Research Methods and Archival Transformation in the Digital Age

Memory as cultural, embodied, affective, discursive, sonic, and visual forms of knowledge has been a key concern for performance studies. In paying careful attention to archives in particular, performance scholars have greatly expanded commonplace understandings of them.Footnote ⁶ Performance theory informs my methods of reading what is a pretty traditional archive of theatre ephemera. Diana Taylor's field-changing intervention to redefine performance as a key system of memory transmission for marginalized groups in the Americas, now published two decades ago, particularly informs my discussion. Within her larger argument, Taylor challenges the misconceptions that the archive is unmediated, that it resists change or manipulation, and that its contents are static. She also contends that the archive works in tandem with performance as ephemeral, in-person acts of transfer, “alongside other systems of transmission—the digital and the visual, to name two.”Footnote ⁷ A careful consideration of the Tablas-Alarcos archive encourages me to take up from these places in her thinking to approach the collection as living and impermanent, and to make visible the labor of critics that construct and mediate our interactions with it. As an extreme case in point, archival subject-collector-curator Roberto Gacio offers a glimpse at several ways that archival memory, working “across distance, over time and space,” converges and intertwines with the embodied memory of performance.Footnote ⁸ I take up these questions in the following sections; here I aim to underscore the ever-changing nature of archives and broach the topic of the ways the growing practice of crude facsimiles taken with a digital camera or cell phone have transformed their materiality and location, as well as researchers’ reading practices.

Archives are living beings. Most are constantly changing, and this causes problems for the distinction between processed and unprocessed collections. Many collections have both processed and unprocessed materials. Processing often remains incomplete because of the expense of time and labor. When processing a collection, archivists frequently cross-reference related materials in other collections since standard archival practices dictate that materials with different origins or provenance be kept separate from one another. Cross-referencing is another dimension of archives that is ever-evolving, as newly processed collections continue to create additional linkages between collections with related content. So, even in the hypothetical case that all the materials in Collection A have been processed and cross-referenced with existing archives, related materials belonging to yet-to-be-processed Collections B or C will, in a perfect world, eventually reference back to Collection A. However, archives don't take place in a perfect world. There will always be gaps, and, in theory, the work of cross-referencing—the webbing of archival knowledge by content—remains forever unfinished.

Whereas resources and labor for accruing, processing, and cross-referencing place limits on the accessibility of archives, the rule of provenance separates archives by the material circumstances of each collection's creation and donation rather than by subject or content. A focus on content allows us to consider how even though archival knowledge weaves multiple collections together, content has little to do with the materiality of archives. For example, a theatre company like Cuba's Teatro Buendía has traveled to London to perform at the Globe Theatre, and to Chicago to collaborate with and perform at the Goodman Theatre. The performances were accompanied by ephemera produced in collaboration with the Globe and the Goodman, ephemera that translated information about Buendía into English, communicating aspects of their work to audiences in the United Kingdom and United States. So, to whose collection do these materials belong and where should they reside? In Buendía's in Havana, the Goodman's in Chicago, the National Theatre's in London? Of course, I would contend that their ephemera belongs in all these places. My example is meant only to point out that since the principle of provenance decides what is in one collection and not in another—the Goodman printed the programs for Buendía's Charentón, they kept a number of copies in their archive before donating materials to a research library—the material circumstances of the collection, before it is donated, circumscribes the limits of what is organized in the first place. Materials documenting Gacio's work as an actor could serve as another example of how provenance, not content, delimits material circumstances of collections. Programs, photos, and reviews can be found in collections in Havana, including Tablas-Alarcos, as well as in the Cuban Heritage Collection in the University of Miami Libraries, which has obtained the primary materials that Gacio personally collected, documenting his own production work as well as other Cuban productions dating back to the 1950s.Footnote ⁹

Unprocessed materials in a collection are at a higher risk of disappearing than processed materials. Without a detailed finding aid, it is harder to verify if an item has disappeared, been “borrowed,” or even been misfiled by a less careful researcher. Unprocessed materials are not necessarily more in flux than processed ones, but lack of a detailed account makes it harder to verify order, disorder, and loss just as it underscores the fluid nature of archives. If I cite a source in an unprocessed container and another scholar cannot come behind me to locate, cross-reference, consult, fact-check, or reinterpret, what does this mean for the claims in my writing? What does it mean about the memory the archive creates, or the materiality of that memory?

Digitization, especially crude digitization for personal use, has important implications for my questions regarding the materiality of archival knowledge, not to mention verification of evidence and access to it. Professional digitization of archives offers potential solutions to inequity in access, material circumscription of contents, and the precarity created by human interaction that threatens the survival of archival materials, their organization, and verifiability. All the while, labor cost, time, and server space greatly limit digitization efforts, making digital archives much more limited than their material counterparts. However, there is a relatively new, under-the-radar digitization produced by the invisible labor of researchers, one that is currently transforming theatre archives, especially regarding their materiality, their location, and the memory they hold.

Learning to work with performance archives in the twenty-first century has meant snapping images of documents with my cell phone and consulting the digital images later. This was a method I was encouraged to use as a graduate research fellow at the Cuban Heritage Collection, as utilizing the time in the reading room to take photos rather than reading allows researchers to consult more materials in the long run. Whereas taking photos of materials is now a ubiquitous practice for researchers in archives that allow it, I argue that the resulting images change the nature of archives and researchers’ experience with them. Furthermore, we need an earnest interrogation and discussion in theatre historiography about the theoretical, methodological, and ethical implications of the quick-and-dirty digital duplication of archival materials. Collectively, how are we as researchers transforming archives through our disparate and continuous duplication of materials on servers and hard drives?

Researchers’ digital duplication of archival materials for personal use is a dispersion of archival knowledge to spaces outside of the archive. This very common practice defies the limits determined by the material circumstances of archival collections. Although archives that allow snapshots stipulate that they are permitted only for personal use, researchers have control over granting access to the duplications they make, and share them with colleagues and students in presentations, collaborations, and in-progress works. Following the itineraries and labor of theatre historiographers and other researchers, archives have a fast-growing wake in the digital realm that has expanded the location of archival knowledge and has broken down certain gatekeeping and safeguarding practices for access to it. This project would have been impossible to continue without access to the physical records as they exist across borders, especially considering the increased limitations to travel because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researcher-made duplication unhinges working with materials from the physical location of the archive alone. It makes the archive portable in such a way that researchers can carry the archive with them and continue interacting with it even at great physical distance.

Using my phone's camera to create legible snapshots of archival materials has greatly altered the relationship between myself as researcher and the archive. Crude digitization gives the researcher superpowered capabilities previously unthinkable. Digital copies are verifiable and rereadable backup records of physical items if those items are misplaced, misfiled, or lost. Even in my own limited experience this has already become an issue. In 2015, I failed to relocate some of the photography I consulted on a 2014 visit to the Tablas-Alarcos collection before working with Gacio. When I recently returned in 2023, the whereabouts of the physical materials in the collection were unknown. In such cases, my researcher-made digital copies provide evidence of my evidence. Having access to this archive of digital records exponentially increases the time I can spend consulting and interpreting photographs, objects, or manuscripts. This allows me to review content multiple times in order to fact-check or reconsider visually readable attributes as my interpretation and narrative develops.

Adding new dimensions to an archive's living nature and constant state of flux, crude digitization is a relatively new practice with an undertheorized impact. So far, I have pointed out that DIY digitization transforms archives in at least several ways. Duplication is the continued dispersion of archival materials. Crude digitization for personal use creates facsimiles that could verify the existence of physical documents for citation in case the original records cannot be located or accessed. Digitization creates increased access for researchers, allowing for elongated interaction with the materials.

In the next section, I provide a reading of performances of Cuban theatre through the digital facsimiles of their documentation in the Tablas-Alarcos archive. I make my methods of duplication and reading images of archival documentation transparent in order to interrogate and demonstrate how such methods are altering theatre archives and researchers’ experiences with them.

The Outer Crust

Having mapped the temporal contours of performance's ongoing aftermath, I would like to reverse the common understanding of theatre history and begin with the temporal coordinates closest to the present moment, the outermost crust of the aftermath. I am not referring to Gacio and I (re)experiencing performances through their documentation in 2015, but rather my reading of recordings of that documentation since then. Mary Elizabeth Anderson investigates the aftermath of performance from the perspective of a researcher who directly experiences it. In approaching a representation of how performance sticks with us through experiments in reflexive writing, she poses new questions for the ways performance's aftermath both stretches and collapses time.Footnote ¹⁰ My approach to reading digital snapshots of los residuos de los residuos shares similar assumptions about the temporal longevity and slipperiness of the aftermath, and in several ways extends her claims to my work as a historiographer.

Before theorizing the archive through Gacio's labor, I need to think through my own labor as a historiographer. Revisiting the images I captured during those two weeks has been a process of slowly reassembling the collection and its myriad of glimpses into past performances. As an outsider, my interpretation of materials, especially of visual images and aesthetics, is distinct from theatre critics in Cuba. Although I am familiar with much of what has been written about some of the most touted groups and playwrights, I have very little firsthand experience with their work, such as seeing them perform. Photography and ephemera provide windows into these experiences, but the temporal walls are buttressed with a cultural deficit of creating and experiencing theatre in those times and places. To gain this missing insight, I have to rely on the reviews of Cuban critics, who are well-informed and initiated spectators with a large stake in and long-term engagement with Cuban theatre.

Although there are many common concerns among scholars in Cuba and the United States in theorizing performance art, theatre for social change, theatricality, and so on, our discourses are distinct and have divergent priorities. For instance, I often am asked to revise my work to foreground context for a readership that editors assume know nearly nothing about Cuba. In this case, priorities of inclusion already assume that Cuba is excluded from theatre historiography. The imposed job of translator and tour guide that, too often, I feel obligated to fulfill is a kind of labor in which I regularly partake to get published, and one that maintains Cuban theatre's exclusion from the center, even as one of the aims of my writing is to break down such barriers. Attention to the politics of race, gender, and sexuality also differ greatly. As a US citizen researching in Cuba, I do not want to impose a US gaze of race as a white–Black binary on my collaborators whose culture, although rife with anti-Black racism, constructs race differently and more fluidly. At the same time, as a biracial Latino and white man, I have to recognize that my race, gender, and US nationality determined a number of unearned privileges for me while I was working in Cuba. Finally, becoming professionalized as a scholar and artist in the United States has given me different kinds of experience with theatre practice than an artist-scholar professionalized in Cuba. And yet, those photographs convey complex worlds and world-making practices to me through affect. Despite the reading and cross-referencing that I must do to begin to reconstruct the context, I experience the artifacts first and foremost through feeling, which is the form of knowledge that initially guides my selection and interpretation of productions. Studying and writing about vanguard approaches in Cuban theatre has helped me to understand how my affinity for Grotowski's methods years ago as a young artist was an impulse belonging to my cubanidad (Cubanness), and serves me now as interpretative sensations into the archive of teatro de la gestualidad (physical theatre). Given the many moving borders outlined above, and with respect to their many pores, I hope the feeling conveyed by the artifact guiding my interpretation is somehow a twice- or thrice-removed residue of the production in its context, which I strive to keep in sight as much as possible. Whether faithful to the moment of performance and its context or a wholly novel reading, my interpretation as a somewhat contiguously related researcher (as a Latino or cubano de allá) continues to make meaning with these productions in their aftermath.

Another consideration for my labor is the general difficulty of accessing archives in Cuba from the United States. In most cases, foreign researchers must apply for special visas to access archives, and the approval process is difficult and not transparent. In addition to official permission, one must gain the trust of Cuban collaborators and have an opportunity to build relationships in the first place—I was able to begin this work because Manzor opened the door and vouched for me. The history of the United States’ political, economic, and militaristic aggression against Cuba, as well as the ebbs and flows of political antagonism between the two countries, underlie the cultural and material rifts that I outline in my work and personal biography. There is a bigger context to the founding of the Cuban Heritage Collection outside of Cuba at the University of Miami, for instance, related to the history of the Cuban Revolution and Cuba's diverse diasporas, comprising multiple migratory generations, perspectives, and reasons for emigrating. The US–Cuba conflict continues to evolve, as we have witnessed multiple shifts in the political climate between the two countries in the past twenty years. I began working in Tablas-Alarcos during the beginning of the move toward the normalization of relations in 2014. Future collaborations seemed much more possible then than they do today following the thaw reversal of the Trump administration and the current crisis of Cuba's “second special period,” triggered by the pandemic shutdown and other factors. Moments like the current one have cyclically decreased opportunities for exchange like those created by the former moment. The Cuban Theatre Digital Archive, a community repository and virtual platform with ties to the Cuban Heritage Collection and the University of Miami, has been able to do the important work of keeping Cuban theatre connected to its diasporas. Even in moments of increased antagonism, it “leverages the digital to create a transborder archive in and of itself where institutional and private collections in Cuba and the United States can exist in the same space.”Footnote ¹¹ My research both models and depends on this very accessible resource, which is further evidence of the capacity of the digital to navigate the obstacles created by larger economic and political changes.

As a final reflection on my own labor in the archive, I take pleasure in it. Reading collections—like my childhood baseball card collection, or the elements of the Tablas-Alarcos archive duplicated by my iPhone and saved on my faltering external hard drive—can be like finding one's way through a maze. There are all kinds of interactive possibility: an audience survey for the 1980 Havana Theatre Festival, an itinerary for a theatre design colloquium, interpreting shorthand in cursive, an unidentified photograph that prompts the detectivelike deductive reasoning. In many ways, this work is a way for me first to experience part of what I have missed about Cuban theatre history as an artist of Cuban descent displaced in the United States. The materials offer different detours into the past, and I cannot possibly take them all. This labor may seem overwhelming to some; I find it pleasurable. Working through the large boxes of unprocessed materials was truly invigorating because of the plethora of possibilities, something I continue to experience while working through the digital traces of those materials. The desire to “discover” something new is overwhelmed by the many faces of historical productions on stages in Havana and elsewhere that continue to draw me on different detours with every image. As I reread its crude digital footprint, the Tablas-Alarcos archive performs. The remnants of different productions, becoming ever more familiar, begin to mirror and build off one another.

Philip Auslander has recently distinguished between documentary and theatrical capacities of performance documentation. The former offers a fragmented and diminished experience of a past live performance, and the latter refers to documentation, like performed photography, where the viewer puts together a narrative or experience of a performance that never really took place.Footnote ¹² Auslander questions what the documentary mode implies—an assumed ontological relationship between the authentic there-there of the past performance and its documentation. He turns this assumption on its head, arguing that documentation authenticates performances. Even in the most intuitive use of a production photo, the documentary and theatrical modes are blurred in the complex temporality of the still image, which freezes the presentness of the past at the same time as it is an image recorded for a future onlooker who experiences this past in the present.Footnote ¹³ Moving beyond documentation's relationship with the past, Auslander favors a focus on the relationship with its viewer. The long duration of my reading of performance documentation in the Tablas-Alarcos archive through digital copies is a much different kind of experience compared to that of the live audience in the past. Both the mediation of the photograph—which communicates in different ways and emphasizes different kinds of information from the live performance—and the time I can spend with the photograph allow me to access a version of the performance to which the live audience did not have access.

Cuban Theatre Historiography from the Outside In

Being able to consult digital images of the programs, photographs, and other records allows me to take time with the archive and to remember, notice, and recognize new stories about theatre in Cuba legible from my position, experience, and affinity for the avant-garde. The random order of the unprocessed materials in the Tablas-Alarcos collection shuffles the categories that divide Cuban theatre, like musical theatre, popular theatre, teatro de sala or laboratory theatre, and Teatro Nuevo, the “New Theatre” of the revolution, a Latin American style of theatre for social change. This random order allows for the historiographic reader to spy new relationships among theatre groups and productions. I could just as easily select images that confirm the aesthetic distinctiveness of the aforementioned branches of theatre, but I would have to omit the numerous instances where these distinctions break down.

In the 1970s and 1980s companies representing Teatro Nuevo, like Grupo Teatro Escambray, Grupo de Participación Popular, and Teatro La Yaya, primarily used open-ended dramaturgy—something like Boal's forum theatre—to cast the audience as the protagonist of their theatre. At times, this approach diminished the line between performer and public. For instance, Teatro Escambray applied theatre to engage small farming communities with the revolution and bridge the divide between small farmers and state-run farming cooperatives. Another group founded in 1978 by former members of Teatro Escambray, called Grupo de Cubana de Acero, created theatre about, for, and with Havana's steelworkers. Both groups broke down the barriers between artist and public by utilizing site-specific staging in or near workplaces, like the Cubana de Acero steel factory. One image from a site-specific production depicts an actor climbing on top of a larger stepladder in a workspace outside of the steel factory (Fig. 1). He looks down at an actor with a welding mask crouching at the base of the ladder. A third actor begins climbing the ladder behind the actor on top. On the other side, a group of actors in hardhats, coveralls, and distressed work clothes support the ladder. In the foreground, the backs of heads appear, indicating that the audience was sitting or standing below the camera lens. With an industrial structure and scraps of sheet metal serving as the backdrop, one can see how the site-specific staging created theatricality through the existing architecture of the factory, which was framed and activated by the somatic composition of experimental ensemble movement. The artful choreography of bodies, levels, and architecture remained in step with the Teatro Nuevo aesthetic by softening the distinction between factory worker and theatre actor.

Figure 1.

Actors and audience at a site-specific performance by Grupo Cubana de Acero, date unknown. Photo: Digital snapshot by the author of an archival image by an unknown photographer. Courtesy of Casa Editorial Tablas-Alarcos.

Another photo depicts Cubana de Acero performing their play Aprendiendo a mirar las grúas (Learning how to watch the cranes), scripted by Mauricio Coll, in a traditional theatre space during the 1980 Havana Theatre Festival. The image accentuates how their particular aesthetic is jarringly displaced inside a theatre building. The set, featuring painted back drops of disproportionately exaggerated gears and metalworks, indicates that the design aimed for an abstract representation of the factory. The stage highlights the artifice of the staging with actors sitting in desks downstage and large groups of actors on platforms behind them. This presentation of a site-specific theatre group in a theatre building reinforced traditional boundaries between theatre and audience, and, by comparison with images of productions staged at the factory, reaffirms the importance of the aesthetic presentation of closeness between Teatro Nuevo artists and their public. The goal was not to collapse completely the distance between artist and steelworker—between actors and who they represent, as Bert O. States has discussed the ontological confusion created by actors existing as both signs and natural phenomena.Footnote ¹⁴ The attempt to create aesthetic closeness, rather, is an engagement with the Other. That work would be meaningless without marking the distance that has been overcome by moving the steelworker ensemble into a traditional theatre.

The work of director Roberto Blanco epitomizes Havana laboratory theatre, which is created from approaches similar to the work of Grotowski, Barba, and the Living Theatre. Scholar Jaime Gómez Triana delineates several common characteristics of laboratory theatre in Havana, including cross-cultural examination of being, exploration of the unconscious, ritual, presence of and reliance on myths, and intimismo, the unveiling of intimate feelings and desires.Footnote ¹⁵ Blanco's 1971 staging of Ramón de Valle-Inclán's Divinas Palabras (Divine Words) (1919) for Teatro de Ensayo Ocuje employed stylized movement and conceptual design. The medieval-inspired modernist play is about a sacristan, his unfaithful wife, and his sister fighting over possession of their nephew, a little person suffering from hydrocephalus, who they use to collect alms. The program for the production emphasizes Valle-Inclán's ironic treatment of the contradictions of Spanish culture, his desire to liberate the Spanish theatre from stagnant convention and dogmatism, and his obsession with Goya-inspired monstrosity.Footnote ¹⁶ These themes resonate with the contradictions, dogmatism, and monstrosity that confronted vanguard artists during the quinquenio gris (“gray years”) in Cuba, roughly the five years following the censorship of poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. Changes in Cuban cultural policy and narrowing parameters that defined the role of art in the revolution, called parametración, isolated the avant-garde from state theatres.Footnote ¹⁷

The only verifiable image from the production gives a sense of the physicality of Blanco's staging (Fig. 2). Actor Omar Valdés appears monklike in his interpretation of the sacristan, Pedro Gailo. He is bald and wears a simple, loose-fitting, off-white garment. The sleeves hang just over his elbows. His pant legs, made of the same cloth, end a few inches below the knee. A scar across his left eye may have been created with prosthetic makeup. He holds a knife in each hand. He points one blade up with his right arm extended out toward a figure out of focus in a black cloak, perhaps a manifestation of Gailo's shadow self. Fearfully, he turns away from the figure, cowering and looking down. Valdés's left arm is twisted, with the inside of his wrist pointed out, holding the second blade pointing down and parallel to his left leg. The knife is reminiscent of a scene from the play between Gailo and his daughter, Simoniña, where Gailo, in a jealous and drunken stupor, threatens to kill his adulterous wife and tries to rape his daughter in order to get revenge. A third actor, perhaps playing Simoniña, stands behind Valdés in close proximity, and, ironically, holds a position of power, looming over the shrinking Valdés from behind with their head appearing over his right arm. This third actor looks away from the camera and in the direction of the cloaked figure, whose left arm is extended out and right arm points down, mirroring Valdés. The third actor's long black hair dangles beneath Valdés's sleeve.

Figure 2.

Omar Valdés in Grupo Ensayo de Ocuje's 1971 production of Divinas Palabras by Ramón del Valle-Inclán, directed by Roberto Blanco. Photo: Digital snapshot by the author of an archival image by an unknown photographer. Courtesy of Casa Editorial Tablas-Alarcos.

The work of one of Blanco's longtime collaborators, playwright and director Eugenio Hernández Espinosa, troubles the separation of laboratory theatre and theatre for popular audiences. Hernández's theatre is wide-reaching and draws on numerous styles. Some of his most well-known works transculturate theatrical modernism with epistemologies and aesthetics of afrocubana/o culture, especially those of the Yoruba-based religion Regla de Ocha, more commonly known as Santería. Roberto Blanco directed Hernández's first major production, María Antonia, which premiered in September of 1967. Described as a Caribbean version of Bizet's Carmen,Footnote ¹⁸ María Antonia combines afrocubana/o performance from Ocha and Abakuá traditions with classical tragedy in its telling of a fatal love triangle among the fierce and streetwise María Antonia, the champion boxer Julián, and Carlos, a sensitive man who succumbs to jealousy and violence. The coproduction by Grupo Taller Dramático and Conjunto Folklórico Nacional stared Hilda Oates, an actor who was also a member of the aforementioned avant-garde group Teatro de Ensayo Ocuje. A definitive success for all artists involved, the production forever connected their careers, making comparisons between their work important for understanding each artist's oeuvre.

During the aforementioned gray years, Hernández faced barriers to exploring afrocubana/o cultural themes, which the writer's union also placed out of bounds, not only because of religious connotations but also because biased officials saw all-Black casts as racially exclusionary.Footnote ¹⁹ At the end of this period, Hernández continued collaborations with Conjunto Folklórico Nacional on productions by Teatro de Arte Popular (Art of the People Theatre) like Odebí, el cazador (Odebí, the hunter) (1982), a tragic retelling of a traditional patakí or Lucumí story about the Orishas Ochosi and Oshún.Footnote ²⁰ Music and dance are central to Hernández's poetic lyricism, and, as performance scholar and folklorist Inés María Martiatu points out, güemilere, traditional public performance of Orisha song, drum, and dance, informs his plays’ structure, style, and scenic elements.Footnote ²¹

Productions of Hernández's work in the 1980s also fused the traditional dance of güemilere with modern dance. For instance, the 1984 staging of Odebí featured choreography by Manolo Micler, a longtime choreographer for the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional who previously worked with Blanco on the 1980 Danza Nacional production of García Lorca's Yerma. Footnote ²² Micler's choreography further links Hernández's and Blanco's work. As a director, Blanco relied frequently on ensemble movement and dance, and his collaborations with Micler and the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional shaped the development of Blanco's aesthetics as well.Footnote ²³ Whereas dance in Blanco's work has been consistently viewed as vanguard, the same is not often said about Hernández's, even though reading ephemera of their theatrical works side by side emphasizes many points of connection in their artistic trajectories.

The fusion of tragedy and güemilere, of modern and traditional dance, in María Antonia and Odebí alike required performers with specialized experience in music and dance. A digitized image from the Tablas-Alarcos collection shows dancer-choreographer and 2020 recipient of the National Dance Prize Yohannes García as Odebí, in a dramatic moment kneeling before his beloved Maguala, played by singer Zenaida Armenteros, in the 1984 production featuring Micler's choreography. The image captures multiple frames in their embrace. Armenteros's arms reaching down evoke a dancers’ frame, which García breaks both by kneeling below and gently resting his fingers on Armenteros's upper arm. Armenteros's costume, a long dress with billowy skirt, wraps around García, almost in a second embrace. The characters paradoxically appear united and split up, soothed and desperate, assured and uncertain, confident and in disbelief. This still image shows how dynamic movement embodied Odebí and Maguala's bond, which, throughout the action of the play, they struggle to hold together as destiny pulls them apart.Footnote ²⁴

Over the decades since its premiere, María Antonia has seen many revivals, which has greatly served its critical reception. A frequent Tablas contributor and cocreator of its archive, Martiatu praised Blanco's hybrid use of realist and nonrealist styles in her analysis of the 1984 production for the Havana Theatre Festival. As she observes, Blanco's approach facilitated the places in the action where otherworldly presences intervene and shape the fate of the human characters.Footnote ²⁵ Martiatu's training and perspective was missing from the critical response to the play's premiere in 1967. Her 1984 review appearing in Tablas verified the play's importance through a more informed analysis that positioned güemilere as vanguard, simultaneously within and beyond popular culture. Martiatu's voice as a critic, chiming in some seventeen years after the play's first staging, decenters the authenticity of the premiere and its context as key to understanding a work of theatre, just as it exemplifies how, in many cases, understanding benefits from a longer aftermath.

An image from the 2011 Teatro Caribeño production of María Antonia directed by Eugenio Hernández demonstrates how dance and movement represent the constant copresence of otherworldly characters onstage, even outside of heightened moments of ritual intervention (Fig. 3). The image documents the transition between scenes 3 and 4, when María Antonia, upset that Julián plans to leave her, runs into the woods, calling on spirits of nature to help her capture his heart. In the forest she meets Cumachela, a personification of death who follows her like a shadow throughout the play. The production image shows María Antonia, stage right, lifted horizontal to the stage by an ensemble of dancers adorned with leaves. Their fragmented human form protruding from the foliage alludes to the aesthetics of Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. The masked Cumachela, draped elaborately in distressed white cloth, appears stage left, also lifted horizontally, carried by an ensemble of actors, representing Cumachela's accompanying spirits, wearing large dome-shaped masks and white tattered cloth. Hernández's script makes no reference to dancers or forest spirits in this moment, but the production directed by the author uses movement to add to the narrative of María Antonia fleeing into the forest, casting a spell on Julián, and subsequently cursing herself. Through this choreography, the spirits seize María Antonia, envelope her, and carry her into the woods, where she first meets Carlos, the character who eventually kills her. The movement underscores how María Antonia's actions and willfulness are tied to the influence of otherworldly presences that control her fate. Cumachela and María Antonia parallel one another physically and vocally as they speak in unison in this moment, when they are both suspended horizontally by the dancers. The movement and choreography in the image show a continued reinvention of the vanguard aesthetics that connect Hernández and Blanco through the production history of the play.

Figure 3.

Teatro Caribeño's 2011 production of María Antonia, written and directed by Eugenio Hernández. Meylin Cabrera (left) appears as María Antonia and Yadira Herrera (right) plays Cumachela. Photo: Alina Morante Lima. Courtesy of Alina Morante Lima.

While having attended a past production—being there—gives important insight into the history of a play, the doors of meaning making do not close with the final performance. Being there should not have a much more privileged position in the making of knowledge about a performance. Similarly, we cannot limit knowledge transference to being an insider or an initiated spectator alone. Certainly, cultural competency and literacy are essential to meaning making, but those competencies are not required for all forms of knowledge transference in performance. Experiencing performances, even by way of their documentation alone, prompts the heuristic endeavor of uncovering the laws and aesthetics of theatrical worlds and how we make meaning with them as works of art.Footnote ²⁶

The Witness-Critic-Subject

I first met actor, professor, critic, and theatre scholar Roberto Gacio Suárez in 2015. Born in Vertientes, Camagüey in 1941, Gacio has been acting professionally since the early 1960s, belonging to some of Cuba's most prestigious theatre companies, including Las Máscaras, Grupo Milanés, Teatro Estudio, and Compañía Teatral Rita Montaner. Gacio's history underscores the fictive nature of the artist–critic dichotomy. His life and career testify to the fact that avant-garde approaches to theatre are a part of Cuban cultural knowledge. In many ways, Gacio is a uniquely perfect collaborator and mentor for my ongoing project with the Tablas-Alarcos archive. In other ways, he adds more wrinkles to an already complex story about temporality and performance's aftermath.

As a teenage theatregoer, he witnessed some of the preeminent companies and artists of Havana's theatre scene, including Rita Montaner, Berta Martínez, and the work of director Francisco Morín with Teatro Prometeo. As a young actor, he studied with artists trained in avant-garde approaches, like Adela Escartín and Adolfo de Luis. He was in the 1962 premiere of Aire frío (Cold Air) by Virgilio Piñera and joined the avant-garde collective Los Doce (The Twelve) in the late 1960s. Acting for Teatro de la Luna in the 1990s, Gacio collaborated with director and Roberto Blanco protégé Raúl Martín to interpret several key roles from Piñera's oeuvre, including Agamenón in Electra Garrigó and Sedicóm in Los siervos (The Serfs).

From a young age, Gacio wanted to study theatre and literature at the highest level, and his chance to do so came in the 1970s when the Cuban state offered a program allowing workers to matriculate to universities. Gacio had been working as an actor for Teatro Estudio during this period, and when the opportunity arose, he enrolled in an introductory course. Gacio's entry into the University of Havana coincided with the beginning of the parametración. In 1972, an official from the Ministry of Culture called Gacio in for questioning, something that several others working for Teatro Estudio at the time experienced. As a result of the meeting, Gacio was separated from the theatre without pay until his case could be reviewed at municipal- and provincial-level hearings. Teatro Estudio's labor council generally supported its workers in such cases, and Gacio was no exception. During this period of separation, he was not fully admitted to the university and counted on the advocacy of senior company members to deal with systemic gatekeeping. For instance, Ana Viña stopped a labor office from reassigning separated workers to professions outside of the arts, and the general director of Teatro Estudio, Raquel Revuelta, intervened on behalf of Gacio when he spoke out against the parametración in a university admissions interview. Revuelta contacted the Dean of the School of Letters, pointing out that as a part of the worker's program, he should not have been required to go to the interview. It is clear that Revuelta's and Viña's advocacy were necessary for Gacio to avoid being subjected to much more severe isolation, which some of his colleagues experienced.Footnote ²⁷

Gacio recalls that, at the time, he sensed that this grim situation, especially affecting artists in theatre, literature, and the visual arts, would not last forever. Nevertheless, the parametración forced him to be separated from Teatro Estudio, and while he did not matriculate to the University of Havana in order to escape its effects, it is clear that this move allowed Gacio to remain in control of his career. After several years studying Hispanic literatures, Gacio was encouraged to enroll in a new program at the University of the Arts (ISA) to become a part of the first class of Teatrólogos (theatre and performance scholars). He graduated in 1981 alongside Carlos Espinosa, Vivian Martínez Tabares, and Freddy Artiles.

Since the mid-1980s, Gacio's reviews and criticism have appeared in Tablas as well as in numerous other periodicals. As theatregoer-actor-critic, Gacio has particular expertise based on his personal and professional, practical and academic insights into Cuban theatre history. He is a unique authority because of his great memory and direct experiences with so many productions as a spectator and actor.Footnote ²⁸ No doubt this exalted status comes from his “being there,” and directly witnessing much of the history that scholars continue to write about.

When I asked Gacio how he navigates his duality as critic and actor, he said, “Me desdoblo en dos personas” (I split into two people).Footnote ²⁹ While Gacio has found it necessary to disassociate his two professions to maintain his authority as critic and integrity as artist, it is clear that his experience in each role has strengthened his capacity in the other. For instance, Indira R. Ruiz asserts that, in his criticism, Gacio attends to the work of the actor in a way that only a master of the craft can.Footnote ³⁰

It is difficult to pin down Gacio's style as a critic because he has such a broad range of interests and expertise (Fig. 4). We might look to his review of the 1995 Havana Theatre Festival to demonstrate his critical dexterity, as the article touches on productions of various genres, historical trends, and contemporary styles from both Cuban and international companies.Footnote ³¹ In a recent recompilation of his writing, Ruiz frames Gacio's work as “theatrical diaries” and Gacio as a chronicler of Cuba's recent history, whose oeuvre captures the evolution of styles on Cuban stages and exemplifies a larger shift in Cuban theatre scholarship over the past thirty years from the ideological to the aesthetic.Footnote ³² Carlos Daniel Sarmiento Barlet describes Gacio as an engaged and informed spectator, one who freely offers from his knowledge, experience, and emotionality, and one who, with each phase of contemporary Cuban theatre, has been able to provide fundamental evaluations and diagnostics of key issues.Footnote ³³ Gacio's approach to criticism combines openness, experience-based observations, theoretical questioning, and an interest in the creative process. Reviewing some of his writing here will give a better sense of his contribution to theatre criticism, as well as of the residue his labor has left behind.

Figure 4.

Roberto Gacio presenting at a Festschrift for Eugenio Hernández Espinosa at Cine 26 y 12 in 2016. Photo: Alina Morante Lima. Courtesy of Alina Morante Lima.

One of the areas in which Gacio has established himself as a leading critic is LGBTQ+ theatre of Cuba. Writing about queer theatre in Cuba during the 1990s, Gacio focuses on two major artists: actor Jorge Perugorría and director Carlos Díaz. Several stage and film adaptations of Senal Paz's short story “El bosque, el lobo y el nuevo hombre” (1990) opened many doors for what was thematically possible to present in Cuba, as it directly addressed homophobia within the revolution. Within this history, Gacio intervenes in debates surrounding Perugorría's performance as Diego in the film adaptation of “El bosque . . . ,” titled Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) (1993), a performance that some critics found to be a stereotypically flamboyant portrayal of a gay man. Compared with acting performances in productions of an earlier stage adaptation titled La catedral del helado, Gacio finds Perugorría's interpretation as complex in its presentation of Diego's internal struggle, which subverts the straight–gay binary the film establishes through stereotypes.Footnote ³⁴ Reaching international audiences, the film's success and visibility helped to bring gay themes into the Cuban mainstream.

Bursting onto the theatre scene in 1992, director Carlos Díaz staged a trilogy of US American plays with Teatro el Público: The Glass Menagerie (1944), Robert Anderson's Tea and Sympathy (1953), and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Gacio describes Díaz and Teatro el Público's style as a postmodern reworking of the discourse of ideas in a play or nontraditional text through an onslaught of intertexts—some that reaffirm, others that contradict its themes.Footnote ³⁵ Drawing on parody and satire, the company staged queer readings of these canonical American texts. In Gacio's reading of their production of The Glass Menagerie, Díaz interpreted Tom's queer difference as subversive and nonconforming. He had actors play up the subtext of Tom and Jim's mutual attraction, and he flipped the script on gender, portraying Laura as the active suitor and Jim as the object of desire. In his treatment of Tea and Sympathy, Gacio emphasized the importance of the cross-gender casting of Laura Reynolds, the wife of the dorm master of an all-male prep school who seduces a student suspected of being homosexual. In casting a male actor in the role, Gacio argues that Díaz disturbed the duality of gender in the script while paralleling and complicating the homoeroticism between the dorm master and his students. With Streetcar, Díaz drew on the company's signature neobaroque pastiche to exaggerate Blanche's performance of femininity, giving it a parodic quality. For Gacio, this deconstruction of Blanche through familiar tropes of femininity rendered the character as a projection of Williams's sexuality.Footnote ³⁶

Gacio has also produced scholarship on avant-garde theatre based on his experiences as a spectator, actor, and insider in the Havana scene. His 1993 historiography of La noche de los asesinos by José Triana draws on theory, literary criticism, and personal memories. He positions the 1966 staging directed by Vicente Revuelta, brother of the aforementioned Raquel Revuelta, as the nucleus of laboratory theatre in Cuba.Footnote ³⁷ In a recent essay unpacking the challenges in interpreting Virgilio Piñera's characters for the stage, Gacio singularly utilizes his creative work as an analytical tool. Part analysis of directors’ approaches to texts, part literary history of Piñera's philosophy and experimentation, Gacio draws on his experience as an actor in seven productions to reveal the complexity of structure and character in Piñera's oeuvre. For instance, Gacio's performance of Agamenón in Raul Martín's production of Piñera's irreverent and Cubanized version of the Electra myth, Electra Garrigó, required a difficult balance of grotesque parody and pathos. Martín's staging included choreographed musical numbers, adding layers to the texts’ existing metatheatricality and aesthetic distance. In order for the performance to convey its dissonant tone and not dissolve into a less meaningful lampoon of Piñera's text, Gacio had to approach Agamenón from multiple perspectives.Footnote ³⁸

By reflecting on his acting work in Electra Garrigó, Gacio unveils the paradox of Piñera's Agamenón as a propitiatory victim, someone who was once glorious but is now a pariah in his own house, at once humiliated and decadent.Footnote ³⁹ He stresses the unique challenges this role and others present to actors. The seven productions Gacio discusses in the essay cover a time span of three separate decades on Cuban stages and chronicle a number of movements, including psychological realism, postmodernism, queer theatre, and solo performance. Only Gacio could make this intervention. He possesses a unique critical authority as someone who has experienced sixty-five years of Cuban theatre history from a number of positions in the creative and interpretative process. Just the same, his approach underscores the interdependence between creative and critical capacities and challenges notions of their mutual exclusivity.

While working with Gacio in the Tablas-Alarcos archive, I had the rare chance to benefit from his singular wealth of knowledge, both for the project at hand and as it related to my larger research in Cuban theatre history. Understanding that our time together was very limited, Gacio and I worked tirelessly to identify as many photographs as we could, day in and day out. In fact, I was in the office so much that month, working long days, even locking up sometimes, that I was understandably misidentified as the new employee. Whereas my labor focused on organization and documentation, Gacio's labor in the archive was a labor of memory, and thus a labor of feeling. Reading production elements, body language, and so on, he could tell right away if the photo documented a production from Havana, the outside provinces, or a foreign theatre company. Emotions flowed through him as he recognized actors, productions, and famous personalities. Putting on his professor cap, Gacio took time to explain the background and importance of particular artists whose photographs we came across while sorting through the collection. I remember Gacio's enthusiasm of images of productions by Pequeño Teatro de la Habana, and the work of its founder, director, and playwright José Milián. Gacio was both surprised and dismayed that I did not recognize actor José Antonio Rodríguez when looking through archived images from a 1996 interview.Footnote ⁴⁰ Gacio had worked with Rodríguez as part of the experimental collective Los Doce in the 1960s and appeared in a Teatro Estudio production of Milián's La toma de La Habana por los ingleses, which was directed by the author in 1970.Footnote ⁴¹ The affect that each image held and evoked was an added texture to the matter with which Gacio worked to identify artists and contexts. Witnessing Gacio as the artist-critic feeling and remembering moments of Havana's theatre history that he experienced and remembered, or didn't experience but recognized, completely transformed my relationship to the materials, filling intriguing voids with vicarious nodes of Gacio's affections.

Gacio's experiences blur the lines between artist and critic, since, even after graduating from ISA in theatre research, he remained very active as an actor (Fig. 5). In fact, some of his more famous performances took place after he became a critic. In 2009, Gacio collaborated with playwright Edgar Estaco and director Pedro Vera, on a piece called El monólogo de Casio. The monologue is a speech given by Cayo Casio, a soldier of the Roman Empire, to a group of senators. In it, Casio tells his life story, which is, in part, based on an interview Estaco conducted with Gacio, of course changing the references to match the ancient Roman context and applying poetic license to add a number of fictional incidents. Much of the play deals with the character's experience of being queer in a world where family and state are continuously concerned with policing or changing Casio's difference. This theme has particularly strong resonances in Cuba, where attempts to redefine and institutionalize revolutionary citizenship and behavior beginning in the mid-1960s led to the state instituting an ideological campaign against antirevolutionary behavior. Authorities included homosexuality in a list of social ills that the revolution wanted to eliminate—in short, sanctioning the persecution of sexuality.Footnote ⁴²

Figure 5.

Roberto Gacio performing in the closing ceremony of the Havana Theatre Festival in 2009. Photo: Alina Morante Lima. Courtesy of Alina Morante Lima.

While the resonances between the Roman and Cuban contexts are undeniable, the monologue seems to take Cuba's history of gay persecution head on when Casio tells the story of a “gray proconsul” who launched a campaign against “immorality” and “decadence,” which were opposed to the proconsul's definition of ideal Roman virtue. The soldiers repressed their sexuality, hid, or reported others to protect themselves from being forced out of the legion. At one point, Casio addresses the audience of senators directly: “Many of you were already Senators when the persecution took place. . . . Many valiant warriors went crazy and others kept wasting away between clay jars. . . . So many departed forever looking for a place where they would not be peered at with suspicion, by eyes looking a gift horse in the mouth. Rome has a strange way of caring for its children!”Footnote ⁴³ Through layering of Cuban and Roman contexts, Gacio and Estaco were able to transfer cultural memory of the quinquenio gris and enact a public condemnation of those complicit state actors and perpetrators—no matter how banal their action or inaction—who participated in institutionalizing the persecution of queer Cubans. It is highly significant that Gacio, who witnessed the parametración, was the actor embodying Casio's story and making this intervention onstage, because telling his story—albeit veiled through the Roman intertext and enhanced by poetic license—unequivocally undid this past marginalization and broke the silence that once surrounded it.

As critic, Gacio contributed to the construction of the archive. As actor, he is the archive's subject, while simultaneously carrying embodied knowledge of theatre practices. As theatregoer, he collected programs and became a living witness to and memory holder of Havana's theatre history. Gacio's relationship with the archive is uniquely complex and prompts us to consider, from multiple perspectives, its makers and subjects—their life, presence, and personal stakes. In writing about gay themes and approaches, he opened up a discourse within state publications that has made LGBTQ+ theatre visible and allowed for later generations of critics to continue this important work. His critical narratives have documented theatre in Cuba, making meaning of productions within their historical context and placing them in conversation with their antecedents. While his writing has been crucial to archive building, Gacio's labor is unfinished in this regard. His labor, along with the labor of his colleagues, has left behind photography, programs, and other ephemera. The residue that persists in excess of his writing calls on scholars to continue to engage with this history as we debate its legacy and the meaning it continues to make in the present. Gacio's own efforts to do so, while working to identify photography in the Tablas-Alarcos archive, is a case in point. The affective labor he performed while interacting with the archive he helped create, much like his anecdotes of being witness to the there-there of theatre history, produced knowledge that exceeds the documentary capacity of archival materials—discursive or visual. At the same time, archival documentation and the memory it holds prompted the transmission of this knowledge-in-excess.