Invisible
Performance Practices and Indigenous Caribbean Theatre: Restoring the Areito
Abstract: A community
that has lost its sense of origin and belonging must be redefined before it
finds its own performance identity. Also, the performance practices of a group
can contribute to the building of community even if what precedes its history
is decimation and invisibility. Thus, redefining performance practices,
contextualizing its present and projecting its future could be the difference
between remaining or disappearing from embodied cultural legacies that may need
restoration. When the gap between what was and what is seems greater, the
subjunctive mode may be one possible alternative to redefine, reconstruct and
reenact newly found performance identities. These can emerge from a personal
commitment to engage in creative process that in turn may inform the group and
subsequently the community. Indigenous theatre is in this paper proposed as an
area of contemporary theatre that is in critical need of attention. The established
theatre circuits in big metropolis do not allow space for indigenous theatre communities
to engage in a dialogue with the practice, the practitioners and the mainstream
audience at a level that could generate differing perspectives in Contemporary
Theatre-making. The invisible indigenous artist is invisible many times:
historically, physically, culturally, politically, and on stage. The
restoration of indigenous performance ritual practices, for instance, is
treated in this paper as a long due necessity to demand theatre reparations by rebuilding
theatre structures from the ground up. In the Caribbean this possible
initiative starts with the areito complex, a type of song-dance-storytelling
that encompasses the very nature of the Taino people’s performance activity in
the XV century. Its reappearance as Danza del Cordon or Lace Dance may be
considered raw material in the creation of new epistemologies in the field of indigenous
dramaturgies and performances.
