Confinement, COVID, and the Comedia in Mexico City

Abstract

The COVID19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the arts, particularly the performing arts, where live audiences are an important part of the creative process. In spite of the immense roadblocks created by this crisis, artists around the world began to shift their craft online. No where do we see a more rapid shift than in Mexico City, propelled in part by the theater department at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. This paper will look at the ways in which small theater companies were able to move their current productions online in the weeks following the shutdown, and how they evolved over the course of 2020 and into 2021, innovating and creating new digital-theatrical spaces via platforms like Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook live.

Keywords:

• COVID
• comedia
• confinement
• theater
• Mexico
• early modern theater

Notes

1 Also known as “Recetas de cuarentena”, this performance is still available on youtube: https://youtu.be/lKUNDkJyXvw

2 This performance can be viewed on the company’s Facebook page: https://fb.watch/9KaYNAbWLV/

3 There are so many resources created by Teatro UNAM still available that there are too many to list individually, but almost all of them can be found on their main page: https://teatrounam.com.mx/teatro/

4 See the introduction to this volume for more on this phenomenon.

5 This is an alternate title for Los empeños de quedarse en casa, mentioned above.

6 An edited version of this interview will be published in the Fall 2021 volume of Latin American Theater Review, but all quotes herein are from the unedited transcript of the original conversation.

7 They performed a scene from Crónicas anacrónicas at the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater’s 2020 virtual conference, live via zoom. Of that experience, Herrera notes: Y la experiencia, por ejemplo, de crónicas, es por zoom, y si hay una audiencia, pero no escuchamos las reacciones, y en el teatro es un reciclaje de energía. Donde el actor lanza toda su energía, el público la recibe, y con la risa regresa la energía, y se genera ahí un tonado de, un ciclo. Se va reciclando y se va reciclando. Y en el zoom no sucede. Pasa lo mismo, porque yo estoy actuando, sé que está la cámara, sé que del otro lado del zoom hay varias personas que están observando lo que estoy haciendo, y al final es… de estar acostumbrado al aplauso, o un sonido, es la nada. Y de pronto volteo a la pantalla, y son aplausos digitales. (Cerviño et al, Interview).

8 A “merolico” is the Mexican equivalent of the traveling salesman. I have written about this adaptation in its various formats previously, see: “Representing the Unrepresentable: A One-Man Retelling of Cervantes’s Entremeses”, and Glenda Nieto-Cuebas and I spoke with Allan Flores and Fernando Villa Proal about revamping it for digital performance in an interview published in Comedia Performance’s 2021 volume “Entrevista con EFE TRES Teatro: El Merolico Confinado.”

9 For more information on this performance see https://www.efetresteatro.com/el-merolico.

10 At the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater’s 2021 Virtual Symposium, Allan Flores mentioned that the concept behind this was meant to mimic a zoom screen, with the actor showing up in different zoom “windows” as each character spoke their lines. However, given the extra bird’s eye view, the audience is made aware of the artifice of this concept, provoking questions of authenticity, reality, and the digital and how they intersect (or not) (“Los clásicos ante los desafíos del siglo XXI: Un diálogo transatlántico”).

11 “Su percepción es un vértigo de imágenes y fragmentos de realidad que cambian a velocidad sorprendente. Algo de eso queda en sus formas de narrar y en sus mestizajes de realidad y ficción” (111). Although millennials might have been more comfortable with the rapid pace of technology, other generations were not completely uninitiated either, nor is the mixture of reality and fiction a new phenomenon. For more on how “fake news”—which is just the latest blend of fiction and reality that affects our daily lives—can be tied to early modern theater and how adaptations can force us to confront these demons, see my recently published piece in eHumanista/Cervantes: “Representing the Unrepresentable”.

12 Aside from the extensive interviews that make up Instantánea and the call for papers that lead to La necesidad de una pausa, UNAM was also involved in several other initiatives. They held an “Anti-festival” to study the impact of Covid-19 on workers in the cultural sector; they set up round tables to talk about theater and the pandemic in late August, and commissioned digital pieces such as Acción + Aislamiento: 15 pieces by various actors and companies in which they express their reaction to isolation and the creative releases they have found during this time, wrapping up with a theoretical reflection and virtual conversation about the experience, and Actores Anónimos, digital shorts that follow a group of AA (Anonymous Actors) that meet in secret to support each other and confess their experiences as unemployed actors in a precarious situation during the pandemic.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erin Alice Cowling

Erin Alice Cowling is an Associate Professor of Spanish at MacEwan University, in Edmonton Alberta. She specializes in early modern Spanish theater and is especially interested in contemporary adaptations of these works. Most recently she has published a co-edited collection, Social Justice in Spanish Golden Age Theater and Chocolate: How a New World Commodity Conquered Spanish Literature, both with University of Toronto Press in 2021.