Mapping a Nation-State's Theatrical Culture: Histories of the Theatre in Spain

The documentation of Spain's twentieth century theatre history has been governed by approaches that have focused on the dominance of the playwright as the primary marker of the nation's theatrical culture. This project proffers alternative configurations of Spanish theatre history that seek to interrogate more orthodox readings of both history and text (in the widest sense of the term) that have sought to stress the insularity of the nation's theatrical culture. Drawing on a range of primary materials in archives across Spain, France and Argentina, as well as interviews with practitioners across Spain and Argentina, this project will map theatrical histories that consciously comment on the ideological agendas of theatre historians and the implications of these for modes of constructing theatre history.

Building on cultural materialist methodologies employed by Golden Age performance historians like Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros and José María Ruano de la Haza, the project will seek to disseminate its findings both in English and Spanish in the hope of reaching scholars, practitioners and students working in the areas of cultural studies, theatre studies and Hispanic studies in the UK, Spain and the Americas, and encouraging further scholarship in this area.

Crucially, while the emphasis will be on theatrical performance, intersections with operatic and cinematic culture will also feature, where appropriate, to allow for a discussion of the ways in which ideology, performance, censorship and exile shaped the theatrical discourses of the Spanish nation. The focus will be on theatre as both process and product and will examine the modes of dissemination and inquiry that produced an exportation of particular theatrical modes, practices and practitioners to the Americas and the implications of this for a transnational approach to Spanish historiography.

The findings of this project will be published in two book projects.

The first is an edited volume, contracted by Cambridge University Press and curated with Professor David T. Gies, Commonwealth Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, USA, which proposes a revisionist history of Spanish theatre from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. While we both retain overall responsibility for the shape of the volume we will also each be authoring individual sections. My own 10,000 word contribution will reassess the importance of directors in Spain, examining the evolution of the figure of the director, from actor-manager to 'metteur en scène' and then coming to embody particular bourgeois ideals of individual attainment, entrepreneurialism and capitalist enterprise that witnessed a move towards cultural management: the 'directeur' or 'intendant'. The relationship with performers and wider company arrangements will be examined as a way of considering the institutional structures through which directors have operated and the modes in which they have (re)inscribed theatre in a network of political realities and responsibilities.

The second is a study of twentieth-century Spanish theatre, to be published by Iberoamericana, that seeks to probe, through six detailed case studies, how the trajectories of performers and directors can map alternative histories of Spanish theatre that underlie the productive ties with practices elsewhere in Europe and the Americas. The focus is on displacing the theatrical text as the primary marker and in so doing exposing the colonialist agenda of previous theatre historians who have viewed Spanish theatre as a poor European relation to the better-documented histories of its North European neighbours.

This project seeks to develop models for documenting Spanish theatre history that go beyond positivist or literary paradigms and rather explore the modes of exchange and interaction that cultures of colonialism, nationalism and exile have wrought on Spain's theatrical culture.