Redefining the contours of hispanicity in '92: José Sanchis Sinisterra’s teatro fronterizo and the V Centenario

ABSTRACT

The showcasing of José Sanchis Sinisterra’s Lope de Aguirre, traidor within the V Centenario was significant for various reasons. The event bestowed legitimacy upon a playwright who foregrounded marginality as a matter of principle and aesthetic. He promoted theater as a catalyst for social and political reforms while insisting on institutional support for theater to thrive.

Directed by José Luis Gómez, the 1992 production of Lope de Aguirre, traidor represents a striking marriage of center and fringe while paying homage to the director and playwright’s cosmopolitan artistry and revisionist mission. Like most of Sanchis’s plays, Lope de Aguirre, traidor reveres and resists the authority of Spain’s theatrical canon. It meanwhile interrogates Spain’s relationship with its colonialist past and encounter with its Other (non-European cultures) both symbolized by America, and it does so precisely at a time when national debates over historical memory and immigration were beginning to dominate public life. The critical response to this performance helps to assess Lope de Aguirre, traidor’s effectiveness in engaging society and reshaping attitudes in relation to these topics. Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s The Couple in the Cage, performed contemporaneously as part of the Edge '92 festival, in Madrid’s symbolically charged Plaza Colón, offers a further yardstick for evaluating the play’s impact in this regard.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• V Centenario
• José Sanchis Sinisterra
• José Luis Gómez
• Lope de Aguirre

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Bernardo Antonio González is Professor in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures (Middletown, CT). His teaching and research focus primarily on the relationship between theater, performance, cinema, politics and society in modern Spain. His essays have appeared in Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, Hecho Teatral, Gestos: Revista de Teoría y Práctica del Teatro Hispánico, Estreno, Siglo XX/Twentieth Century: Critique and Cultural Discourse, Revista Hispánica Moderna and Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos. He has also been invited to contribute to various special monothematic editions published in Spain, England and the United States. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 On 15 June 1977, Spaniards voted to approve the Ley de Reforma Política of December 1976, which authorized the new bicameral parliament to draft a constitution. The new constitution was approved by popular vote on 6 December 1978.

2 Dougherty (1984) summarizes the main threads of the press-based debates that raged in the early twentieth century.

3 I refer here to chapters 2 and 3, “The Holy Theater” (49–77) and “The Rough Theater” (78–119), of Peter Brook’s The Empty Space (1968).

4 Critics writing in Extremadura’s Hoy and Seville’s ABC touted Gómez’s and José Luis Gallardo’s local roots, identifying the former as the “director onubense” (Monjas 1992; “La esperpéntica figura” 1992) and the latter as an “andaluz-extremeño” (Monjas 1992).

5 These and similar interpretations may be found, for instance, in Díez (1992); Llauradò (1992); Rioja (1992); Muñoz (1992); Pita (1992); Castro (1992); Portero (1992) and Vigo (1992).

6 The list includes: Gonzalo Torrente Ballester’s 1941 play, Lope de Aguirre; Ramón Sender’s 1964 novel, La aventura equinoccial de Lope de Aguirre; Julio Caro Baroja’s 2014 essay Lope de Aguirre ‘Traidor’ y Pedro de Ursúa o el caballero; and Carlos Saura’s 1987 film, El Dorado. It bears recalling that Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God came out in 1972. Sanchis refers in general terms to his having been inspired specifically by Torrente Ballester’s play and Sender’s novel (Salazar 2009, 112–113). Serrano identifies Sanchis’s inclusion of “los amores de doña Elvira” as a sign of Torrente’s and Sender’s influence given that this material is absent from the chronicles (1996, 27n34, 243–244n76).

7 In her edited edition of Lope de Aguirre, traidor, Serrano (1996) documents meticulously in copious footnotes the relationship between Sanchis’s text and the chronicles that it is based on.

8 Lope de Aguirre, traidor (originally: Crímenes y locuras del traidor Lope de Aguirre), 1977–1992; Naufragios de Álvar Núñez, 1978–1991; Conquistador o El retablo de Eldorado, 1977–1984.

9 In her 2002 Los trabajos de la memoria, translated immediately into English as State Repression and the Labors of Memory (2003), Jelin prompted a major discussion concerning this topic in the Spanish-speaking world (Moreiras 2002; Moreno-Nuño 2006; Ospina 2019). She did so by drawing on the contributions of key theoreticians writing around the time of the V Centenario celebrations, or shortly thereafter: Caruth (1995), LaCapra (1998), Agamben (1999) and Ricoeur (1999).

10 The dead figure symbolically in plays by such students of Sanchis Sinisterra as Sergi Belbel (Morir, 1994, and Forasters, 2004), Lluïsa Cunillé (Barcelona, mapa d’ombres, 2004) and Laila Ripoll (Los niños perdidos, 2005). Moreiras (2008) offers an insightful analysis of the corpse in the attic in Álex de la Iglesia’s 2000 La comunidad, relating this movie to Silva’s pioneering work and to debates regarding the mass grave excavations.

11

“No ha perdido ese aire malicioso, esa mirada profunda de pimpi, que luce durante los Carnavales cuando sale a la calle para interpretar alguno de los papeles que más le gustan: cadavérico niño de primera comunión o “niña bien” de la Viña. Ahora, es un soldado de fortuna que, por los azares del destino, disfruta de un fugaz reinado entre las ciénagas del Amazonas, amenazado por la siempre temible presencia del vasco Lope de Aguirre. Atrás quedan los años del grupo Cámara y Carrusel, en Cádiz, con los que alcanzó renombre en los círculos del entonces llamado teatro independiente; su paso por el Instituto Andaluz de Teatro y el CAT, como adjunto a la dirección de Roberto Quintana”. (Gutiérrez Molina 1992)

12 “Luis Yáñez aseguró que entre los objetivos de la Comisión Quinto Centenario, no se encontraba la del dirigismo cultural. “Hemos querido que fuese un debate absolutamente libre”, dijo y añadió “ya en el XVI la corona se planteaba la legitimidad de la conquista y si los indios tenían alma o no” (B. P. 1992).

13 Bharucha argues that in his Mahabharata, for instance, Peter Brook “upholds a Eurocentric structure of action and performance … designed for international audiences” and that it reflects “his affiliations within a system of power that have made India increasingly visible (and economically viable) in the international market” ([1990] 1992, 4–5).

14 “Desde el punto de vista formal, me interesaba también investigar las diversas modalidades del monólogo, cuya aparente uniformidad oculta una compleja polifonía, así como las posibilidades dramáticas del discurso coral, que el teatro contemporáneo parece haber olvidado” (Sanchis as quoted in Martínez 2004, 56).

15 “In 1983 Spain legally recognized the existence of 167 Latin American refugees in its territory, while the research carried out at this time by the Colectivo IOÉ (1987) calculated the actual number to be around 45,000. According to its data, Latin American migrants made up 76 percent of the total refugee population in Spain” (Martín Díaz, Cuberos Gallardo, and Castellani 2012, 817–818).

16 Hannerz offers a particularly suggestive discussion of these themes in the chapter “The Withering Away of the Nation?” (Hannerz 1996, 81–90). See also Appadurai’s (1990) theories of the various “-scapes” around which contemporary culture is configured on the global sphere (ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes).

17 Bhabha ([1994] 2002) uses this quote as the epigraph for his introduction to The Location of Culture.

18 According to the historian Rodrigo Escribano, a scholar at the University of Alcalá de Henares’s Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Estudios Latinoamericanos, Franco-era interest in the Spanish conquista, which subordinated the topic of the “discovery” to questions of empire and the monarchy, yielded after Spain’s transition to democracy to attitudes that he describes as follows: “en vez de explicarlo como un proceso plural, es decir, un proceso en que no solo importan los elementos que venían de la península, sino las sociedades que existían en América, se ha practicado una política del olvido” (as quoted in “El doble relato” 2016).

19 “El desengaño del cronista ante la actitud de Lope significa una toma de postura del autor actual respecto a la traición al sueño revolucionario de quienes en nuestro tiempo han sepultado sus iniciales ideas de justicia bajo el peso de una violencia indiscriminada” (Serrano 1996, 64n90).

20 Fusco (1994, 146–147) includes a chronology of various individuals exhibited either alive or dead starting with Colombus’s Arawaks and ending with “Tiny Teesha”, a woman midget displayed at the Minnesota State Fair in 1992.

21 At the time of its 1977 inauguration, the art critic Santiago Amón decried this monument in the following terms:

Desde una angulación histórica, las tres esculturas-carabelas nos remiten al reino del anacronismo. Concebido a favor de los aires triunfalistas del fenecido Régimen, de ningún modo debe verse inaugurado el conjunto monumental de marras, si no es en contra de las nuevas perspectivas políticas, de una democracia que se dice en marcha y de todo un replanteamiento en las relaciones con los pueblos de la América española. (1977)