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Monday, September 14, 2015

Redefining Theatre Communities 2015




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.  

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