Bulletin of the Comediantes

The cover of the present volume returns to the theme of Federico García Lorca and La Barraca explored in volume 73, number 1. We also continue our reflections on the student troupe’s legacy ninety years after it first set forth to travel the Spanish countryside, one of the Second Republic’s state-sponsored misiones pedógicas designed to bring the theater of the Golden Age to contemporary rural audiences. Featured here is Lorca’s own sketch of another type of itinerant trickster drawn from La Barraca’s repertoire: the vagabond estudiante of Cervantes’s La cueva de Salamanca, who proves himself something of a skilled actor in staging a scene of his own design to sing for his supper (fig. 1). The 1932 re-envisioning of Cervantes’s student performer, refracted through the Lorquian lens and brought to life by La Barraca’s own student-actors, invites us to consider how the misiones pedagógicas of previous generations continue to inform our own teaching and research practices today.

La cueva de Salamanca, performed as part of a trio of Cervantine entremeses alongside La guarda cuidadosa and Los dos habladores, formed an essential part of La Barraca’s programing from its first sally to Burgo de Osma in the summer of 1932.¹ Lorca saw the entremeses as central to the company’s misión pedagógica, accessible in their themes, vivid in their language, direct in their structures.² While intimately involved in all stages of their production, Lorca took a particular interest in the details of La cueva’s costumes, sketching the designs for the four principal characters, including the Salamancan visitor, in his own hand (figs. 1–4).³

The resulting images are quintessential La Barraca: in the case of the student, the bright colors of his garb, designated by Lorca as “naranja” and “encarnada” in the sketch’s upper right-hand corner, suggest the vanguardist mise-èn-scene Lorca saw as essential to La Barraca’s mission to bring the public the most cutting edge of theater arts (see fig. 1 and cover); to Plaza Chillon’s eye they are “explosivos” and “picassianos,” reminiscent of Lorca’s design collaboration with Dalí for Mariana Pineda (201–02).⁴ [End Page 5]

The spoon-adorned bicorne atop the student’s head, however, evokes a more ancient visual tradition: the iconography of the wandering Salamancan student; roving and hungry, the stock character of the Medieval sopista would arrive, cutlery stowed in hat, to sing for their supper. Surviving as the symbol of Spain’s student choirs today—known as the tuna universitaria—the be-spooned hat, then as now, signals an act of performance. And indeed, Cervantes’s student, seeing an opportunity for a meal of more than the usual traveler’s sopa boba, mounts a memorable show for his hosts.

This performance, however, will be a dramatic one, with the student turned both actor and director. Here our sopista takes advantage of his host Pancracio’s interest in the occult arts of the fabled Cave of Salamanca to finagle himself a seat at the lavish table; with Pancracio having returned home unexpectedly, his wife Leonarda frantically hides the local sacristan and barber, illicit guests whom she is entertaining for dinner in his absence. The student, assuming the role of conjurer trained in the cave’s diabolical subterranean classrooms and pretending to summon forth infernal visitors, casts the barber and sacristan as “demonio” and “sacridiablo” in a farce at Pancracio’s expense (Cervantes 242). The duped host, blinded by his own thirst for secret learning, invites this cast of characters to sit down for the feast, the performance continuing with a serenade praising the inverted university that is the cave of Salamanca.

It is fascinating to envision La Barraca’s itinerant student performers, decked out in Lorca’s bold designs, portraying Cervantes’s own wandering student performer. And there is a final element of Lorca’s sketch that is particularly compelling to consider in light of these resonances between actor and character portrayed: the spoon that decorates the student’s cocked hat is not the traditional one of modest wood, but rather, as...