Dramaturgias en el teatro actual de las Antillas. Cartografía de poéticas en movimiento: Teresa Hernández y Josefina Báez

This dissertation aims to explore the contemporary Caribbean and its dramaturgy through the study of the artistic work of two remarkable artists: the Puerto Rican Teresa Hernández and the Dominicanyork Josefina Báez. Both artists are currently generating a lot of attention due to the internationalization of their creations, but still their work deserves even more consideration. These skilled stage artists connect various islands through their artistic work: Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and the islands within New York City. The different cultures that converge and coexist in these places exemplify the process of hybridization that characterizes our modern world. Teresa and Josefina illustrate in their plays the plurality of the Caribbean, depicting a true multiplicity of languages and cultures that makes it impossible to adopt a fixed and unique conception of a national identity. They engage in the difficult task of finding out what it means to be a Puerto Rican, a Dominican or a New Yorker. Both performers clearly criticize the notion of an identity that pretends to fuse and include all the possible voices of every Caribbean nation under a sole definition. Therefore, one must consider the heterogeneity that surrounds us as the basis to approach the work of these two artists when evaluating the Caribbean, as well as the dramaturgical procedures these great performers employ. To begin with, how can we talk about the Caribbean? How can we talk accurately about dramaturgical procedures? Furthermore, how can we express with words the ephemeral aspect of the theatrical event? How can we use words to address a Caribbean reality, which contains European and American standards, but does not necessarily follow them? These are the questions that the present investigation seeks to answer; however, it is not an easy task. Thus, the real challenge of this dissertation is to offer a rigorous response to these questions...

La adaptación teatral de textos narrativos en España, 1972-2012

Novel or story adaptations and also dramatic texts versions, that need to be translated and updated to modern audiences are quite frequent in today`s theatre. This study aims to show the state of contemporary stage adaptation of narrative texts and, specifically, its evolution in Spain in the last forty years (1972-2012). To do this, I have tried to gather, first, all the terminology associated with the concept of stage adaptation: version, dramaturgy, rewriting, translation, interpretation, updating and consolidation. The theoretical part of the work begins with the various definitions of the concept of dramatization. All the positions reflected by theorists and specialists in the field come together when explaining the term adaptation or theatre version: the intervention on the original text is based on the transformation or change, radical or superficial, for its effective representation in the theatre. In contemporary times, the concept of adaptation applies to any kind of intervention, from the translation of the original (and rewriting) to the dramaturgical work involved in creating a new sense. In turn, any theatre adaptation requires a dramaturgical operation and supports all possible moves: reorganization of the story, breakage, reduced characters, dramatic concentration, incorporation of foreign texts, installation and collage, changes to the plot, etc. Although there is no definitive model for the theatre adaptation of works, several authors and theatrical theorists propose guidelines and types of adaptation to the transformation of a work into another or one genre into a different one; and regarding narrative texts, provide criteria for interpreting the original text. The issue for many authors is the danger of modifying or betraying the sense or the form of the original text, considering it as simple material for the play. Finally, it follows that there is affinity of thought among authors finding that there is no differentiation between adaptation and version: both terms refer to the same in the theatrical event and are also terms used equally for the countless film adaptations of novels and plays...

William Layton en España

This year 2015 marks the 55th anniversary of the establishment in Spain of the first theatre academy whose methodological principles for actors were based on the Stanislavski system —although transformed by the perspective of the Method, developed in America by the Group Theatre during the 1930s and then implanted in some famous schools such as the Actor’s Studio—. It was in October 1960 when the American actor, teacher and director William Layton (1913-1995) opened the Teatro Estudio de Madrid (TEM). By then, he had already been living in Spain for two years. In that adventure Layton was accompanied by the Spanish Miguel Narros (a stage director) and the American Elizabeth H. Buckley. This private academy began its activity by offering the Method, a discipline that Layton had learned in his country with Sandford Meisner; one member of the Group Theatre along with Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Harold Clurmann or Elia Kazan. Thanks to the TEM, concepts till then completely unknown in Spanish academic venues for actors such as organicity, truth, mood, sensory memory, etc., started being implemented in the theatrical interpretation. Firstly, in exercises of improvisation; secondly, in scenes and characters; and finally, after a time of performing, those concepts were tested in the scenarios, by display to the public, which is the biggest challenge for any actor, author or director. That way, a singular model of interpretation, a naturalistic type, which have prevailed in the West over other ways of interpreting, came to Spain. A system (which could be defined as organic interpretation) that had been systematized by the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski in the early twentieth century and rapidly was exported abroad by some of his first students: Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, Michael Chekhov, Pietro Scharoff, P. Pauloff... Its popularity in the USA increased mainly due to the Actor’s Studio and also thanks to professor Lee Strasberg, through the famous Method working. While in 1960 Layton founded in Madrid the TEM, together with Narros and Buckley, the Brechtian technique was arriving to Barcelona. In that city, Ricard Salvat —who had trained in Germany— and Maria Aurélia Capmany opened the School of Dramatic Art Adrià Gual (EADAG). From Catalonia and over the years, this center will project the first formulas about “distancing”. That way, after decades of delay, that same year 1960 landed in Spain two key trends that shaped and influenced the development of Western theatrical art in the first half of the twentieth century. SYNTHESIS: The knowledge and deep analysis of William Layton’s work as acting teacher in Spain will allow us to get closer to a major figure in the history of theater education in our country. Our main goal is to demonstrate that he was responsible for breaking the isolation that, from secular times, suffered the training of actors in Spain. Layton not only did achieve that, but did it consistently, without interruption. Also, by analyzing his work as stage manager, we will discover how this methodology was implemented in two aspects regarding the theatrical play: in the actor himself and in the dramatic text...

Avel·lí Artís i Balaguer (1881-1954), comediógrafo e impresor-editor. Entre la plenitud del cambio de siglos y el exilio

This thesis has its origin in a previous work: “The Catalan theatrical life in the magazine ‘El Teatre Català’ (1912-1917)” (DEA, UCM, 2004-2005), focused on the history, description and the indexes of that magazine. Among the historical and literary references ordered there, we chose a figure that would make a monographic work resulting in the present Doctoral Thesis. The choice fell on Avel·lí Artís i Balaguer (1881-1954), whose personality and literary corpus, allow additional possibilities for research. The cultural and literary reach of his life and his work covers a whole historical cycle in Catalan culture and literature, which moves from its contemporary consolidation towards the drama of its temporal dislocation, between the Spanish Civil War and the exile experience. This e historical itinerary is represented by Avel·lí Artís i Balaguer, being a playwright and a publisher. He’s been considered a comedy playwright since his editions bear titles such as “comedy”, “pas comedy”, “sainet” “quadro”, “farce” or “dialogue”, at most we find the word “Drama” once and “tragicomedy” twice, and we can find all this, in a series of texts for the representation ranging from 1909 to 1938. Secondly, as a professional fully involved in printing and publishing, thereby covering since its first steps as a compositor in the late nineties of the 19th century until his activity as a crucial character for magazines and other publishing projects, from the first decade of the 20th century until the last year of his Mexican exile...

El teatro peruano contemporáneo (1960-2000). Aproximación

An Approach to contemporary Peruvian theatre (1960-2000) is a work of research that attempts to justify an initial assumption: contemporary Peruvian theatre could not have come to an end at the close of the 1950s with the few writers mentioned briefly in histories of literature, such as Sebastián Salazar Bondy, Enrique Solari Swayne, Juan Ríos and Julio Ramón Ribeyro. Moreover, these are writers noted for their work in other areas of literature and not specifically defined as playwrights. There must have been a new generation of theatrical authors starting in the 1960s who did not gain notoriety in Peru or, of course, beyond its borders. In the preface to his collected works, Mario Vargas Llosa gives us a clue that illustrates this period: “To write theatre in the Lima of those years, was worse than to weep; it was almost to condemn yourself never to see what you wrote on the stage, which is even sadder and more frustrating than it is for a poet or novelist to die unpublished.” [2001: 4] The huge social inequality that characterised Peruvian society at the time meant that only a small elite had access to theatres...