Authors explore practical, political effect of theatre studies

LAWRENCE — Stuart Day is both a professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and dean of the University of Kansas School of Professional Studies and Edwards Campus in Overland Park, which focuses on training, often for nontraditional students. So what is he doing editing a new book titled “Performances That Change the Americas” (Routledge, 2022), which looks at both top-down and bottom-up uses of acting skills to create political change in the Western Hemisphere?

“The idea is to explore the question ‘How does classroom learning apply to the real world, and how does social change come about?’ in a fairly explicit way,” Day said. “It really is asking ‘How does formal training in theatre performance impact the world around us?’ Everything we do at the Edwards Campus is very focused on that. How are we applying studies? How does training impact the world? So it might be in an American Sign Language & Deaf Studies degree; it may be in another area like biotechnology. But if you look at social change, a lot of change agents have some theatrical and some performance background. So I thought it would be interesting to study.”

In fact, Day has long had a long career in performance studies, having written the book “Outside Theater: Alliances That Shaped Mexico” (University of Arizona Press, 2017), among several others. For the new book, he said, he sought contributions from experts in other regions, such that the content spans cases from Canada to Argentina.

Several chapters focus on recent, grassroots uses of theatricality to create social change, particularly by marginalized groups, including “Carnival in hell: kinetic dissidence and the new queer carnivalesque in contemporary Brazil” by Pablo Assumpção Barros Costa of the Universidade Federal do Ceará.

Day highlighted the essay “The queer/muxe performance of disappearance: Lukas Avendaño’s butterfly utopia” by Antonio Prieto Stambaugh of Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico. Muxe is a word in the Zapotec language that can be translated as “third gender.” Prieto Stambaugh tells how Avendaño theatrically demonstrated outside Mexican government buildings and elsewhere, seeking to address the 2018 disappearance (and, it turned out, the murder) of his brother, Bruno Alonso, in the state of Oaxaca.

And while eventually Alonso’s body was returned to Avendaño’s family, perhaps as a result of his activism, Prieto Stambaugh “argue(s) he is also gesturing toward a queer utopia where political, aesthetic and sexual dissidence merge, where violence and impunity fail to destroy hope.”

The content of the book is so fresh that Day noted that Alonso’s “body was found shortly after that chapter was written, so we added an epilogue.”

Sometimes, Day wrote in his introduction, a performance itself is the change.

“Sometimes you're trying to raise awareness,” he said. “Sometimes you're trying to get attention. But sometimes you're just speaking to people; someone whose voice isn’t heard otherwise has an opportunity then to express themselves, so that incremental change does happen. At least, we had better hope it does.”

Top image: Performance artist Lukas Avendaño (left) holds hands with a member of the Xica Teatre group in June 2018 outside the Mexican Consulate in Barcelona, Spain. Photo still from the short documentary “Buscando a Bruno” (“Searching for Bruno”), posted on YouTube. Credit: Used with permission of Lukas Avendaño.

Right image: Stuart Day, KU professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese.