Historic and symbolic violence in the Romani Fuenteovejuna by TNT-El Vacie: Gender, ethnicity, and interculturalism

Abstract

I address here the performance of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna undertaken by TNT-El Vacie, giving particular consideration to the ways in which Antonio Álamo’s adaptation, Pepa Gamboa’s direction, and the staging of El Vacie, a company composed exclusively of Roma women, constitute a site of resistance as well as a performance of gender, identity, and place. From this vantage point, I wrestle with issues of agency, dialogism, and intercultural communication to make sense of ontological as well as hermeneutic aspects of the performance text: deletions and additions; orality and authority; meta-theatricality and self-reflexivity; acting and becoming. In addition, I bring to bear the fact that the name of the company, El Vacie, bears witness to the impoverished settlement or shantytown where the women reside, which stands within a mere two hundred yards of the theater where the play is performed. The name of the company signals the identification of the actresses with the marginal space in which they live, enriches the text, and further complicates their reading of Fuenteovejuna by adding levels of referentiality and indexicality that redefine boundaries as well as processes of exclusion and inclusion. While this is not the first collaboration between TNT and El Vacie—it was preceded by the successful and award-winning 2009 staging of La Casa de Bernarda Alba—I consider this performance a particularly important contribution to the construction of a historicized cultural politics of identity that makes the Romani community visible by positioning the women of El Vacie center stage as participants, creators, and interpreters of the national cultural patrimony. Through this cultural intervention, certain spaces and markers of the Roma community acquire visibility as they get inserted into a national historical discourse from which they previously had been historically excluded.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural politics
• Fuenteovejuna
• gender identity
• performance
• Roma community

Notes

1 All translations in this article are my own.

2 I favor the term “Roma” throughout the essay because it is widely accepted by the collective itself and indicates its plight ethnically and across borders. However, when it makes sense to contextualize the argument locally or nationally, I use calé [Spanish Roma] and even “gypsy,” terms that are accepted positively in the present day by the interpellated gitano community and that connote the local/national/global distinction. The name of the language spoken by the calé is caló.

3 Elena Cánovas, founder of the 1984 prison theater group Yeserías, describes some of the challenges and aims of working with female inmates who share a troubled past of marginalization: “Carecen de capacidad de planificación a largo plazo. No les interesa reflexionar. Pasan directamente a la acción. Necesitan resultados inmediatos. Las cosas buenas se producen por azar, nunca por el esfuerzo personal. Suelen ser agresivas y desconfiadas, pero con necesidad de afecto” (Savall) [They lack the ability to produce long-term plans. They are not interested in reflecting. They go straight to action. They need immediate results. Good things happen to them by chance, never as a result of personal effort. They tend to be aggressive and distrustful, but they need affection]. Cánovas insists on the potential of theater for self-development as well as the general lack of opportunity shared by most of the actresses, “nadie había depositado en ellas la responsabilidad de hacer algo lícito. En muchos casos, la primera oportunidad les llega gracias al teatro” [nobody had ever given them the responsibility of succeeding through licit means. In many cases, theater gives them their first opportunity to do that] (Savall). Cánovas credits theater with the ability to teach the inmates necessary social skills such as discipline and self-control (Huete). Critics, for their part, regularly mention the conditions and backgrounds of the incarcerated actresses, rather than aesthetic aspects or achievements of the productions, thus focusing on their social rather than artistic merits (Huete, Ceberio, Savall).

4 See on this account, for instance, Teresa San Román’s La diferencia inquietante: Nuevas y viejas estrategias culturales de los gitanos, as a salient example of her life’s work on the anthropology of the Spanish Roma. See also María Sierra Alonso’s article on the paradoxical and simultaneous romanticizing and marginalization of the Roma throughout Spanish history, “Cannibals Devoured: Gypsies in Romantic Discourse on the Spanish Nation.”

5 This situation is fortunately no longer the case for the majority. A 2011 study on the levels of literacy and education of the calé shows that although 58 percent of the population older than 45 has never attended school, recent efforts have reduced that number to 4 percent among those between 16 and 19 years of age (Diagnóstico 80). Though the number of those who drop out of school is still disproportionally high among the Roma, education is becoming increasingly accessible. The fact that the actresses of El Vacie are helped by their granddaughters to memorize the script they are unable to read themselves is a clear indication of this. The Roma actresses I talked to showed interest in entering literacy programs as soon as possible.

6 In Spanish classical theater these breaches of the fourth wall normally take place in “apartes” [asides], which are often through the interventions of graciosos [a category in Spanish drama that encompasses servants, fools, and jesters].

7 In our interview, Álamo observed that the scene of the popular uprising and execution of the comendador was extracted from the account by Francisco de Rades y Andrada, Chrónica de las tres órdenes y caballerías de Santiago, Calatrava y Alcántara, rather than inspired by Lope’s version of the events (Álamo).

8 All references to the performance text of Fuenteovejuna by El Vacie refer to the performance staged in Teatro Romea in Murcia, May 4, 2017.

9 The 2016 census of El Vacie reveals that out of the 529 residents, 44 are of Portuguese descent, thus showing that the actresses constitute part of a minority in their settlement (Pérez Avila).