No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2025
Mexican theatre company Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes are world-renowned for their intensive laboratory processes leading up to unique, interdisciplinary performances that defy expected theatrical conventions. Their piece El Gallo (2009) is a poignant example of this company's capacity for innovation and social action. Here, actors are transformed into opera singers in a piece that is sung – in an entirely invented language – while inciting audiences to consider the anxieties that fuel the act of exposing one's body onstage, as fears over our own perceived differences prevent us from feeling ‘normal’ in a society that constantly judges us as we recognize the discriminatory power of social normativity.
1 Bogdan, Robert, ‘The Social Construction of Freaks’, in Garland-Thomson, Rosemary, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press), pp. 23–37Google Scholar, here p. 35.
2 The play title translates as ‘The Rooster’, but it also carries the connotation in Spanish of letting a false note slip while singing (or your voice cracking while talking). While this play has toured internationally for years, in this essay I am writing about the first season that took place in Mexico City at the Centro Cultural de Bosque, as well as the anniversary performance in Mexico City that took place at the Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris.
3 Since 2010 I have been the company dramaturge for Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes. While I did not work on this performance, my ongoing work with the company gives me a particular perspective and knowledge when approaching this play.
4 Zien, Katherine, ‘Troubling Multiculturalisms: Staging Trans/National Identities in Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes's El Gallo’, Theatre Survey, 55, 3 (2014), pp. 343–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 348.
5 Having an orchestra conductor onstage contributes to the confusion of the play-within-a-play form of the production. Viptim, the fictitious conductor of the opera narrated onstage, will often mimic the movements of the ‘real’ conductor as they each guide their musicians and actors in their performances.
6 All translations are my own. The original reads, ‘En la pluralidad está la razón de ser de la misma identidad, pues la cultura solo se puede definir en su diferencia consigo misma. Por esta razón, no podemos reconocer las identidades culturales sin, al mimo tiempo, invocar la figura del Otro. El Yo no existe sin el Otro.’ Roger Bartra, Oficio mexicano (Mexico: Debolsillo, 2013), p. 14.
7 Ibid., p. 14. This quote is filled with Mexican idioms. The original reads, ‘sin afrancesados, tecnócratas ayanquizados, agnósticos, socialistas, positivistas, protestantes, indios idólatras, comunistas, masones, malinchistas, judíos, agachupinados y muchos otros grupos minoritarios, simplemente no podríamos ni siquiera discutir acerca de la identidad mexicana’. Some of these terms are untranslatable, such as malinchista, which means ‘sell-out’, in reference to la Malinche, historically misassigned the cultural role of the whore and traitor by being Hernán Cortez's interpreter.
8 Foucault, Michel, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom: An Interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984’, in Bernauer, James and Rasmussen, David, eds., The Final Foucault: Studies on Michel Foucault's Last Works (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 112–31Google Scholar.
9 Bogdan, Robert, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 24Google Scholar.
10 Adams, Rachel, Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 5Google Scholar.
11 I am borrowing David Hevey's concept of ‘enfreakment’ to refer to the figure of the freak as a social construct and as a practice of othering. Hevey, David, The Creatures Time Forgot: Photography and Disability Imagery (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 53Google Scholar. As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson states, ‘Enfreakment emerges from cultural rituals that stylize, silence, differentiate, and distance the persons whose bodies the freak-hunters or showmen colonize and commercialize. What we assume to be a freak of nature was instead a freak of culture.’ Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, ‘Introduction’, Garland-Thomson, , ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 1–19Google Scholar, here p. 10. Robert Bogdan, Freak Show, p. xi, also defines the process of enfreakment as a cultural framing: ‘“Freak” is not a quality that belongs to the person on display. It is something that we created: a perspective, a set of practices – a social construction.’
12 Zien, ‘Troubling Multiculturalisms’, p. 344.
13 All five characters and their performers are Jogbos (Guadalupean-Mexican actress Fabrina Melon), Shaktom (Japanese-Mexican actress Irene Akiko Iida), Thiktum (Mexican actor Edwin Calderón), Shaktas (Iranian actor Kaveh Parmas) and Shaptes (Mexican actress Itzia Zerón).
14 Garland-Thomson, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.
15 It is important to point out that in the case of Mexico, ethnic markers are mostly applied to indigeneity and blackness, identities that are often marginalized from the collective national configuration of self. Let us emphasize that most Mexicans would consider themselves white; it is upon becoming the immigrant other in Europe and the United States that Mexicans are racialized.
16 Garland-Thomson, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
17 In the play, these two characters are performed by Itzia Zerón and Edwin Calderón, both Mexican actors.
18 Russel, Emily, Reading Embodied Citizenship: Disability, Narrative, and the Body Politic (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), p. 4Google Scholar.
19 It is significant that lucha libre (wrestling) are the only words that the audience can understand in the performance when the actors sing ‘la lucha libre’ in this sequence. Wrestling is a form that has already become part of the national iconography in Mexico, with the transformation of the wrestler into a fashionable figure. Lucha libre is already part of a national ‘style’ that has been commercialized and mythologized as part of national identity. As the critic Carlos Monsiváis points out, wrestling ‘is popular because the form does not intend to deceive the function (the style is the message), because the fanatics in their metamorphosis become a Roman court at the circus, because the claims in the agglomeration are the result of everyone and nobody, because clothes do not deceive or disappoint, because unexpected events cause joy, because you can be an idol without style but not without panache’. Carlos Monsiváis, Los rituales del caos, 7th edn (Mexico: Ediciones Era, 2000), p. 6. Thus the audiences in Mexico (and most of Latin America) will be very familiar and probably fans of either rudos or técnicos, and it goes without mention that there is a third component in the wresting families with the exóticos who perform in drag and are, for the most part, members of the LGTBQ+ community.
20 Santana, Adela, ‘Lucha Libre and Mexican National Identity’, in Producta50: An Introduction to Some of the Relations Between Culture and Economy (Barcelona: YProductions, 2007), pp. 228–37Google Scholar, here p. 234.
21 Levinas, Emmanuel, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969)Google Scholar.
22 Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self’, p. 117.
23 Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at the Limit’, in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 55–66, here p. 55.
24 Adams, Sideshow U.S.A., p. 7.
25 Ibid., p. 7.
26 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, 2001).
27 Roger Bartra, Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origin of European Otherness, trans. Carl T. Berrisford (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 260.
28 Garland-Thomson, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.
29 Bogdan, ‘The Social Construction of Freaks’, p. 35.