caribbean dance: resistance, colonial discourse, and subjugated knowledges

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The Drama Review48, 2 (T182), Summer2004. q 2004

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Caribbean Bodies, Migrations,

and Spaces of Resistance

Vivian Martnez Tabares

Lately Ive become more and more seduced by developments in the His-

panic Caribbean island scene, whose alternative theatre has been the subject of

several recent studies of mine, including an examination of what I call The

Other? Puerto Rican Theatre (1997), The Dominican Theatre in Search

of Itself (2000), and current Cuban explorations (2001, 2002). For this reason

Id like to share my an alysis of three closely related solo performances by artists

from this region:You Dont Look Likeby Puerto Rican Javier Cardona (1996);

Pargo, los pecados permitidos(Pargo, the Permissible Sins) by Dominican Waddys

Jaquez (2001); andBlanche Duboisby Cuban Maria nela Bo an (2000).1 InPargo

several other actors appear with Jaquez but these characters are conceived as

useful devices to resolve practical, transitional problems, and are not essential

to the central discourse.

These works reject a dramaturgy where the text is the starting point, either

because the artists consider an in dividual response necessary in the absence of

relevant texts or believe that theatre is a truly integrated space for the conver-

gence and equalizing of theatrical languages. As a result, these artists practice

a dramaturgy of spectacle in which the text is subordinated to the creative pro-

cess, and in which the body and its presence are pivotal.

Cardonas You Dont Look Likeis a choreographed score of movements and

situations, a framework within which the artist indicts the racist, classist, and

sexist prejudices of the colonized Puerto Rican society. In You Dont Look

Like, words are kept to a minimum.2 The actor divides himself into the nu-

merous stereotypes that are applied to blacks within a society that is eager to

whiten itself. The stage directions, curiously, are written in the rst person. In

them, Cardona transcribes his physical movements which go beyond acting

because the perfor mance artist deliberately forcespresentation and representation

to coexist, alternating between them. His performance is a visceral reaction to

the racist practices of t he media and advertising, which can only imagine that

a black actor such as Cardona can promote a new toot hpaste as part of a civ-ilizing mission, sanctioned from above with a condescending pat on the head.

The politicized ritual is directly based on an experience from Cardonas own

life when he answered a casting call for a toothpaste commercial, but it tran-


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26 Vivian Martnez Tabares

Tell me your full name.

Have you ever worked for the competition?

Okay, now look straight at the camera and say a few simple words: Bunga,

bunga, water.

Remember your character...give itsabor...mas...this is the Caribbean, more...

rhythm.

Then, through photographic projections, the actors body is seen, cross-

dressed and transformed into colonized identities, in order to reveal the word

that has been withheld. As Jossiana Arroyo states, these images deal with sig-

nicant and social-cultural orders that represent blackness: poverty, crime,

violence, the sexual-erotic, sabor, music, Tembandumba de la Quimbamba,

Juan Boria, folklore, among othe rs (2002:n.p.).3

Cardonas staging is simple and unpolished, with an obvious playful spirit

that offsets any distance created by the minimal technological intrusion. He

deconstructs and reconstructs his body in a fragmented dance that respects

natural, nonchoreographed movements more than formal, stylized ones; his

gestures are contradictory and appear disorganized, as he gradually (and with

resistance) embodies the summa of attributes of an alienated vision. And the

body is also the means to expand, to arrive at ontological freedom; it is theinstrument that displays the real and multiple identities that Javier Cardona

shares or negotiates: Puerto Rican, performance artist, actor, dancer, and

playwright, a black gay man from the Caribbean, temporary Newyorican,

supporter of Puerto Rican independence.

Cardona confronts the world of a dvertising by juxtaposing its ideal, plastic,

and unpolluted images against the blunt candor of the stereotypes that he him-

self globalizes; he parodies the excesses of marketing by resignifying the non-

theatrical objects that he uses (the mirror, a school backpack decorated with

the Puerto Rican ag, packets of regular and diet sugar); he also challenges the

ofcial culture of his country, which behind its false egalitarian pretensions

tolerates and promotes stereotypes. And he validates the aesthetics of a popular

culture4 often diminished by self-perceptions that depict whats ours as

poor, small, vulgar, savage, or behind the times.InPargo, los pecados permitidos, the Dominican a rtist Waddys Jaquez links the

narrative performativity of a group therapy session with the spectacle of a

seedy cabaret to create the pathetic and scathingly humorous session of the Pa-

tronato de Recuperacion Global Organizado (the Or ganized Global Recovery

Foundation), or Pargo.5 As a Do minican living in New York City, Jaquez6

who spends his life on the yo la aerea, or air-raft,7 traveling between the half-

island that is the Dominican Republic and the Big Apple re-creates the un-

known and problematic side of the migration to the Nor th. Created in the big

city and premiered in Santo Domingo, this piece is a hybrid that feeds from

the traditions of solo performance, stand-up comedy, and the ant hropological

questions ra ised by Latin Amer ican theat re. The characters Jaquez g ather s are

four poor souls from the margins of New York. Mara Cuchivida is a frustrated

poet in her adolescence who, from a branch of a guayaba tree, saw her eightsiblings leave, one by one, for the North, called there by the oldest, who pe-

titioned for each sibling except Mara because she was no longer a minor. Sick

and tired of the indifference of Candela, her mother, who dies in a re,8 Mara

leaves for Holland with her friend Emperatriz to work as a babysitterto

take care of children aged 20 to 50 years old with a whip tucked into her

garters and stockings. Finally she manages to obtain a stolen passport and ar-


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Caribbean Bodies 27

rives at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Between alcohol, marijuana, and hits

of cracka life of highs and lowsMara thinks that to live each day is an

adventure, a war nobody wins, and is t erried to look back.

Papicho Domnguez is t he irres istible Matat an de Borohol (Ladys Man

of Borough Hall), who has been living for15years in the land of Superman,

Batgirl, and Wonder Woman. This stud left Quisqueya, stowed inside the

hold of a cargo ship,9 to work in a sweatshop. But he spent a year behind bars

after the death of Modesta, a ne woman with a bad job, whom he met one

night and still fondly recalls between his legs. Modesta was the victim of ajeal ous husband who sur pris ed t he l overs an d then committ ed suicide; the po-

lice, needing someone to blame, arrested Papich o. Papich o lives with his

suitcase under my bed lling it with clothes and saving money to go back.

He remembers his mothers farewell: my son, be

careful and dont pick ghts, good men die with their

shoes on, and speaking of shoes, I wear a size eight and

your sister Iluminadita a nine and a half , in sneakers,

[...] and if anyone messes with you, punch his face in.

[...] God bless you!

Zaza, the third character, is the long-reigning

beauty queen of the barrios underworld who has

grown weary of her role. She is a well-padded, gro-

tesque explosion of tropical sensuality, a miscarriageof nature according to her Dominican grandmother,

Intervenida, who taught her never to say no.10 Zaza is

a compendium of popular culture and a victim of

globalized banality.

Rounding out the g roup is Pasion Contreras, a

crazy wind blown in by the storm, a woman born

and raised according to the twists of fate in a country,

time, and body that are foreign to her, playing the

leading role in a cross-over to the female sex, com-

3. &4. Mara Cuchvida

and Papicho Domnguez,two of the characters of

Pargo, los pecados per-

mitidos (Pargo, the Per-

missible Sins), by

Domi nican Waddys Ja-

quez, Teatro del Trapo.

Premiere: Teatro Reperto-

rio Espanol, New York,

31 May 2001; Dominican

Republic premiere: Ravelo

Room, Teatro N acional,6

September2001. (Cour-

tesy of Waddys Jaq uez)


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plete with silicone implants. Rising above the contempt of others, she is con-

vinced that she is a beautiful woman trapped inside an ugly body, who

deserves to go to heaven because, as she puts it, without realizing it, I created

my own hell on earth.

These characters are dened by their condition as displaced persons and

hustlers. They are street ghters battling to survive. Each combines tragedy

and humor, with a language that is full of slang, clever expressions of popular

wisdom, pseudo-philosophical comments, and cultural references reecting

the worst by-product s of gl obalization, a ccompanied by a Latin beat. Jaquezendows each character with a unique set of characteristics and movements,

and his phy sicality adds a visual dyna mism to his perfo rmance. Jaquez h as in-

scribed on his body the gestural essence, the agonized palpations of all he has

seen in the poor neighborhoods of the Dominican Republic and up and down

the streets of New York. He recongures paradigms: for example, the rhyth-

mic body of Papicho, never letting life get him down, is always moving to the

beat of aguag uanco. Jaquezs people display the incessan t tics and sa shaying of

drag queens, whose bodies pursue, run away, get beaten, ght back. Th ey are

full of scattered, uncontrollable energy.

Jaquez creat ively interacts with the costume desig ns of the artist Hochi

Asiatico over-the-top inventions that answer the characters profound

needs. He models these garments with dazzling amboyance and versatility.

Jaquez is black, like the four charact ers he play s, but cur iousl y this fact is notmade explicit in the text, except when Papich o specically refers to his

mother as a white woman from Santiago, suggesting that he perceives h im-

self as different and has assumed the posture of t he subaltern other. I wonder if

his race is taken for granted, as part of the condition of thesedomi nicanyorks, or

if the performance artist is also playing ironically with the conicted self-

identity reected by the Do minican government, which afrms that the ma-

jor ity of its popul atio n, from mestizo to black, is indio,11 and states so on

national identity cards.

In Blanche, Cuban Mar ianela Boan works with th e main chara cter of Ten-

nessee Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire, for whom she confesses a long-

standing fascination. She admires the strength of Blanches character, which

lies beneath h er precarious fragility. Boan displays the stubbornness with

which Blanche defends her past, her utopia, and the personal values she haslost th rough the t ransformations history has imposed on h er life. Boan uses

Blanche to create a presence who tells the story of changing identities in a

work that falls so mewhere in between a parable and a didactic piece.

Boans Blanche DuBois can be understood as a woman from the middle

class, rened and worldly, who let herself be swept up in the transformations

of the Cuban Revolution. She worked hard to please others and to nd her

place in the new society as all around her a debate ensued about her values and

the new ones that suddenly emerged amid the growing process of socializa-

tion values which were not always to her liking or easy to assimilate.

Blanche oscillates between deantly rejecting change and making choices that

lead to sacrice and confusion as she holds fast to her convictions. Later on, in

middle age, this same woman realizes that the essential pillars of her moral and

political identity have been knocked out of place. Worn o ut, she g ives up andis defeated. In th e words of the performance artist Deborah Hunt, Boans

Blanche is a savage woman in a box, with a ag that never covers her body

(2001).

The few scattered lines, sometimes just isolated words, detached and recon-

textualized, are from Williamss text. The familiar character from the play

serves as a bridge to the new character, who (despite the title) doesnt reveal


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Caribbean Bodies 29

her identity until several minutes into the performance, when the woman who

steps out o f the vertical box lined in vivid red (where she has been imprisoned

upside down), nally identies herself to the audience. She struggles to inte-

grate herself in the outer world, at turns crawling, stumbling, stopping, and

retreating. It is Blanche, the elegant woman in sunglasses who walks sugges-

tively and irts, but it could also be Blanquita, as perhaps she was called by her

comrades in a battalion of the womens revolutionary militia. Later she is thenameless woman, jaded by experience, who desperately waits by the tele-

phone or calls Western Union over and over to see if the money she expects

has ar rived.

Unlike her previous works with DanzAbiertaEl pez de la torre nada en el

asfalto(The Fish from the Tower Swims in Cement) orEl arbol y el camin o(The

Tree and the Road), in which basic contradictions were expressed in the cho-

reography by a constant displacement of bodies up and down, falling and ris-

ing, here the movement is backward and forward, inside and out, with

variations on the oor or with an upright body, creating a different kind of

dance, deliberately truncated and imperfect. In choreographic terms, a hori-

zontal pattern of movements is blocked out, neither linear nor univocal, which

operates in a double game of centrifugal a nd centripetal forces (seen at a more

mature stage in her next work,Chorus perpetuus, performed in Monterrey dur-ing the 2001Hemispheric Institute).

These are the movements of a woman who cannot free herself from old

bonds, who fears what society will impose, and who experiences the painful

and difcult process of a ssimilating change. At the end, when she displays the

symbols of her personal values (however enduring they may be), they are of no

use to her in this new context. Her painful reections which turn ironic and

5. Cuban Marianela Boan

as Blanche DuBois in her

2000productionBlanche.

Directed by Marianela

Boan and Raul Martn.

Premiere: Teatro Nacional

de Cuba, La Habana, Feb-

ruary2000. (Courtesy of

DanzAbierta)


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mocking, underscored by a comic pathos introduced by the artistpoint to

essential contradictions in the new social realities of Cuba.

The dramaturgy of the objects is meticulous. The vertical box/trunk is a

womb, and I wonder if it is perhaps a space of security or a metaphor for the

Island as well. But it is also a package, a cofn, a pulpit, a useful hiding place,

a screen, a shell that gives refuge. The black, gold-bordered ag is a symbol of

rebellion, the epic spirit and the persistence of utopia and I cannot help but

remember certain gestures of Brechts Mother Courage played by Helene

Weigel, seen in a video of the Berliner Ensemble, or in the ballet Avanzada, inwhich Ali cia Alonso dan ced while holding al oft a red ag . Boans visu al cues

awaken countless associations, as does her use of the well-known musical score

from Santiago Alvarezs short documentaryNow, a foreshadowing of the video

clip. The tattered diploma that proclaims Awarded to Blanche DuBois for her

outstanding work, placed before us at the foot of the proscenium next to a

milicianas shirt, which t he woman will later wear, engages in a multivoiced di-

alogue with daily life in the past and the present.

What Boan callsdanza contaminada(contaminated dance), closely resembles

Javier Cardo nas explorat ions and the physicalit y of Waddys Jaquezs work.

Coincidentally,You Dont Look Likeand Pargo, los pecados permitidos are proj-

ects that respond to the structural cr isis of collaborative theatre today, a situa-

tion that has prompted actors t o write, develop scores and scripts, design sets,

and more. Boan i n tur n has ta ken full advanta ge of the s tability th at she enjoysas a Cuban theatre professional, which has allowed her to develop the potential

of her six dancers.12

Each of these three works is carried out with a conscious political calling.

The stage becomes a forum for debate, a thought-provoking arena for the

spectator. Migration, the phenomenon of human displacementan impor-

tant factor within the Car ibbean region, historically interconnecting its pop-

ulations (and globally, a phenomenon of escalating proportions)is pivotal.

While in Pargo, los pecados permitidos, the personal stories of the four immi-

grants identify migration as a causal factor, inYou Dont Look Like, the gaze of

the outsider is seen as all-legitimizing, and its references to blacks from other

Caribbean islands reappropriates the above-mentioned mobility that led to the

genesis of a region toward which Puerto Rico feels a complicated afliation.

In Blanche, the main character allies herself, in the midst of political and eco-nomic migrations from Cuba, with those who have stayed, a perspective that

is perhaps much l ess considered an d studied, but which animates other Cuban

productions such as Weekend en Baha and Delirio habanero by Alberto Pedro

and Miriam Lezcano (Teatro Mo), or the much more recent El baile (The

Dance) by A belardo Estor ino ( Compana Hubert de Blanck), orEl enano en la

botella(The Dwarf in the Bottle) by Abilio Est evez, directed by Raul Mar tn

(Teatro de la Luna).

Projects such as these have energized my investigations into the links be-

tween theatre and performance art because they are hybrid expressions that

consider dramaturgy as an organization of actions, making no distinction be-

tween theatre and dance, freely intermixing words and gestures. These three

artists disregard well-known orthodox paradigms isolating genres. They ig-

nore linear or continuous time, actively consider the audience, and propose asubversive and intertextural linguistic game that appropriates popular language

and culture, merging these into a new performative norm. Their work is note-

worthy as well because, inspired by Jerzy Grotowskis idea of the performer

who knew how to unite corporal impulse with sound, and who followed a

path toward the essential body (1992/93), they also want to shape their stories

around an instant focused on the here and now, afrming their presence and

voice in times like our own that are marked by permanent crisis. A s spaces of


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Caribbean Bodies 31

human resistance within a global market dominated by the media, these artists

have deliberately adopted a conceptual perspective that engages them directly

with life, art, and the society in which they al l, sometimes uncomfortably, live.

translated by Margaret Carson

edited by Richard Schechner

Notes

1. This paper was presented at the Third Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Poli-

tics, dedicated to the theme of Globalization, Migration, and Public Space, and held

in Lima, Peru, 513 July 2002.

2. For the published text see Cardona (1997) and Lugo (2002).

3. Tembandumba de la Quimbamba is a character who represents the spirit of the Afro-

Caribbean woman in the poem Majestad Negra by the Puerto R ican poet Luis Pales

Matos (18981959). Juan Boria (19061995) was an Afro Puerto Rican performer fa-

mous for his public readings of poes a negra.

4. See Los teatreros am bulantes y la estetica del espe jo prismad o (Travelling Performers

and the Aesthetic of the Prismatic Mirror) by Yanis Gordils, an unpublished yet excel-

lent study of the theatre project developed between1986an d 1990by Ros a Lu isa Mar-

quez and Antonio Martorell with their students, among them Javier Cardona:

The native popular aesthetic, w hich escapes the homogenizing modernity of

the media, brands itself as jbara mean ing peas ant, cafre mean ing Afr ican ,

charra mean ing Mex ican. What is national is seen as ana chron istic and what is

native is seen as vulgar, never as important as what is p reached in magazines and

on movie screens. (n.d.)

The title of the essay alludes to a mirror a toy mirror as a recurring object in the

exploration of the g roups self-recognition. Referring to the artist in que stion, Gordils

states:

The essential achievement is self-revelation and learning to call everything by its

name in order to share its real name with another.Javier, for example, discovered

that he is black and that he is as beautiful as the god Ogun in the process of per-

sonifying the biracial character Jose Cle mente in the Ana Lydia Vega story, Otra

maldad de Pateco.

5. Among Latinos in New York pargoalso means a paid sexual service.6. In contrast to another performance artist of Dominican origin, Josena Baez (who calls

herself Dominicanyork with the aim of legitimizing and dignifying this term in her per-

formance Dominicanish), Jaquez calls himself a Dominican, period, who lives in New

York , p erio d (see Baez 2000; and Vargas 2001).

7. I allude to and paraphrase the title of Luis Rafael Sanchezs notable essay La guagua

aerea (Th e Air- Bus; 1994).

8. Candela means re in Spanish.

9. It is signicant that in Globalization and Transculturation, her keynote speech to the

2003Encuentro of The Hemispheric Institute, Mary Louise Pratt noted that globaliza-

tion begins with changes in the means of human mob ility, with an increasing migration

of ex-colonial subjects toward their former capitalswhere although this diaspora is

needed, it is not necessarily favored. Pratt also mentioned that in the 90s stories ap-

peared that seemed recycled from the archives of18th-century travel literature, but now

featured stowaways who hide in the landing gear of airplanes or illegal domestics who

are kept as virtual captives in wealthy homes.

10. The name Intervenida (intervened) refers to the U.S. military intervention of the Do-

minican Republic in 1965, which exp lains why she couldnt say no.

11. In the Dominican Republic, indiois a euphemism understood to mean any person who

is not white.

12. As well as incorporating acting and singing in her works (as in Chorus perpetuus), some

of the members o f DanzAbierta, such as Jose Antonio Hevia and Grettel Montes de

Oca, have begu n to choreogr aph on their own, enc ouraged by Boan.


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References

Arroyo, Jossianna

2002 Espej ito, espejito : raza y forma cion de identi dades puert orriq uenas en You

dont look like, by Javier Cardona (Mirror, Mirror: Race and the Formation

of Puerto Rican Identities in Javier Cardonas You Dont Look Like). In S a-

queos: Antologa de produccion cultural, edited by Dorian Lugo, n.p. San Juan:

Editorial Noexiste.

Bae z, Jose na

2000 Dominicanish, a performance text. New York: Graphic A rt.

Cardona, Javier

1997 You Dont Look Like. Conjunto106(May August):4749.

Hunt, Deborah

2001 Mujeres laborand o (Women at Work). En Rojo, Claridad(San Juan), 915

March:19.

Lug o, D or ian

2002 Saqueos: Antologa de produccion cultural. Puerto Rico.

Gordils, Yanis

n.d. Los teatreros ambulantes y la estetica del espejo prismado (Traveling Per-

formers and the Aesthetic of the Prismatic Mirror). Unpublished manuscript.

Grotowski, Jerzy

1992/93 El Performer.Mascar a, Cu ader no Iberoa merican o de Reex ion sob re Escenolo ga

(Mexico D.F.) 3, 1112:7881.

Mart nez Tabares, Vivian

1997 La escena puertorriqueno vista desde fuera/dentro (The Puerto Rican

Scene from the Inside/Outside).Conjunto 106, (May August):312.

2000 Quince voces en busca del teatro dominicano (Fifteen Voices in Search of

Dominican Theatre).Conjunto 116 (JanuaryMarch2000):221.

2001 Mover la palabra, ritualizar el gesto (Move the Word, Ritualize the Ges-

ture). Revolucion y Cultura 1/2001( January February, Fifth Series):4548.

2002 Chorus perpetuus: bailar la plenitud del hombre(Chorus Perpetuus:Dancing

the Plenitude of Man).Conjunto 124 (JanuaryApril):5861.

Sanc hez, Luis Rafael

1994 La guagua aerea (The Air-Bus) . R o Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cul-tural.

Vargas, William

2001 Los nales felices pasaron de moda (Happy Endings Are Out of Style; an

interview with Waddys Jaquez ). Oh! Magazine(a supplement toEl Listn Dia-

rio; Santo Domingo), 8 September.

Vivian Martnez Tabaresis a Cuban critic, researcher, edito r, and professor. She has

publishe dTeatro por el Gran Octubre (Universidad de La Habana, 1978), Jose

Sanchis Sinisterra: Explorar las Vas del Texto Dramatico (Teatro Municipal

General, 1993), andDidascalias Urgentes de una Espectadora Interesada (Edi-

torial Letras Cubanas, 1996). Her work has been compile d in theatre anthol ogies, andshe has collaborated in specialized publications in the Americas and Europe. She is a

Professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte, and has lectured in several universities in

Latin America and Europe. She received the Caribe 2000 Rockefeller Foundation

fell owship at Universi dad de Puer to Rico, and is Director ofConjuntomagazine and

head of the Theatre Department of Casa de las Americas, Cuba, where she organizes

the Theatrical May Season.


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