‘A theatre without curtains’: On process, the actor as artisan and La Cubana

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Notes

1. For a more detailed overview of La Cubana's trajectory, see Maria M. Delgado, ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres: Erasure and Inscription on the Twentieth-Century Spanish Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 225–274.

2. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

3. Dennis Kennedy, ‘Shakespeare and Cultural Tourism’, Theatre Journal, 50:2 (November 1998), 175–188 (p. 187).

4. The choice of a ventriloquist to articulate such a dictum is not insignificant, for ventriloquists are illusionists, duplicitous beings that flourished in nineteenth-century vaudeville through their promotion of the disjuncture between what an audience appear to see and what they can hear. The link between the onset of modernity (embodied by the advances signalled by cinema and later television) and the demise of ventriloquism may perhaps also be obliquely commented on by Mamá quiero ser famoso.

5. Andy Lavender, ‘Pleasure, Performance and the Big Brother Experience’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 13:2 (May 2003), 15–24 (p. 23).

6. For further details, see Delgado, ‘Other’ Spanish Theatres, pp. 236–237.

7. Ric Knowles, Reading the Material Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 182.

8. Interestingly this is also true of their offices which are now in an industrial quarter of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat but which were, for many years, in the rundown Carrer del Carme off the Ramblas.

9. While there is now no core company, traces of the ensemble that made up La Cubana in the 1980s and 1990s are visible across the Catalan cultural landscape. For example, Santi Millán's cartoon-like elasticity was drawn on by Ventura Pons in Amor idiota (Idiot Love, 2004), and José Carbacho's lively directing debut Tapas (2005), realized in association with Juan Cruz, fielded an ensemble cast in its bittersweet look at a group of neighbours in L'Hospitalet.

10. Maria M. Delgado would like to acknowledge the assistance of Susie Burnet and the Edinburgh International Festival in the preparation of this interview. Sections of the introduction were first published in Spanish as ‘El “performance” catalán, turismo cultural y La Cubana’, in 1 Simposi Internacional sobre teatre català contemporani: de la transició a l'actualitat (Barcelona: Diputació de Barcelona/Institut del Teatre, 2005), pp. 325–353.

11. The production closed at Barcelona's Tívoli theatre in 2006 after playing to over half a million spectator-participants during its two and a half year tour.

12. See, for example, Mercedes Barrado, ‘La Cubana: así somos si así nos parece’, Hoy (14 November 1992), p. 12, and Jackie McGlone, ‘Coco Loco’, Scotsman (12 August 2005), pp. 12–13.