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Paper: “Criss-Crossing the Atlantic: Argentine Diasporic Stage Directors Returning to Buenos Aires.” PSi Performance Studies international Conference #30 “XXX Cruzo, Cruising, Crossroads,” Fortaleza, Brazil, December 11–15.

Paper: “Criss-Crossing the Atlantic: Argentine Diasporic Stage Directors Returning to Buenos Aires.” PSi Performance Studies international Conference #30 “XXX Cruzo, Cruising, Crossroads,” Fortaleza, Brazil, December 11–15.

In my first trip to Brazil, I’ll present the paper “Criss-Crossing the Atlantic: Argentine Diasporic Stage Directors Returning to Buenos Aires,” on Dec. 12, 2025 at PSi #30, the Performance Studies international conference “XXX Cruzo, Cruising, Crossroads,” held in Fortaleza. I examined the transnational careers of Argentine directors Jorge Lavelli and Alfredo Arias, tracing their emigration to Paris in the 1960s and their rise to prominence within major French cultural institutions, including Arias’s leadership of the National Drama Center of Aubervilliers and Lavelli’s tenure as founding director of the Théâtre de la Colline. I argue that their repeated Atlantic crossings shaped not only their artistic identities but also their later triumphal returns to Buenos Aires stages in the 1980s and 1990s, supported by French institutional funding and prestige. Through close analysis of Arias’s The Game of Love and Chance by Marivaux and Lavelli’s Macbett by Ionesco, I aim to illuminate how French and Argentine theatrical traditions intersected in innovative ways, offering a compelling model for understanding diasporic exchange in global performance networks.

Book: Actor-Network Dramaturgies: The Argentine of Paris

Book: Actor-Network Dramaturgies: The Argentine of Paris

After about 6 years from project through on-site research in Buenos Aires and Paris to book, I just finished checking the proofs of my monograph Actor-Network Dramaturgies: The Argentine of Paris, forthcoming in August with Palgrave Macmillan in the Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History series. What a journey!
In the meantime, I was fortunate to receive two great endorsements:
 
1. from Maria Delgado, professor and director of research at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK:
A rich, engaging and beautifully written exploration of stagings produced by Argentines who chose to settle in Paris in the 1960s. Boselli’s monograph is not simply a repositioning of iconic directors such as Jorge Lavelli, Jérôme Savary, and Alfredo Rodríguez Arias, but also an exploration of a wider group – including artist and playwright Copi, costume designer Juan Stoppani, set designer Roberto Platé, and performers Facundo Bo, Marucha Bo, and Marilú Marini — as a means of exploring the different networks through which they collaborated. In tracing the ventures these artists generated, this important monograph asks pertinent questions about nationhood, exile, intercultural collaborations, non-human agents, global and local exchange, and the political, social and cultural agents that shaped their navigation of intersecting cultural spaces.

2. from Leo Cabranes-Grant, Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Santa Barbara:

Spanning two hemispheres and two mega-cities, Stefano Boselli’s pioneering book manages to map, with great precision and inclusivity, the complex exchanges that make TransAtlantic cultures possible and sustainable. Adapting and refining the foundational principles of actor-network analysis, Boselli captures the creative and political transactions connecting Argentinian playwrights, directors, and performers living in France to funding resources, human and non-human agencies, policies, fashion, or set designers. What’s truly significant about Boselli’s research is that he manages to keep all these elements not only together —which is already quite a feat—but also in perpetual motion (as they are experienced and assembled). His meticulously detailed presentation of both the macro and micro factors involved, and his vision of intercultural relations as a flowing process that is constantly redressing its own forms posits the possibility of a richer methodological template breaching the gaps between sociology, performance studies, affect studies, and theater historiography. Last but not least, his book proposes a dynamic approach to diaspora studies, showing that geography is defined by our collaborations as much as by the lands we leave behind or the new lands we inhabit.