24

The Drama Review 48, 2 (T182), Summer 2004. q 2004

New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Caribbean Bodies, Migrations,
and Spaces of Resistance
Vivian Mart nez Tabares
Lately Ive become more and more seduced by developments in the His-
panic Caribbean island scene, whose alternative theatre has been the subject of
several recent studies of mine, including an examination of what I call The
Other? Puerto Rican Theatre (1997), The Dominican Theatre in Search
of Itself (2000), and current Cuban explorations (2001, 2002). For this reason
Id like to share my analysis of three closely related solo performances by artists
from this region: You Dont Look Like by Puerto Rican Javier Cardona (1996);
Pargo, los pecados permitidos (Pargo, the Permissible Sins) by Dominican Waddys
Jaquez (2001); and Blanche Dubois by Cuban Marianela Boan (2000).
1
In Pargo
several other actors appear with Jaquez but these characters are conceived as
useful devices to resolve practical, transitional problems, and are not essential
to the central discourse.
These works reject a dramaturgy where the text is the starting point, either
because the artists consider an individual response necessary in the absence of
relevant texts or believe that theatre is a truly integrated space for the conver-
gence and equalizing of theatrical languages. As a result, these artists practice
a dramaturgy of spectacle in which the text is subordinated to the creative pro-
cess, and in which the body and its presence are pivotal.
Cardonas You Dont Look Like is a choreographed score of movements and
situations, a framework within which the artist indicts the racist, classist, and
sexist prejudices of the colonized Puerto Rican society. In You Dont Look
Like, words are kept to a minimum.
2
The actor divides himself into the nu-
merous stereotypes that are applied to blacks within a society that is eager to
whiten itself. The stage directions, curiously, are written in the rst person. In
them, Cardona transcribes his physical movements which go beyond acting
because the performance artist deliberately forces presentation and representation
to coexist, alternating between them. His performance is a visceral reaction to
the racist practices of the media and advertising, which can only imagine that
a black actor such as Cardona can promote a new toothpaste as part of a civ-
ilizing mission, sanctioned from above with a condescending pat on the head.
The politicized ritual is directly based on an experience from Cardonas own
life when he answered a casting call for a toothpaste commercial, but it tran-
Caribbean Bodies 25
scends the strictly personal by blending transvestism and dance, political de-
bate and catharsis.
The actor appears with a small toy mirror and, as he looks at himself, de-
clares: Mirror, mirror, on the wall, tell me if Im also... The last part of the
sentence is kept in suspense. The adjective-turned-noun black is repeatedly
withheld, because, for the artist, his essence as a human being has been rele-
gated to cliched folkloric visions fabricated by those in power who control the
media and who represent him as a cannibal, sugar cane cutter, santer a priest,
Rastafarian, basketball player, servant, rap artist, dancing machine, washer-
woman, and one of the Three Kings Melchior, of course. The word black is
only uttered at the end of the performance, after Cardona has traversed all
these social constructions made problematic by the racist gaze.
Here is an excerpt from the text:
When I arrived there, I realized that the talent pool (thats what we were
called) were all...like...you know... I mean, the only exception was the girl di-
recting the audition. Then I noticed that everyone in front of the camera was
talking very strangely. I have to confess, at rst I thought they might be New-
yoricans, or had problems with...with...pronunciation...diction... I dont
know what! But little by little I realizedthat was exactly what she wanted.
Please look at the camera.
(Like the girl, I approach several audience members as if I were videotaping and inter-
view them with a hand mirror a` la Snow White. After each question, I wait for an
answer.)
1. & 2. In You Dont
Look Like, Puerto Rican
actor/director Javier Car-
dona portrays the numer-
ous stereotypes that are
applied to blacks within a
society that is eager to
whiten itself, including the
rap artist and the
Puerto Rican dancing
machine. Premiere: Luis
Mun oz Mar n Founda-
tion, San Juan, 31 Octo-
ber 1996, as part of the
Vive las Artes series,
presented by the Funda-
cion Comunitaria de
Puerto Rico. (Courtesy of
Javier Cardona)
26 Vivian Mart nez Tabares
Tell me your full name.
Have you ever worked for the competition?
Okay, now look straight at the camera and say a few simple words: Bunga,
bunga, water.
Remember your character...give it sabor...mas...this is the Caribbean, more...
rhythm.
Then, through photographic projections, the actors body is seen, cross-
dressed and transformed into colonized identities, in order to reveal the word
that has been withheld. As Jossiana Arroyo states, these images deal with sig-
nicant and social-cultural orders that represent blackness: poverty, crime,
violence, the sexual-erotic, sabor, music, Tembandumba de la Quimbamba,
Juan Boria, folklore, among others (2002:n.p.).
3
Cardonas staging is simple and unpolished, with an obvious playful spirit
that offsets any distance created by the minimal technological intrusion. He
deconstructs and reconstructs his body in a fragmented dance that respects
natural, nonchoreographed movements more than formal, stylized ones; his
gestures are contradictory and appear disorganized, as he gradually (and with
resistance) embodies the summa of attributes of an alienated vision. And the
body is also the means to expand, to arrive at ontological freedom; it is the
instrument that displays the real and multiple identities that Javier Cardona
shares or negotiates: Puerto Rican, performance artist, actor, dancer, and
playwright, a black gay man from the Caribbean, temporary Newyorican,
supporter of Puerto Rican independence.
Cardona confronts the world of advertising by juxtaposing its ideal, plastic,
and unpolluted images against the blunt candor of the stereotypes that he him-
self globalizes; he parodies the excesses of marketing by resignifying the non-
theatrical objects that he uses (the mirror, a school backpack decorated with
the Puerto Rican ag, packets of regular and diet sugar); he also challenges the
ofcial culture of his country, which behind its false egalitarian pretensions
tolerates and promotes stereotypes. And he validates the aesthetics of a popular
culture
4
often diminished by self-perceptions that depict whats ours as
poor, small, vulgar, savage, or behind the times.
In Pargo, los pecados permitidos, the Dominican artist Waddys Jaquez links the
narrative performativity of a group therapy session with the spectacle of a
seedy cabaret to create the pathetic and scathingly humorous session of the Pa-
tronato de Recuperacio n Global Organizado (the Organized Global Recovery
Foundation), or Pargo.
5
As a Dominican living in New York City, Jaquez
6

who spends his life on the yola aerea, or air-raft,

7
traveling between the half-
island that is the Dominican Republic and the Big Apple re-creates the un-
known and problematic side of the migration to the North. Created in the big
city and premiered in Santo Domingo, this piece is a hybrid that feeds from
the traditions of solo performance, stand-up comedy, and the anthropological
questions raised by Latin American theatre. The characters Jaquez gathers are
four poor souls from the margins of New York. Mar a Cuchivida is a frustrated
poet in her adolescence who, from a branch of a guayaba tree, saw her eight
siblings leave, one by one, for the North, called there by the oldest, who pe-
titioned for each sibling except Mar a because she was no longer a minor. Sick
and tired of the indifference of Candela, her mother, who dies in a re,
8
Mar a
leaves for Holland with her friend Emperatriz to work as a babysitterto
take care of children aged 20 to 50 years old with a whip tucked into her
garters and stockings. Finally she manages to obtain a stolen passport and ar-
Caribbean Bodies 27
rives at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. Between alcohol, marijuana, and hits
of cracka life of highs and lows Mar a thinks that to live each day is an
adventure, a war nobody wins, and is terried to look back.
Papich o Dom nguez is the irresistible Matatan de Borohol (Ladys Man
of Borough Hall), who has been living for 15 years in the land of Superman,
Batgirl, and Wonder Woman. This stud left Quisqueya, stowed inside the
hold of a cargo ship,
9
to work in a sweatshop. But he spent a year behind bars
after the death of Modesta, a ne woman with a bad job, whom he met one
night and still fondly recalls between his legs. Modesta was the victim of a
jealous husband who surprised the lovers and then committed suicide; the po-
lice, needing someone to blame, arrested Papich o. Papich o lives with his
suitcase under my bed lling it with clothes and saving money to go back.
He remembers his mothers farewell: my son, be
careful and dont pick ghts, good men die with their
shoes on, and speaking of shoes, I wear a size eight and
your sister Iluminadita a nine and a half, in sneakers,
[...] and if anyone messes with you, punch his face in.
[...] God bless you!
Zaza, the third character, is the long-reigning
beauty queen of the barrios underworld who has
grown weary of her role. She is a well-padded, gro-
tesque explosion of tropical sensuality, a miscarriage
of nature according to her Dominican grandmother,
Intervenida, who taught her never to say no.
10
Zaza is
a compendium of popular culture and a victim of
globalized banality.
Rounding out the group is Pasio n Contreras, a
crazy wind blown in by the storm, a woman born
and raised according to the twists of fate in a country,
time, and body that are foreign to her, playing the
leading role in a cross-over to the female sex, com-
3. & 4. Mar a Cuch vida
and Papich o Dom nguez,
two of the characters of
Pargo, los pecados per-
mitidos (Pargo, the Per-
missible Sins), by
Dominican Waddys Ja-
quez, Teatro del Trapo.
Premiere: Teatro Reperto-
rio Espan ol, New York,
31 May 2001; Dominican
Republic premiere: Ravelo
Room, Teatro Nacional, 6
September 2001. (Cour-
tesy of Waddys Jaquez)
28 Vivian Mart nez Tabares
plete with silicone implants. Rising above the contempt of others, she is con-
vinced that she is a beautiful woman trapped inside an ugly body, who
deserves to go to heaven because, as she puts it, without realizing it, I created
my own hell on earth.
These characters are dened by their condition as displaced persons and
hustlers. They are street ghters battling to survive. Each combines tragedy
and humor, with a language that is full of slang, clever expressions of popular
wisdom, pseudo-philosophical comments, and cultural references reecting
the worst by-products of globalization, accompanied by a Latin beat. Jaquez
endows each character with a unique set of characteristics and movements,
and his physicality adds a visual dynamism to his performance. Jaquez has in-
scribed on his body the gestural essence, the agonized palpations of all he has
seen in the poor neighborhoods of the Dominican Republic and up and down
the streets of New York. He recongures paradigms: for example, the rhyth-
mic body of Papich o, never letting life get him down, is always moving to the
beat of a guaguanco. Jaquezs people display the incessant tics and sashaying of
drag queens, whose bodies pursue, run away, get beaten, ght back. They are
full of scattered, uncontrollable energy.
Jaquez creatively interacts with the costume designs of the artist Hochi
Asiaticoover-the-top inventions that answer the characters profound
needs. He models these garments with dazzling amboyance and versatility.
Jaquez is black, like the four characters he plays, but curiously this fact is not
made explicit in the text, except when Papich o specically refers to his
mother as a white woman from Santiago, suggesting that he perceives him-
self as different and has assumed the posture of the subaltern other. I wonder if
his race is taken for granted, as part of the condition of these dominicanyorks, or
if the performance artist is also playing ironically with the conicted self-
identity reected by the Dominican government, which afrms that the ma-
jority of its population, from mestizo to black, is indio,
11
and states so on
national identity cards.
In Blanche, Cuban Marianela Boan works with the main character of Ten-
nessee Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire, for whom she confesses a long-
standing fascination. She admires the strength of Blanches character, which
lies beneath her precarious fragility. Boan displays the stubbornness with
which Blanche defends her past, her utopia, and the personal values she has
lost through the transformations history has imposed on her life. Boan uses
Blanche to create a presence who tells the story of changing identities in a
work that falls somewhere in between a parable and a didactic piece.
Boans Blanche DuBois can be understood as a woman from the middle
class, rened and worldly, who let herself be swept up in the transformations
of the Cuban Revolution. She worked hard to please others and to nd her
place in the new society as all around her a debate ensued about her values and
the new ones that suddenly emerged amid the growing process of socializa-
tionvalues which were not always to her liking or easy to assimilate.
Blanche oscillates between deantly rejecting change and making choices that
lead to sacrice and confusion as she holds fast to her convictions. Later on, in
middle age, this same woman realizes that the essential pillars of her moral and
political identity have been knocked out of place. Worn out, she gives up and
is defeated. In the words of the performance artist Deborah Hunt, Boans
Blanche is a savage woman in a box, with a ag that never covers her body
(2001).
The few scattered lines, sometimes just isolated words, detached and recon-
textualized, are from Williamss text. The familiar character from the play
serves as a bridge to the new character, who (despite the title) doesnt reveal
Caribbean Bodies 29
her identity until several minutes into the performance, when the woman who
steps out of the vertical box lined in vivid red (where she has been imprisoned
upside down), nally identies herself to the audience. She struggles to inte-
grate herself in the outer world, at turns crawling, stumbling, stopping, and
retreating. It is Blanche, the elegant woman in sunglasses who walks sugges-
tively and irts, but it could also be Blanquita, as perhaps she was called by her
comrades in a battalion of the womens revolutionary militia. Later she is the
nameless woman, jaded by experience, who desperately waits by the tele-
phone or calls Western Union over and over to see if the money she expects
has arrived.
Unlike her previous works with DanzAbiertaEl pez de la torre nada en el
asfalto (The Fish from the Tower Swims in Cement) or El arbol y el camino (The
Tree and the Road), in which basic contradictions were expressed in the cho-
reography by a constant displacement of bodies up and down, falling and ris-
ing, here the movement is backward and forward, inside and out, with
variations on the oor or with an upright body, creating a different kind of
dance, deliberately truncated and imperfect. In choreographic terms, a hori-
zontal pattern of movements is blocked out, neither linear nor univocal, which
operates in a double game of centrifugal and centripetal forces (seen at a more
mature stage in her next work, Chorus perpetuus, performed in Monterrey dur-
ing the 2001 Hemispheric Institute).
These are the movements of a woman who cannot free herself from old
bonds, who fears what society will impose, and who experiences the painful
and difcult process of assimilating change. At the end, when she displays the
symbols of her personal values (however enduring they may be), they are of no
use to her in this new context. Her painful reectionswhich turn ironic and
5. Cuban Marianela Boan
as Blanche DuBois in her
2000 production Blanche.
Directed by Marianela
Boan and Raul Mart n.
Premiere: Teatro Nacional
de Cuba, La Habana, Feb-
ruary 2000. (Courtesy of
DanzAbierta)
30 Vivian Mart nez Tabares
mocking, underscored by a comic pathos introduced by the artist point to
essential contradictions in the new social realities of Cuba.
The dramaturgy of the objects is meticulous. The vertical box/trunk is a
womb, and I wonder if it is perhaps a space of security or a metaphor for the
Island as well. But it is also a package, a cofn, a pulpit, a useful hiding place,
a screen, a shell that gives refuge. The black, gold-bordered ag is a symbol of
rebellion, the epic spirit and the persistence of utopiaand I cannot help but
remember certain gestures of Brechts Mother Courage played by Helene
Weigel, seen in a video of the Berliner Ensemble, or in the ballet Avanzada, in
which Alicia Alonso danced while holding aloft a red ag. Boans visual cues
awaken countless associations, as does her use of the well-known musical score
from Santiago A

lvarezs short documentary Now, a foreshadowing of the video

clip. The tattered diploma that proclaims Awarded to Blanche DuBois for her
outstanding work, placed before us at the foot of the proscenium next to a
milicianas shirt, which the woman will later wear, engages in a multivoiced di-
alogue with daily life in the past and the present.
What Boan calls danza contaminada (contaminated dance), closely resembles
Javier Cardonas explorations and the physicality of Waddys Jaquezs work.
Coincidentally, You Dont Look Like and Pargo, los pecados permitidos are proj-
ects that respond to the structural crisis of collaborative theatre today, a situa-
tion that has prompted actors to write, develop scores and scripts, design sets,
and more. Boan in turn has taken full advantage of the stability that she enjoys
as a Cuban theatre professional, which has allowed her to develop the potential
of her six dancers.
12
Each of these three works is carried out with a conscious political calling.
The stage becomes a forum for debate, a thought-provoking arena for the
spectator. Migration, the phenomenon of human displacement an impor-
tant factor within the Caribbean region, historically interconnecting its pop-
ulations (and globally, a phenomenon of escalating proportions) is pivotal.
While in Pargo, los pecados permitidos, the personal stories of the four immi-
grants identify migration as a causal factor, in You Dont Look Like, the gaze of
the outsider is seen as all-legitimizing, and its references to blacks from other
Caribbean islands reappropriates the above-mentioned mobility that led to the
genesis of a region toward which Puerto Rico feels a complicated afliation.
In Blanche, the main character allies herself, in the midst of political and eco-
nomic migrations from Cuba, with those who have stayed, a perspective that
is perhaps much less considered and studied, but which animates other Cuban
productions such as Weekend en Bah a and Delirio habanero by Alberto Pedro
and Miriam Lezcano (Teatro M o), or the much more recent El baile (The
Dance) by Abelardo Estorino (Compan a Hubert de Blanck), or El enano en la
botella (The Dwarf in the Bottle) by Abilio Estevez, directed by Rau l Mart n
(Teatro de la Luna).
Projects such as these have energized my investigations into the links be-
tween theatre and performance art because they are hybrid expressions that
consider dramaturgy as an organization of actions, making no distinction be-
tween theatre and dance, freely intermixing words and gestures. These three
artists disregard well-known orthodox paradigms isolating genres. They ig-
nore linear or continuous time, actively consider the audience, and propose a
subversive and intertextural linguistic game that appropriates popular language
and culture, merging these into a new performative norm. Their work is note-
worthy as well because, inspired by Jerzy Grotowskis idea of the performer
who knew how to unite corporal impulse with sound, and who followed a
path toward the essential body (1992/93), they also want to shape their stories
around an instant focused on the here and now, afrming their presence and
voice in times like our own that are marked by permanent crisis. As spaces of
Caribbean Bodies 31
human resistance within a global market dominated by the media, these artists
have deliberately adopted a conceptual perspective that engages them directly
with life, art, and the society in which they all, sometimes uncomfortably, live.
translated by Margaret Carson
edited by Richard Schechner
Notes
1. This paper was presented at the Third Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Poli-
tics, dedicated to the theme of Globalization, Migration, and Public Space, and held
in Lima, Peru, 513 July 2002.
2. For the published text see Cardona (1997) and Lugo (2002).
3. Tembandumba de la Quimbamba is a character who represents the spirit of the Afro-
Caribbean woman in the poem Majestad Negra by the Puerto Rican poet Luis Pales
Matos (18981959). Juan Boria (19061995) was an AfroPuerto Rican performer fa-
mous for his public readings of poes a negra.
4. See Los teatreros ambulantes y la estetica del espejo prismado (Travelling Performers
and the Aesthetic of the Pr ismatic Mirror) by Yanis Gordils, an unpublished yet excel-
lent study of the theatre project developed between 1986 and 1990 by Rosa Luisa Mar-
quez and Antonio Martorell with their students, among them Javier Cardona:
The native popular aesthetic, which escapes the homogenizing modernity of
the media, brands itself as j barameaning peasant, cafre meaning African,
charrameaning Mexican. What is national is seen as anachronistic and what is
native is seen as vulgar, never as important as what is preached in magazines and
on movie screens. (n.d.)
The title of the essay alludes to a mirror a toy mirror as a recurring object in the
exploration of the groups self-recognition. Referring to the artist in question, Gordils
states:
The essential achievement is self-revelation and learning to call everything by its
name in order to share its real name with another. Javier, for example, discovered
that he is black and that he is as beautiful as the god Ogun in the process of per-
sonifying the biracial character Jose Clemente in the Ana Lydia Vega story, Otra
maldad de Pateco.
5. Among Latinos in New York pargo also means a paid sexual service.
6. In contrast to another performance artist of Dominican origin, Josena Baez (who calls
herself Dominicanyork with the aim of legitimizing and dignifying this term in her per-
formance Dominicanish), Jaquez calls himself a Dominican, period, who lives in New
York, period (see Baez 2000; and Vargas 2001).
7. I allude to and paraphrase the title of Luis Rafael Sanchezs notable essay La guagua
aerea (The Air-Bus; 1994).
8. Candela means re in Spanish.
9. It is signicant that in Globalization and Transculturation, her keynote speech to the
2003 Encuentro of The Hemispheric Institute, Mary Louise Pratt noted that globaliza-
tion begins with changes in the means of human mobility, with an increasing migration
of ex-colonial subjects toward their former capitals where although this diaspora is
needed, it is not necessarily favored. Pratt also mentioned that in the 90s stories ap-
peared that seemed recycled from the archives of 18th-century travel literature, but now
featured stowaways who hide in the landing gear of airplanes or illegal domestics who
are kept as virtual captives in wealthy homes.
10. The name Intervenida (intervened) refers to the U.S. military intervention of the Do-
minican Republic in 1965, which explains why she couldnt say no.
11. In the Dominican Republic, indio is a euphemism understood to mean any person who
is not white.
12. As well as incorporating acting and singing in her works (as in Chorus perpetuus), some
of the members of DanzAbierta, such as Jose Antonio Hevia and Grettel Montes de
Oca, have begun to choreograph on their own, encouraged by Boan.
32 Vivian Mart nez Tabares
References
Arroyo, Jossianna
2002 Espejito, espejito: raza y formacio n de identidades puertorriquen as en You
dont look like, by Javier Cardona (Mirror, Mirror: Race and the Formation
of Puerto Rican Identities in Javier Cardonas You Dont Look Like). In Sa-
queos: Antolog a de produccio n cultural, edited by Dorian Lugo, n.p. San Juan:
Editorial Noexiste.
Baez, Josena
2000 Dominicanish, a performance text. New York: Graphic Art.
Cardona, Javier
1997 You Dont Look Like. Conjunto 106 (MayAugust):4749.
Hunt, Deborah
2001 Mujeres laborando (Women at Work). En Rojo, Claridad (San Juan), 915
March:19.
Lugo, Dorian
2002 Saqueos: Antolog a de produccio n cultural. Puerto Rico.
Gordils, Yanis
n.d. Los teatreros ambulantes y la estetica del espejo prismado (Traveling Per-
formers and the Aesthetic of the Prismatic Mirror). Unpublished manuscript.
Grotowski, Jerzy
1992/93 El Performer. Mascara, Cuaderno Iberoamericano de Reexion sobre Escenolog a
(Mexico D.F.) 3, 1112:7881.
Mart nez Tabares, Vivian
1997 La escena puertorriquen o vista desde fuera/dentro (The Puerto Rican
Scene from the Inside/Outside). Conjunto 106, (MayAugust):312.
2000 Quince voces en busca del teatro dominicano (Fifteen Voices in Search of
Dominican Theatre). Conjunto 116 ( JanuaryMarch 2000):221.
2001 Mover la palabra, ritualizar el gesto (Move the Word, Ritualize the Ges-
ture). Revolucion y Cultura 1/2001 ( JanuaryFebruary, Fifth Series):4548.
2002 Chorus perpetuus: bailar la plenitud del hombre(Chorus Perpetuus: Dancing
the Plenitude of Man). Conjunto 124 ( JanuaryApril):5861.
Sanchez, Luis Rafael
1994 La guagua aerea (The Air-Bus). R o Piedras, Puerto Rico: Editorial Cul-
tural.
Vargas, William
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interview with Waddys Jaquez). Oh! Magazine (a supplement to El List n Dia-
rio; Santo Domingo), 8 September.
Vivian Mart nez Tabares is a Cuban critic, researcher, editor, and professor. She has
published Teatro por el Gran Octubre (Universidad de La Habana, 1978), Jose
Sanchis Sinisterra: Explorar las V as del Texto Dramatico (Teatro Municipal
General, 1993), and Didascalias Urgentes de una Espectadora Interesada (Edi-
torial Letras Cubanas, 1996). Her work has been compiled in theatre anthologies, and
she has collaborated in specialized publications in the Americas and Europe. She is a
Professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte, and has lectured in several universities in
Latin America and Europe. She received the Caribe 2000 Rockefeller Foundation
fellowship at Universidad de Puerto Rico, and is Director of Conjunto magazine and
head of the Theatre Department of Casa de las Americas, Cuba, where she organizes
the Theatrical May Season.
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