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Book Chapter: “Latin America” in Pirandello in Context

Book Chapter: “Latin America” in Pirandello in Context

My chapter “Latin America” has finally been published in the collection Pirandello in Context, edited by Patricia Gaborik for Cambridge University Press. Happy to be in the company so many other Pirandellian scholars!  Combining my interest in Italian and Latin American theatre studies, this was the first time I became aware of very active transatlantic networks that allow a touring theatre company to work a full-year season. Leave those pesky summer lulls behind by moving between hemispheres 😅.
In the chapter I speak about the introduction of Pirandello’s plays to Latin America, which started after the controversial Italian success of Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921), then staged by Dario Niccodemi’s company in Buenos Aires (1922), Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro (1923). When Pirandello’s newly established Teatro d’Arte found itself in serious financial trouble in 1927, it welcomed the proposal by the Teatro Odeón in Buenos Aires for a tour that promised to cover the deficit. On his first trip to South America the author sparked a fervor that made him the tour’s protagonist while dispelling the perception of his theatre as a conduit for Fascist propaganda. Pirandello’s second trip in 1933 saw the author directing the successful world premiere of When One Is Somebody. An important connection between the Italian playwright and the Buenos Aires professional theatre scene was actor Luis Arata, whose company systematically offered his plays between the 1930s and 40s. Over time, Pirandellian productions spread across the official, commercial, and independent circuits and Pirandellian tropes continue to influence Argentine playwriting to this day.

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Book Chapter and Paper: “Echoes of Theatre Past: Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca and Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo” in the The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction

Book Chapter and Paper: “Echoes of Theatre Past: Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca and Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo” in the The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction

My chapter “Echoes of Theatre Past: Blasco Ibañez’s El comediante Fonseca and Cozarinsky’s El rufián moldavo” has been published in the The Routledge Companion to Theatre-Fiction edited by Graham Wolfe. In the chapter, I continue my digging into topics related to Argentine theatre, Buenos Aires, and the importance of looking at networks of people and things to really know what’s going on. I examine El comediante Fonseca (Fonseca, the Actor, 1924) by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867–1928) and El rufián moldavo (The Moldavian Pimp, 1984) by Argentine filmmaker and writer Edgardo Cozarinsky (b. 1939) as examples of how theatre-fiction provides access to a broader historical awareness of the intertwined genealogies of artistic work and private events that influence theatre but remain otherwise mostly invisible. Unrestrained by the immediacy of a staged performance, these works expand their scope to encompass whole lives and diverse locales: not only do both Blasco and Cozarinsky jump freely between the present and the past, but they also evoke a variety of places on both sides of the Atlantic spanning from the city of Buenos Aires to the Argentine provinces, from the tropical forest of Venezuela to the steppes of Eastern Europe.

On March 7, 2024 I presented a paper on the same topic at the Mid-Atlantic Theatre Conference in Madison, WI.

Paper: “Friends or Foes, You’ve Gotta Love ’Em: Reframing Theatre’s Adversaries as Unwitting Allies”

Paper: “Friends or Foes, You’ve Gotta Love ’Em: Reframing Theatre’s Adversaries as Unwitting Allies”

On November 9 I discussed my paper “Friends or Foes, You’ve Gotta Love ’Em: Reframing Theatre’s Adversaries as Unwitting Allies” during the “Anchoring Historiographies: Hope, Method, and the Future of Theatre History” Working Session at ASTR American Society for Theatre Research Conference “Hope,” in Providence, RI.

Abstract:

Inspired by the theme “Hope,” I argue that, in certain circumstances, adversarial agents can be viewed as paradoxically beneficial for theatre groups or productions, as in the case of the Parisian stagings of Jean Genet’s The Screens (1966) and Copi’s Eva Perón (1970), both targets of threats and violent attacks by the right-wing group Ordre Nouveau and other agents. In 1971, theatre critic Colette Godard noted how such malicious interferences were a boon for companies without a budget. Indeed, for the Argentine group TSE staging Copi, the event made the difference between oblivion and immediate success.

This approach stems from my recently published book’s notion of “actor-network dramaturgy,” which articulates an expanded notion of agency for theatre and performance studies in the context of Actor-Network Theory by highlighting the uninterrupted continuity of the aesthetic with history at large. Because the network is a continuum of associations between “actors,” it makes no sense to distinguish artistic action from action per se. Thus, if “people know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does” (Foucault), actions chronologically preceding or parallel to the aesthetic ones can still be seen as pushing towards a theatre production, even without full awareness of their consequences. Hence, even enemies may unwittingly facilitate what they wanted to impede.

More generally, this method invites researchers to develop a more comprehensive actor-network dramaturgical vision by including longer genealogies of humans, things, and events; more numerous types of actors, human and non-human; and both friendly and adversarial actors, successes and failures, as sources of exciting historical accounts.

 

Paper: “The Balcony, The Pope, and The Screens: Jean Genet’s Unsettling Perspectives on the Society of the Spectacle.”

Paper: “The Balcony, The Pope, and The Screens: Jean Genet’s Unsettling Perspectives on the Society of the Spectacle.”

On October 26, I presented the paper “The Balcony, The Pope, and The Screens: Jean Genet’s Unsettling Perspectives on the Society of the Spectacle” for the “Theatre and Society” Panel at the PAMLA Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference “Shifting Perspectives,” in Portland, OR.

Jean Genet (1910–1986) found recognition by shocking conventional French society. In this paper I analyze his three plays that more pointedly critiqued “the society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord), the degradation of authentic social connections in favor of relations between their images.

In The Balcony (1955), the brothel of the title appears as a high-scale establishment dedicated to enacting perverse scenarios by regular men who seek the thrill of absolute power. Stage manager of this “house of illusions” is Madame Irma, who surveils its 38 studios. However, because her clients’ reenactments are nothing but simulacra of power, fundamentally blunting any desire to act in the real world, the bordello acts as one of the status quo’s institutions, against which a popular revolution is brewing. In the end, the rebels fail because, even after the real Royal Palace is blown up, a confrontation of allegories is displayed from the brothel’s balcony, with Irma and her clients silently embodying the archetypes of power just destroyed and yet desired by the masses as guarantors of order. When Irma dismisses the audience in the same way as her clients, hinting at a new rebellion the next day, she implicates the voyeuristic spectators as acquiescent to the mechanisms of power through spectacle.

With The Pope (1955), Genet applies his analysis to the highest position in the Catholic Church. In this playful and irreverent short piece, a photographer has made an appointment to capture the Pontiff’s ideal image for worldwide distribution, but this highly self-conscious Pope regrets gradually shedding all his “interior density” to finally become an empty vessel reduced to a “definitive image.” Indeed, he enters in the expected “long white robe […] a tall papal miter and a cross on his chest” but does so gliding on roller skates, while his behind remains naked because never officially visible.

Finally, combining his scathing assessment of white colonialism and the discourse on power achieved through simulacra, The Screens (1961) offers a sprawling, polyphonic epic that obliquely alludes to the Algerian war of independence (1954–1962), in which both sides rely on simulacra. On the one hand, the ruthless racist colonizers count on their constructed image to dominate the territory, such as wearing a fat suit to look more imposing, while the French soldiers seem more preoccupied with looking good than having better weapons; on the other hand, the insurgents – though able to win the war – simply substitute the older with their own oppressive power structures. This similar approach becomes evident once all warring characters end up in the same metaphysical “place” after death. The only way to escape this society of the spectacle is suggested by the Nettles family, when Saïd dies but does not reappear among the dead, so he will never be fixed in a hero’s image.

Overall, Genet’s work displays a gusto for defying expectations, an eagerness to contradict the assumptions of bourgeois morality, and a constant reminder of the power and fragility of simulacra in the private and political arena.

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.

 
Director: Happy Days by Samuel Beckett at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre

Director: Happy Days by Samuel Beckett at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre

For my first directing credit at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre, I will stage Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, which runs September 11–17 in the Black Box Theatre at the Nevada Conservatory Theatre and will later move to the Vegas Theatre Company theatre in downtown Las Vegas.

Here’s the season announcement and the show’s presentation:
“Buried waist-deep in a mound of earth, the ever chatty, seemingly optimistic, and resilient Winnie reminisces about happier days. Time, marriage, disappointment, and existence collide in Samuel Beckett’s absurdist tragicomedy masterpiece. This dazzling one woman tour-de-force production is a relentless existential search to find meaning in relationships that bind one person to another and to times past, times present, and the future. Featuring the effervescent Kymberly Luke Mellen as Winnie, Happy Days is produced in partnership with Vegas Theatre Company.

For more on the show, my director’s note, and production photos, click here.

 

 

Paper: “Catastrophe for Whom?: Posthuman Ecologies in Bontempelli’s Hedge to the North-West.”

Paper: “Catastrophe for Whom?: Posthuman Ecologies in Bontempelli’s Hedge to the North-West.”

For the 2022 ASTR Conference, on November 5, I chaired a virtual Working Session with my colleague and co-editor Sarah Lucie, on the same topic of our forthcoming collection Revealing Posthuman Encounters in Performance.
I also presented the paper “Catastrophe for Whom?: Posthuman Ecologies in Bontempelli’s Hedge to the North-West,” in which I sought to point out more numerous non-human actors in the play than Bontempelli’s magical realism already envisions.