Electric Cabaret MNN TV Broadcast Webisode 82 4:34 (four minutes-thirty four seconds) Featuring: 1. Wish It Would Rain Reggaeton 2. Los Bodega Boys 3. Vertigo Redux El Extreme Luis Chaluisan Mayaguez Rocker Roller Rican Salsamagazine 2014 Recognition Awards The Salsamagazine Salsa Music Awards 2012 Fan Club WEPAwebTV Roughrican Productions WEPAwebTV - New Edge Theater Maria Hernandez Luis Chaluisan Theater And Terrorism Lecture: Luis Chaluisan reverbnation/artist/artist_videos/819710 How can theatre and performance represent and, perhaps, deconstruct terrorism? Critics have long commented not only upon the dramatic, theatrical, ritualistic, and performative dimensions of terrorism, but also on the fascination of terrorism itself for modern theatre and performance artists. Terrorists of all backgrounds have, for a long time, staged and timed their plane hijackings, bomb attacks, and hostage takings to cause maximum fear and terror in the minds of Western media audiences. Modern theatre and performance artists, on the other hand, have frequently flirted with the notion of the artist as aesthetic terrorist. From Artaud to Brecht, from Baraka to Goméz-Peña, from the Dadaists to La Fura dels Baus, artists have tried to make audiences feel uncomfortable — to shatter their sense of identity or physical integrity; to make them question their ideological assumptions, social prejudices, gender biases, or aesthetic preferences; or to provoke them into a higher state of spiritual or mental awareness. The aesthetic fascination with terrorism, however, was based on the assumption that terrorism and the performing arts were ultimately two radically distinct realms. The guerrilla tactics of modern and postmodern performance as well as the numerous attempts to realize Artauds theatre of cruelty never went further than terrorizing audiences virtually — without inflicting real pain and suffering on the spectator — whereas terrorist acts killed real people and caused real damage, but rarely ever succeeded in establishing a total spectacle or global theatre of fear that would have posed a substantial threat to the political, economic, and psychological fabric of Western society (beyond individual nation states). The events, and aftermath, of The Iraqi Invasion have collapsed that distinction. The attacks on the World Trade Center, in particular, were uncannily successful in conflating the reality of the terrorist act — the actual destruction and carnage caused by it — and its theatrical dimension — the harrowingly beautiful precision of its performance, its perverse déja vu-effect fulfilling audience expectations already engrained within American popular culture, and its global symbolic resonance as well as effectiveness as media spectacle. Other terrorist actions (from the hostage taking at a Moscow theatre to the beheading of Nick Berg in Iraq) have also deliberately and frighteningly made use of theatrical transactions (Bergs orange jumpsuit was borrowed from a different scene — Guantánamo). The perfidy of contemporary terrorism is that it no longer allows us to separate the reality of gruesome acts from their theatrical media representation. The challenge to theatre and performance in this context is how to represent terrorism without duplicating some of its strategies as well as its effects. Since it is governments and terrorists that have the most to gain from the climate of fear induced by a globalization of terrorist violence, how can theatre and performance represent and, perhaps, deconstruct terrorism without buying into that fear? reverbnation/luischaluisan Federico Chaluisan L.f. Chaluisan Batlle — with Maria Hernandez, Brian Tully and L.f. Chaluisan Batlle at MNN. Tags: El Extreme Luis Chaluisan
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 13:31:52 +0000
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