical past — including Nazism — with a present moment when social and political violence is being linked to artistic creation, ironically joining Beethoven’s admirable music with the moral indignities and murderous acts of the contemporary musicians, and in turn, indirectly with the atrocities of the Argentine Dirty War of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. In Cuarteto, Rovner creates an ambiguous artistic world — both sublime and horrendous — as a way to explore the processes of artistic communication, and to claim not only the artist’s own creative freedom, but also the political and ethical freedom that has been suppressed in Argentina’s recent history. (PM, Article in Spanish

Parálisis, parloteo y performance en Potestad de Eduardo Pavlovsky

From the perspective of time and space, this essay analyzes the way in which Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Potestad (1985) transforms the outrageous speeches of the protagonist and his excessive bodily movements into signs of physical, psychological, and moral paralysis. Such an approach serves to reveal the dialogic, proxemic, historical, and temporal schemes of the play. The author examines the dialogue and tension established between the protagonist’s harangues, his obsession with the positions of the characters, and his closely timed bodily activity and the relation between these discourses and an audience forced to harmonize the contradictions between what it hears and sees and the places occupied by people and objects. Through the theatricalization of silence and paralysis, Potestad questions the traditional notion of theatre as dialogue and action, thus creating an ambiance of ambiguity, trickery, and emptiness

Parálisis, parloteo y performance en Potestad de Eduardo Pavlovsky

From the perspective of time and space, this essay analyzes the way in which Eduardo Pavlovsky’s Potestad (1985) transforms the outrageous speeches of the protagonist and his excessive bodily movements into signs of physical, psychological, and moral paralysis. Such an approach serves to reveal the dialogic, proxemic, historical, and temporal schemes of the play. The author examines the dialogue and tension established between the protagonist’s harangues, his obsession with the positions of the characters, and his closely timed bodily activity and the relation between these discourses and an audience forced to harmonize the contradictions between what it hears and sees and the places occupied by people and objects. Through the theatricalization of silence and paralysis, Potestad questions the traditional notion of theatre as dialogue and action, thus creating an ambiance of ambiguity, trickery, and emptiness

(De)Humanizing Humor: The Anthill of Life and Politics in the Theatre of Sabina Berman

This article examines several theatrical works of this Mexican dramatist by means of ironic humor as a powerful resource to examine the nature of human communication, and to expose the serious and devastating social and political aspects of contemporary culture: machismo, political corruption, sexual violence, sexism, exploitation, historical manipulation, and hopelessness. In a tense environment where humor might not seem appropriate, Berman masterfully uses and critically examines it as a means to understand humor’s serious implications and its comic imperfections, as she subtly recurs to but also parodies some of the most recognized theories of humor. Berman’s use of incongruity highlights the tension in her theatrical production, in which even the most sordid acts are counterbalanced by irony, which produces not only surprise or pain in the face of the unexpected, but also pleasure. Perhaps that is why she incorporates the image of the anthill in her reflections about society, politics, history, sexuality, gender identity, and art, where the artist, with her double perspective, like the queen of the “Formicas exsectoides,” is able to interpret the world from both the inside and the outside