Theatre Journal

For a few decades now, Latin American artists and scholars have been grappling with a shift in creative practices that began at the turn of the century in response to the economic crisis that transformed the political landscape in the beginning of the 2000s. Many have identified this turn as the development of a new genre, characterized as envisioning "the real" on the theatrical stage. In her book, Paola Hernández seeks to dialogue with the historical trajectory of documentary theatre as it pertains to Latin American and the notion of the real in contemporary performance, a genre Hernández defines as artists using "documentary techniques as a way to explore issues stemming from real events. In doing so, they destabilized fictional settings, and highlighted the possibilities of how the theater could engage with real events in a more direct way, relying less on traditional realism" (1). The author wants to bring forth an understanding of how documentary theatre has evolved in Latin America, the political purpose of this evolution, and the intricate ways in which artists have engaged with this form through theatrical practices, technology, and above all the novel use of objects on the stage. Through her compelling examples, Hernández draws attention to the complexity of this seemingly simple concept through an introduction and four chapters that carefully display the multiple ways in which this term can be used and how elusive the search for a single, stable definition can be. The intended purpose of the book is to understand the nuanced performative practices that very important artists in Latin America have been developing as they relate to a questioning of the relationship between truth and fiction, a realm of increasing importance in a region that continues to grapple the violent historical past that has shaped their histories.

Staging Lives is a major contribution to the fields of Latin American, theatre, and performance studies. Hernández offers a theoretically sophisticated and eminently readable analysis of how the theatre of the "real" comes to embody a broad range of aesthetic positions within the liminal space of fact and fiction. As the author explains, "the real in the theater has emerged as a way to respond to the many ambiguities, doubts and questions people have regarding shifting paradigms of truth, reality, and information" (161). Chapter 1, "Biodramas: Vivi Tellas and the Act of Documenting Lives," offers a brilliant study of this iconic Argentine artist, who is renowned for promoting the investigation of new approaches to biographical and documentary practices onstage to question the conventional theatrical representation. The second chapter, "Reenactments: The Autobiographical at Play in Lola Arias," focuses on the work of this renowned artist, paying particular attention to the active role that photography occupies in the retelling of personal stories in her work. Chapter 3 presents the work of Mexican company Teatro Línea de Sombra and its commitment to human rights through its politically charged work aimed at building memory through [End Page 110] site-specific works. In the final chapter, Hernández turns to the work of Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón. Through the analysis of three of his works, the author traces issues of memory politics that range from the Pinochet era and beyond to question the purpose of historical truth onstage. In each of the captivating cases studied in the book, the playwrights and performance artists mobilize the archive to flip accepted social norms and values around the concepts of truth and authenticity. Especially important to this study is the value placed on the theatrical object as an important actant of meaning on stage. Objects carry intrinsic value in these performances as they constitute remains of the reality staged and primary elements in the artists' own performed biographies.

Staging Lives also makes a sophisticated and important contribution to the scholarly debates around notions of the archive, object-art, memory, affect, and spectatorship through the prism of aesthetics, performance, embodiment, abjection, politics, and the biographical. Hernández stages conversations among theorists from what we now call the Global North and South to expand the range of understandings of how these political and economic processes have affected the Americas as different nations try to deal with a questionable history of authoritarian militarization and violence. For reasons that are hard to understand, theories of affect, memory, aesthetics continue to focus on predominantly European and US voices. But Latin America has brilliant theorists of these subjects that, in this study, make their voices heard. Hernández's theoretical range is remarkable. The brilliance and dexterity with which she brings existing debates into conversation with her own very fine readings make this book a major critical intervention.

One of the many things I admire about this book is that the author groups the artists in chapters that allow her to develop the theoretical arguments in a grounded and compelling manner. One of the problems that Latin Americanists (and other scholars from understudied fields) often face is that we need to provide a great deal of context so that readers can follow the argument. But the methodology that Hernández uses allows her to set up the context as a theoretical set of questions that the works themselves illuminate. It is within this analytical framework that the power of the real—as both the mechanism and critique of truth and memory—gains its explanatory power. She never reduces the works to "examples" of the theory she imposes but on the contrary compellingly argues for new theoretical directions opened up by the works themselves. Taken together, these skillfully constructed chapters present a thought-provoking overview of the various tropes and methodologies that the theatre of the real can bring to the study of contemporary performance. I believe there will be a significant community of readership that will want to engage with this text—not only specialists in Latin America, but also scholars and readers interested in memory studies, affect studies, the use of multimedia in theatre, and many others. This book points to new paths for future research, and efforts to extend scholarship on this subject into new linguistic and geographical territories will certainly have the advantage of this well-researched study as a model for such an endeavor.