Monday Seminar:
Paola Hernández
Resident Fellow (2016-2017)
Spanish & Portuguese, UW-Madison
Why do we see a renaissance of documentary practices in contemporary theatre? Where and how does the idea of the affective of a staged biography or the autobiographical enter the scene? And what is the place that this genre of documentary fictions take on different stages around Latin America? One way to tackle these questions could be through the understanding the personal stories affect us, the audience, in a very direct way. The need to return to the “real” or authentic could be a way to respond to many other forms of simulacra and virtual episodes of our times. However, I also believe that an effect of this type of implosion of this genre has been to give agency to those other voices that are rarely heard or considered.
Paola S. Hernández specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre and performance. She has published numerous articles on Southern Cone theatre, performance, memory politics, sites of memory, and human rights. She is the author of El teatro de Argentina y Chile: Globalización, resistencia y desencanto (Corregidor, 2009), and co-editor (with Brenda Werth and Florian Becker) of Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives (Palgrave, 2013). Hernández is the South American drama editor for the Handbook of Latin American Studies, Library of Congress, as well as Book Review editor for Latin American Theatre Review. Her current research project examines the role of the “real” in theatre and visual arts with an emphasis on contemporary documentary theatre and urban ethnography in Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Peru.