Location: Zoom Room B / Salle Zoom B

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/5324702280?pwd=yuo077u9YJNihv59FvXxbosHNeVpvv.1

• Sarah Ashford Hart and Janneth Aldana, “Community Theatre in Colombia: Origins and Trajectories”

There has been renewed national interest in socially-engaged arts since Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement, but the legacy of community theatre is largely ignored in pedagogy and scholarship. This article considers origins and trajectories of Colombian community theatre starting from the 1960s. While methods such as Nuevo Teatro and Theatre of the Oppressed have come to dominate the Latin American theatre cannon, we show how the influential ideas of Augusto Boal and Enrique Buenaventura were shaped through dialogue and exchange with collages who are much less known. We examine debates from the 70s about whether “teatro popular” was by or for “the people’, which have evolved into a contemporary commitment to working in community (from inside rather than outside). We consider key international encounters that occurred at regional festivals like the Festival de Manizales, which was a laboratory for the development of an anti-hegemonic Latin American theatre. Despite the extrajudicial persecution of “leftist” artists carried out across the region during the 80s, aggressive commercialization, and persistent institutional amnesia regarding creative practices of resistance, we find that “popular” theatre has endured by adapting to changing (now neoliberal) contexts, becoming “community theatre” in the 90s. We highlight the work of three active Colombian groups with long-term trajectories: Teatro Experimental de Fontibón (Bogotá), Nuestra Gente de Medellín, and Esquina Latina (Cali). All show a commitment to transgenerational collaboration and have proven resilient in contexts that are often life-or-death. This brings us to a Latin American understanding of applied theatre based in building affective connections and repairing torn social fabrics.

• Mika Lillit Lior, “Barravento: Liminal Tensions between Interior and Exterior Landscapes of Gendered Authority in an Afro-Brazilian Ritual Performance”

Barravento, which translates literally to a turning wind or wind that knocks you over, is a choreographic movement as well as signal of an oncoming entity in the traditionally woman-dominated Afro-Brazilian ritual matrix of Candomblé. This paper takes the barravento as a departure point for addressing the liminal tensions between internal and public negotiations of gender and sexuality at a religious compound in Bahia, Candomblé’s formative region in northeastern Brazil. Through an in-depth look at choreographies of invocation and spirit embodiment at an unofficial Candomblé ceremony held at the suburban Candomblé, Ilê Axé Opo Aganju, this paper presentation explores the barravento as a key to apprehending complex, non-Western constructions of masculinity, human and non-human agency, and religious orthodoxy in the Afro-Bahian world. Specifically, I probe the tensions between interior landscapes and intimacies between divinities and their devotees, on one hand, and exteriorized politics of authority at the temple.
As part of my larger project focusing on four different Bahian Candomblé sites, this research approaches choreography as both a source of insight and methodological approach to intervene in dominant representations of Africana religious performance as unidirectional processes of ‘possession.’ Rather, as I demonstrate, spirit embodiments constitute movement-oriented, reciprocal relationships that blur the binary opposition of interiority and exteriority and can serve to both affirm and destabilize established configurations of power. 

Biographies

Sarah Ashford

Dr. Sarah Ashford Hart is Assistant Professor of Theatre & Performance at the College of William & Mary. She is a socially-engaged performance practitioner/scholar from a Canadian-Venezuelan-American background. She completed her BA in Theatre at Barnard College, Columbia University, her MA in Devised Theatre at Dartington College of Arts, Falmouth University, and her PhD in Performance Studies at the University of California, Davis. 

Mika Lillit Lior

Interdisciplinary dance artist-scholar Mika Lior researches ritual choreographies and their political valences in Bahia, Brazil. She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at York University’s School of the Arts and holds a PhD in Culture and Performance from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her creative practices include samba, capoeira, dance-film and contact improvisation.