Devising as Pedagogical Practice in Latin American Theatre

Abstract

In some theatre communities in Latin America, devised projects (creación colectiva) became a dominant presence throughout the 1960s-1980s, grounding a practice that remains fundamental today, though such work presents a challenge to study in traditional, script-based classrooms.  For those of us who work with Latin American theatre in an academic setting in the United States and who would like to give our students a taste of the challenges and rewards of developing and staging devised productions, the big questions we always ask ourselves include where to begin, with which models, in what balance of textual reading and production work, and in which language. The challenge, then, is not with devising per se, but rather with determining how to incorporate student devising adequately into “rigorous” theatre study, where the word “rigorous” stands in for a host of often-underexplored presumptions about methodologies and practices. This article is illustrated with examples of recent devised productions by the Cornell theatre troupe Teatrotaller. I am convinced—having done both scene work and full production—that the advantages of performance in the target language are best achieved when the stakes are high, not just scene work in a classroom setting, but full performance for a diverse public.