Towards a Poor Techno-theatre

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Notes

¹ These are some of the exponents of Puerto Rican popular theatre in the late twentieth century. Informed by Brechtian epic theatre and by other theatre movements of Latin America, such as Augusto Boal´s theatre of the oppressed, these practitioners often combined farce and ritual, addressing marginal communities and embracing a mission of cultural resistance. Among them, Pedro Santaliz Ávila (1938–2008) founded the inspiring Nuevo Teatro Pobre de América in 1963, moving through streets, cafes, squares and communal centres in the Island and in New York until his death.

² Kozel contrasts her current stance with the idea of technology as foreign to the body or as a threat that is going to replace the body, a way of thinking that spread in the 1990s and that she refers to as ´body police´ (Kozel 2007: xvii).

³ For Grotowski himself, his original proposal in which the spectator functioned more as a witness to the actor´s spiritual act turned out to be eventually insufficient, leading him to the practise of ´paratheatrical acts´ in which every person present was part of communal rituals.

⁴ Commonalities can also be traced between escritura acto and the Italian movement of poor art, 'arte povera' (1967-1972): flows in materiality; the importance of presence over representation and process over product; the foregrounding of the everyday and the now, of the personal and the emotive; and the emergence of letters and signs in simple denuded forms (in escritura acto this sometimes takes the shape of aleatory panoramas of letters, of writing as typing).

⁵ According to André Breton´s ´First Surrealist Manifesto´ of 1924, automatic writing attempts to transcribe an uncensored drift of thought. Persons can be instructed to write as fast as they can without pause. They can pick a letter before they begin. If their minds go blank, they can write the preselected letter down and begin a word with it, thus keeping the flow.

⁶ Variations of the exercise that allow the writer to continually change the target word at each stage that a letter is added could echo the statistical dynamics proposed by Markov chains in which each successive state of the system is arrived at randomly based on a set of possibilities.