Feeling the Gaze: Image and Affect in Contemporary Argentine and Chilean Performance

By Gail Bulman

Feeling the Gaze explores the visual elements in eight contemporary Argentine and Chilean theater performances. Gail A. Bulman shows how staged images can awaken spectators' emotions to activate their intellect, provoking nuanced and deep contemplation of social, historical, and political themes. Ranging from simple props, costumes, body movements and spatial constructions to integrated media and digital images, the aesthetic components in these pieces engage to forge multifaceted storytelling, stimulate the public's relation to memory, and create affective bonds that help build individual and collective social consciousness. Recent innovations in Southern Cone theatre aesthetics have been shifting traditional performance/spectator relationships and animating ideological discussions. The various works presented here give readers a holistic understanding of the emerging prominence of visuality and affect as a vehicle for political advocacy in Latin American theatre and performance. The book asks us to consider the formation of new spectator-performance bonds as authors, directors, and theatre groups increasingly turn toward alternative settings for their work. Lingering visual memories of the performances, together with the feelings that the performative experience stirs up, provide spectators with an enduring focal point through which to reflect on and judge what is "beyond" the performed scenes. Staged live in the Southern Cone and internationally since 2014, these plays demonstrate the transgressive power of the visual to make spectators see, feel, and potentially act against injustices and violence.

This study offers comprehensive critical discussions of Teatro Banda's O'Higgins: un hombre en pedazos; Teatro Nino Proletario's Fulgor; Mario, Luiggi y sus fantasmas's Manual de carrona; Agustin Leon Pruzzo's En la sombra de la cupula; Teatro la Maria's Los millonarios; Claudio Tolcachir's Proximo; Sergio Blanco's Tebas Land; and Lola Arias's Doble de Riesgo.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Department of Romance Studies
• Release date: Aug 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469667447

Gail Bulman

Betty A. DeBerg is professor of religion and head of the department of philosophy and religion at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

ON IMAGE AND AFFECT

In the opening paragraphs of The Leper in Blue, theatre scholar Amalia Gladhart describes in detail the lingering memories of her first encounter with Latin American performance as a child. Even though she lacked the language skills to understand the dialogue at that time, she still remembers, more than thirty years later, both the images she saw on stage and how they emotionally impacted her (11–13).¹ We live in an era where we are all, increasingly, marked by the visual. As the first book to examine the construction of performed images and their affective pull on spectators in Latin American performance, Feeling the Gaze highlights contemporary Argentine and Chilean plays as models of innovation, places them in dialogue with other world theatres, and shows how the visual elements of performances can broaden and deepen a play’s meaning and resonate beyond local audiences and contexts.

Expanding upon Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory on postdramatic theatre, in which aesthetic devices eclipse textuality and "the theatre performance turns the behaviour onstage and in the auditorium into a joint text …made up of evident and hidden communicative processes (17), my book shows how the intentional creation of a rich, sometimes elaborate, and always diverse array of visual elements in these performances, seduces spectators, directs their focus, impacts their emotions, increases their understanding, and constructs an enduring impression on them due to the images’ stickiness" (Ahmed 29).² Because affects linger (Thompson 157), the affective bond inspired by these images on stage prods spectators to reframe, reuse, and reconnect with the lasting images long after the performance has ended and, thus, they continue to grapple with the play’s expanded themes. Far from superfluous, superficial adornments, intentionally performed visual elements, through their affective links with spectators, become memories and postmemories (Hirsch) that can be recalled, reenacted, and reengaged with in other contexts, and in this way, they deepen spectators’ encounter with the social, historical or political themes signaled by the performance.

Feeling the Gaze scrutinizes intentionally-repeated visual elements in eight of the most dynamic Argentine and Chilean performances staged since 2014 and frames these within the larger socio-political and aesthetic contexts of Latin American and world theatre practices. The book shows how these performed images innovatively narrate personal, national, or global (hi)stories in revolutionary ways, thus marking the viewer emotionally (Phelan, Unmarked) and creating an individual impact and a shared bond (Dubatti, Entre el convivio), which may inspire social responsibility (Brecht) and open an ethical operative (Lehmann 18; Thompson 172) or a pause for judgment (Brennan 5; Sommer 85). By identifying and isolating each performance’s compelling images and examining what Roland Barthes calls each image’s punctum, that element that pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me) (Camera Lucida, 27), I show how that affective punch generates and transfers energy (Brennan) from performance to spectator and I postulate the ways in which the visual-affective bond magnifies socio-political significance in each case.

Using these eight Argentine and Chilean plays as case studies, Feeling the Gaze considers different creative uses of visual elements in performance and the ways in which these might personally or collectively resonate with spectators beyond the stage. I choose Argentine and Chilean performances from 2014 to 2020, not only because these two nations have shared strikingly similar histories and political situations, but also because their innovative theatre and performance practices have much in common and can serve as models for other national and international performances. While there are a handful of book-length studies on theatre and visuality and on theatre and affect in other world theatre contexts, as well as some recent Latin American Studies Association conference presentations and some published articles examining affect in specific plays staged in Latin America, to date, there is no monograph examining visuality and affect in Latin American theatre or performance.³ In addition to filling this void, the plays themselves are outstanding theatre, worthy of scholarly exploration. Spectators in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States are increasingly drawn to the dynamism of Argentine and Chilean performances as proven by the successful U.S. (2019) and London (2016) stagings of Lola Arias’s Minefield/Campo minado and the London performance of Sergio Blanco’s Thebesland (2016), among others. I argue that the popularity of these performances will grow because of the visual elements they incorporate and their capacity to emotionally captivate their audiences.

The pages that follow summarize some important theories on both image and affect, which are at the core of this book, and articulate some connections between the two fields. In addition to its introduction and conclusion, Feeling the Gaze is divided into two parts, each analyzing four plays that construct different types of images. Part One, Embodied Images, spotlights the most straightforward kinds of staged images —objects, people, and spaces— while Part Two, Seeing through Screens highlights transmedia images by examining the diverse ways in which screens are used in four performances to unmask deceit (Teatro la María’s Los millonarios); to stare blankly back at ourselves (Tolcachir’s Próximo); to replace the author through the simulation of live, on-stage collective creation (Blanco’s Tebas Land); and to generate new emotional archives, which I call sensichives. I create the term sensichive to emphasize how spectators’ and actors’ individual and collective senses, history, memories, and feelings, stimulated by visual elements of performance, can be gathered, stored, and extended into digital and personal libraries of memories and postmemories (Arias’s Doble de riesgo). Each chapter juxtaposes two plays based on the kinds of images they use and their affective pull. Feeling the Gaze shows webs of different kinds of images and postulates ways of reading them within and beyond their staged and social contexts. The final section of the introduction gives a brief summary of each chapter’s content.

This book grapples with the following questions: How do the images created in these plays manipulate spectators’ focus and direct their attention, perhaps in an effort to change individual or community perspectives? How does the visual in performance inscribe a social or political message that may reinforce, inform or stand apart from the script and its social foundations? In what ways can performed images, either part of actual real archives or fragments from the play’s repertoire (Taylor, Archive) create a lasting, memorable and dynamic new kind of affective and effective archive because of their potential to live on in spectators’ memory in a way that facts or words may not?⁴ How can performed images maneuver spectators’ emotions and, thus, open new pathways to their mind? What might the performed images teach us that both links with and goes beyond these performances and their cultural contexts?

ON IMAGE

Latin America has always prioritized the visual. Consider the predominance of the visual in pre-Columbian art, the importance of indigenous pictographic writing, the symbols on Mayan stelae or the potent images created by important Colonial-era writers like Guamán Poma de Ayala to tell the real, but unofficial, stories of sixteenth-century life under Spanish rule. Contemporary performance artists from Astrid Hadad (Mexico) and Yuyachkani (Peru) to Lola Arias (Argentina) also spotlight the visual through body art, bright ly-colored costumes, or transmedia to show how, through embodied performance, as Taylor suggests, the images, so visually dense, transmit knowledge of ritualized movement and everyday social practices (Archive 17). Hadad, whose work literally marks and immerses her and her audience in images, affirms:

Long before the arrival of the Spanish, the ancient peoples of Mexico used wall painting for purposes beyond the ornamental. They used painting to remember important events as well as to affirm a power given legitimacy of the sacred.

This practice continued after the Conquest: the Catholic Church covered the walls of its temples with striking images to awe the people. Grounded in fears, emotions, and human needs, these codes could be easily deciphered even without literacy. The faithful trembled when they looked at the flames of Hell and sought solace in the skirts of the figure of the maternal Virgin. (qtd. in Noriega and Santana, translated by Judith Iliana Villanueva, 208)

In Latin American communities, image has often taken precedence over the verbal in spite of the power attributed to possessing verbal skills and acquiring the colonizers’ language. Latin American scholars and theorists have consistently questioned the power of words to control, include, marginalize, or exclude citizens and they have proposed the prioritization of visual systems.⁵ In addition, embodied performance has taken on an urgency from the earliest times. According to Taylor, Although the Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas practiced writing before the Conquest —either in pictogram form, hieroglyphs, or knotting systems— it never replaced the performed utterance (Archive 17). In recent decades, murals, graffiti, and street art across the Americas speak volumes about histories, communities, violations, and infiltrations.⁶ As another type of performance, installations are on the rise in Latin America and around the world. As I will show in my final chapter’s analysis of Argentine Lola Arias’s 2016 installation Doble de riesgo, the images created in some recent installations in the Americas visually rewrite and docu ment alternative histories and record people’s memories and stories in captivating ways.

Documenting memories and stories has been central to art since the beginning of time. Yet, ways of telling and the capacity to tell have varied across historical moments, cultures, and geographic locations. In focusing on trauma relief and storytelling, James Thompson claims that multiple performance forms can break the limited binary of ‘telling’ and ‘not-telling’ (47). Although words and even silences are important to narration, in performance visual and sound markers can break through the verbal binary either to enhance the story or tell their own story. These elements, essential to both the dramatic (written) text through the stage directions and definitely to the performance, are able to capture and harness the liminal, the in-between, and the beyond in ways that words might not.

Maaike Bleeker also notes that each discourse has its own possibilities for showing and telling, for taking its audiences along, and for making these audiences move in response to the address presented to them (8). As one of the many discourses within performance, an image can connect audiences to the performance and, since an image is more permeable and more flexible than words in terms of the number of ways to interpret it, the visual can be maneuvered in multiple ways to help direct spectators’ focus. Images in a performance have the power to shape and manipulate connections through the creation of much more consciously porous boundaries between audience space and performance space (Welton 21).

One of the reasons why images impact spectators is because, as Walter Benjamin has articulated, they possess an aura, which emanates from them because of their links to culture, tradition, and ritual. Benjamin writes that the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition (223). For him, the aura is never entirely separated from the object’s ritual function (223). Bleeker concurs when asking the question: how do images on stage relate to the desires, presuppositions, and expectations of a culturally and historically specific seer? (66). Thus, spectators need to be aware of what they see and how they see it. They also cannot separate the images that they see from that image’s tradition or from their own values, rituals, and tradition.

Benjamin’s study on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction theorizes that the aura of an image, while sharply diminished in film, is predominant in theatre, because aura depends upon presence: For the first time —and this is the effect of the film— man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor (229). Because in film the camera controls the audience’s focus and does not need to respect the performance as an integral whole, the audience has a less engaged role. In film the audience takes the position of the camera and experiences only limited personal impact (228). In performances, on the other hand, even when these incorporate multimedia and mechanical reproductions, playwrights, directors and actors can play with an image’s aura in ways that make it stick with spectators. Through this and other techniques, the performance continues to work long after it is ‘over,’ as Taylor asserts (Performance 66).

Roland Barthes also articulates the tension between absence and presence that is inherent in images. Barthes argues that there is a rhetoric of images, which, like other rhetorics is based on a formal relationship of elements (Rhetoric of the Image 49). He maintains that interpreting a photograph or an advertisement, for example, requires a three-way relationship between the subject of the image, the photographer or image-creator, and the viewer. Moreover, he reminds us that the subject of an image is, by its nature, absent in its presence, that is, dead as a real object but alive in the reproduced image (Camera Lucida 9).⁷ Bleeker concurs and turns to the notion of focalization to describe the relationship between these subjects of vision and what is seen (10). Whereas perspective is static and culturally embedded, focalization describes the precise relationship between the subject viewing and the object viewed as it is given within the particular construction of the visual, verbal or multimedia text (28). Thus, by playing with point of view, focalization is readily manipulated through the images presented and can re-contextualize the viewing, guiding spectators’ relationship to an image and toward the interpretation of the image. In her expansion on theories of performance, Taylor also emphasizes the important role of the spectator: Earlier, performance was defined as a ‘doing’ and a ‘thing done.’ Now we need to add: Performance is a doing to, a thing done to and with the spectator (Performance 86). Each performed image contains a message in its own right but it also connects with the whole performance, as well as with each spectator, with the collective audience, and with the culture and history from which it and the viewers emerge. Every image contains not only what is within and alongside it, but also those things that are beyond it.

Barthes’ theories of studium and punctum are at the center of my study because they delineate how images impact viewers and mark them beyond the viewing moment. For Barthes, all images have a studium, a cultural connotation invested in tradition:

Many photographs are, alas, inert under my gaze. But even among those which have some existence in my eyes, most provoke only a general and, so to speak, polite interest: they have no punctum in them: they please or displease me without pricking me: they are invested with no more than studium. The studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste: I like/I don’t like. The studium is of the order of liking, not of loving; it mobilizes a half desire, a demi-volition; it is the same sort of vague, slippery, irresponsible interest one takes in the people, the entertainments, the books, the clothes one finds ‘all right.’ To recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions, to enter into harmony with them, to approve or disapprove of them, but always to understand them, to argue them within myself, for culture (from which studium derives) is a contract arrived at between creators and consumers. The studium is a kind of education. (Camera Lucida 27–28)

In contrast to studium —the common reading of an image within its culturally and visually coded framework—, Barthes argues that some images possess a second element that "will break (or punctuate) the studium" (26).⁸ The punctum can take the form of a detail that arouses great sympathy in me, almost a kind of tenderness (43) and it has a power of expansion (45), which means its impact may be great and may endure beyond the viewing of the image. Barthes confirms images’ ability to emotionally impact long after they are viewed: "Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it" (Camera Lucida 53). Barthes continues: "The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond —as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see" (59).

Studium and punctum can co-exist in an image. Bleeker posits that, because all images contain pre-existing discourses, an image shows more than what can actually be seen (47). Connected to Barthes beyond, images within performances evoke both what is present on stage as well as that which is concretely absent. Dominic Johnson confirms, it is this beyond that performance often revels in, unleashing the power of images to confound, excite, and unsettle audiences (16).

Performance extends beyond boundaries in numerous directions. In Performance, Taylor sums up the crossdisciplinarity and centrality of performance in the twenty-first century and affirms its broad reach: Performance is not only an art form, an activist intervention, a business management system, or a military exercise. It provides a lens and framework for understanding just about everything (133). Performance studies as a field places emphasis on the performance text, over the written text. In his book on Postdramatic Theatre, Hans-Thies Lehmann affirms that "the whole situation of the performance is constitutive for theatre and for the meaning and status of every element within it (85). This paves the way for scrutinizing visual or other elements, such as lighting, space, costumes, sound, bodies, and looking beyond the written script for enhanced meaning and contemplation. For Lehmann, theatre is no longer based on action and plot, and narrative is no longer the soul of drama, as it was in Aristotles’s definition of theatre. Lehmann argues, postdramatic theatre is a theatre of states and of scenically dynamic formations, (68) which becomes more the presentation of an atmosphere and state of things" (74).

Within postdramatic theatre, textual, visual, or auditory elements may share an equal plane or some elements may stand out. This book looks at performances that prioritize the visual in a variety of ways, as a means of provoking broader or deeper contemplation of personal, social, historical, or political backdrops. The first half explores how objects, bodies, costumes, or spaces can create a kind of scenic poem —using Lehmann’s term— to draw spectators’ gazes toward contemplation of the image(s) and the cultural implications that lie beyond them. In part two, Feeling the Gaze assesses diverse ways in which media and technology incorporated into a performance create visual collages, which can also provoke greater contemplation and meaning. Lehmann argues that both simple images and multi-media have value: The impact of media on performance manifests itself not only in the use of high-tech ‘multi-media’ onstage, however, but sometimes also in its very opposite: theatre on a bare stage with minimalist, pared down aesthetics, which nevertheless can only be understood by being related to life in a ‘mediatized’ society (10). This emphasizes that all performance images are relational; they cannot be separated from the image’s creator, the viewer, and each of their cultural/historical experiences. Lehmann remarks: "It is a fundamental fact of today’s Western societies that all human experiences … are tied to commodities or more precisely their consumption and possession (and not to a discourse). This corresponds exactly to the civilization of images that can only ever refer to the next image and call up other images (183). This civilization of images that we live in and that Lehmann emphasizes as central to postdramatic theatre always has political ties: Such an experience would be not only aesthetic but therein at the same time ethico-political" (Lehmann 185–86).

In his seminal study Ways of Seeing, John Berger reminds us that seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world … . The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled (7). In the theatre as well, spectators see images on stage, they are impacted by them, they feel intuitions about them, and as they study them more, they are marked by them in personal and collective ways. Examining the visual elements in a performance automatically connects present time and space, the here and now of this viewing moment, to a (personal and historical) past and a future because it is usually through the visual that spectators remember the play. Peggy Phelan notes that, although performance is ephemeral, our critical work depends upon our memory of it: it does last a short time, disappears once it is over and then our critical work starts as a response to the loss of the object (Ends of Performance 3). The visual aspects of performance support and prolong our memory of what existed but is now lost by providing us with an enduring focal point and a way to remember it.

Because spectators are struck by the performance, captivated by its visual elements, they remember the performance through these. This experience fosters in them, as Marianne Hirsch argues, postmemories, which remain long after the performance and allow spec tators to feel as if they have experienced the event or memory evoked by the performance, even when they have only experienced it by seeing the performance and not in real life. For Hirsch, "‘Postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before —to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right" (Generation 5).

The performances in this book will show this dynamic. Spectators will feel the impact of Bernardo O’Higgins’s legacy on both Chile and the world; they will be marked by immigrants’ experiences as represented visually in Fulgor; and they will be emotionally drained as they remember and re-live the trauma of Argentina’s Dirty War and its present-day impact alongside the real victims/actors/spectators of Lola Arias’s Doble de riesgo. Both images and our memories of them are relational, connecting to the cultural background and lived experiences of creators and viewers. Thus, shared dreams and nightmares form a shadow archive that fills the empty space of the picture (Hirsch, Generation 249), extending it beyond the moment, backwards (toward history) and forward into postmemory.⁹ It was Alison Landsberg who coined the term prosthetic memory and this will also be useful to my study:

Prosthetic memory emerges at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or museum. In the moment of contact, an experience occurs through which the person sutures himself or herself into a larger history … . The person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory of a past event through which he or she did not live. The resulting prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and politics. (2)

Prosthetic memory begins with a connection to a place, space, image or experience but it extends beyond that and registers with the person in deeply personal and political ways, even when the per son has only experienced the historical or political event referred to through representation. I, as a North American living the in the U.S., did not experience the Argentine Dirty War first-hand; however, as a spectator converted into an actor in Arias’s Doble de riesgo, that historical event’s emotional damage begins to resonate in me. By seeing the images and looking at the traumatic event with new eyes, I am moved to feel what Susan Sontag calls the pain of others. This begins with my seeing.

Any study of the visual always implies questions about looking: Who is looking? From where? Why? How? For what reasons? Studies on the gaze have been particularly important in cinema studies and feminist scholarship. Christian Metz and Laura Mulvey have made notable contributions regarding visuality and its role in the cinema. In The Imaginary Signifier Metz writes:

Now for looks. In a fiction film, the characters look at one another. It can happen (and this is already another ‘notch’ in the chain of identifications) that a character looks at another who is momentarily out-of-frame, or else is looked at by him. If we have gone one notch further, this is because everything out-of-frame brings us closer to the spectator, since it is the peculiarity of the latter to be out-of-frame … . (55)

Performance as well incorporates this game of looking, albeit differently because it is not necessarily mediated by and filtered through a camera, although sometimes camera views or screen gazes do now occur within or in addition to the live performance. With or without media interventions, performances can integrate and manipulate a play of gazes to bring spectators in and out of the frame and to alter or open up their worldview, sometimes providing close-ups (Los millonarios), masked identities (Manual de carroña), altered borders (Fulgor), or architectural framing (En la sombra de la cúpula; Tebas Land) to layer the aesthetic with the thematic. Mulvey theorizes the pleasure that is inherent in looking due to the tensions surrounding the visual, which both seduce and push away viewers and simultaneously straddle the boundaries between the scopofilic and the narcissistic.¹⁰ Mulvey discusses the games of gazes that are intrinsic to cinema and how these are unstable and thus can control and deceive viewers: The film is really being shown, is there to be seen, conditions of screening and narrative conventions give the spectator an illusion of looking on a private world (17). My work integrates cinema studies by examining the gaze(s) in these Latin American performances and by showing how that gaze is codified and contextualized and often directed and channeled.

Bleeker also articulates the distinction between the look and the gaze within performance studies and agrees that the gaze is always framed within a larger cultural-historical perspective (78). Most significantly, she highlights the impingement upon freedom that the gaze implies: Within this gaze we can seem to be free to look around as we wish, but this freedom is a result of our unawareness of the way the gaze guides what we see (78). Thus, as spectators, it seems like we are free to look at images on stage any way we wish; however, this is a mirage. In addition to being manipulated by actors, director and playwright, spectators’ gaze is culturally and historically biased and swayed. Rooted in culture, the gaze also comes with an affective pull inscribed into our looking. The feelings evoked by looking at an image connect to the self, to others, to history, and to culture.

In addition to Taylor’s seminal work on images, emotion, and the gaze in Latin American performances, several other Latin American theatre and performance studies scholars have made fruitful contributions examining diverse visual elements in different kinds of performances. Juan Villegas’s early study on visuality in Latin American theatre and performance paved the way for future contributions in this realm. Although what follows is by no means an exhaustive list, several scholars have done groundbreaking work in examining different kinds of visual elements in Latin American theatre and performance. Jacqueline Bixler has made great contributions to discussions of theatre, memory and performance studies with regard to both Mexican and Argentine theatre.¹¹ Like Bixler’s, Debra A. Castillo’s work also crosses disciplinary boundaries and makes great contri butions to several of the fields incorporated in my book: visuality, affect, transmedia, gender studies, performance. Her very early work on gender in both narrative and theatre examines how the female body can be written as a site of resistance. More recent work, such as her edited collection with Edmundo Paz-Soldán, looks at other kinds of images in literature and performances as well as memory. In a 2019 LASA presentation, Castillo focused on affect in Natalia Almada’s cinema. That presentation and her essay on devising also inform my study. Roselyn Costantino, Sandra Messinger Cypess, Stuart Day, and, more recently, Julie Ann Ward have contributed greatly to performance and cultural studies scholarship in Mexico. Several articles and books by Brenda Werth, Laurietz Seda, and Camilla Stevens address issues of identity, politics, and staged imagery.¹² These milestones become a launching point for my study. Argentine theatre and performance scholar Jean Graham-Jones’s seminal study of Evita as icon is both visually and affectively intriguing as is her plethora of writing on Lola Arias. Graham-Jones’s Lola Arias: Re-Enacting Life is a rich, visual chronicle of Arias’s artistic corpus and provides important English translations of some of her major works. The whole notion of the visual elements of performance and the space and place of Latin American and Latinx theatre and performance is also taken up from various perspectives in Jimmy A. Noriega and Analola Santana’s Theatre and Cartographies of Power.

Moreover, several Latin American scholars have contributed excellent articles or books analyzing different facets of space as image, which is the subject of my chapter two. Sharon Magnarelli has had a long and important impact on the analysis of diverse performance and theatrical spaces.¹³ Magnarelli’s work on Argentine Javier Daulte’s theatre is especially relevant for its analyses of real and fictional spaces. Priscilla Meléndez has also provided important insights on space through her essays on the works of Cuban José Triana and Argentine-Ecuadoran Arístides Vargas. Paola S. Hernández has looked at how performance reenacts spaces of memory in the Argentine postdictatorship.¹⁴ Books like Ramón Griffero’s La dramaturgia del espacio and Sarah M. Misemer’s 2017 study of Uruguayan theatre, Theatrical Topographies, are also excellent examples of the creative and powerful ways space is used in Latin American performances. My analysis of Agustín León Pruzzo’s En la sombra de la cúpula recognizes and expands upon the contributions of these scholars.

These studies use diverse kinds of images to read and interpret other Latin American theatre texts or performances. Recognizing these valuable contributions, my book carries their work a step further by systematically examining visual elements —from simple props and bodies, to spatial constructions, and digital images— that are ingrained in recent Argentine and Chilean performances and reading those images in tandem with their affective pull on spectators to show how the visual both captivates spectators and moves them toward other levels of consciousness regarding the performance, the ideology behind it, and their own values. But how do we read images? In W.J.T. Mitchell’s earliest image theories, this scholar has argued that even modern viewers possess a magical attitude toward images: I believe that magical attitudes toward images are just as powerful in the modern world as they were in the so-called ages of faith (What do Pictures Want? 8). For Mitchell, images, because they are rooted in culture and are like living organisms, embody a double consciousness, of simultaneous belief and disavowal (11). There is an intrinsic tension within images that impacts their interpretation. Thus, images embody meaning but they also resist meaning. They pull viewers between their rational scope and their magical powers.

Feeling the Gaze starts from the premise that every live performance incorporates diverse visual components but when images are repeated, emphasized, or foregrounded they employ their inherent double consciousness to draw viewers in, to pull them between the image’s rational and magical scopes, thus activating an affective bond with spectators. By isolating and analyzing visual elements —defined broadly as anything that we see on stage, which was purposefully intended to be frozen in time and space during the performance (by dramaturge or director) and thus rendered an object of focus by the audience—, this study examines the wide-ranging ways in which images engage in multifaceted storytelling. Considering what is beyond the images —the ways in which images dialogue with the personal, cultural, political and historical— also sparks the realization that images within a performance relate to each other and are associated with the verbal and sound elements in the entire performance as well. Sometimes images are juxtaposed or layered and sometimes they actually compete with each other. No matter their type —actors’ bodies, poses, gestures, costumes, objects, or technically-produced— images on stage can pull viewers in one or another direction, manipulating their vision and thus maneuvering their interpretation. Focusing on visual elements of performance allows us to read the ways in which playwrights, directors and actors reassemble the world.

ON AFFECT

To deny the centrality of emotion to the artistic experience, both for the creator and the viewer, is to strip art of its essence. Jill Bennett maintains that the very definition of art is its capacity to sustain sensation (18). Emotion is what makes art what it is and gives it its purpose and power. As Thompson argues, Art is nourishment. A protective force that … enables people to tolerate suffering, not so they become immune to it, but so that they have the energy to resist (1). And yet, since the earliest times people —be they critics, scholars, or spectators— have downplayed the significance of emotion to art. Thompson discusses Barbara Ehrenreich’s work and argues that

The squelching of affect began in colonial times when Europeans may have learnt very little about the peoples they visited (and often destroyed in the process) … instead they did learn, or imaginatively construct … that the essence of the Western mind, and particularly the Western male, upper-class mind, was its ability to resist the contagious rhythm of the drums, to wall up the fortress of ego and rationality against the seductive wildness of the world. (qtd. in Thompson 123)

This was particularly true in the New World, where indigenous slaves were so shut out and abused that they chose to secretly insert their own originally absent self-images by carving their own faces among the saints and cherubs on the ceilings and walls of the ornate cathedrals they were forced to construct for their colonizers. Ironically, during those same colonial times, performances were used by Spanish priests to evangelize the New World’s inhabitants. Performed images of political and religious authority were expected to educate and reinforce the dominance of the Spanish Crown and Catholic dogma (Versenyi). Yet, as Taylor has pointed out, often, even today, the official archive is interwoven or even replaced by the repertoire, which helps foreground the seductive power and affective impact of performance, allowing it to inspire questions about the mirage of domination. Erin Hurley claims that feeling is the core of theatre. It furnishes theatre’s reason for being, cements its purpose —whether such purpose is construed as entertainment or instruction— and undergirds the art form’s social work and value (77).

But, since feelings can be elusive and vacillating, how can we ground scholarly work in affect? Because, as Brian Massumi notes in Parables of the Virtual, affect is indeed unformed and unstructured, but it is nevertheless highly organized and effectively analyzable (260n3). Thompson sustains that by failing to recognise affect —bodily responses, sensations and aesthetic pleasure— much of the power of performance can be missed (7). More strongly, Artistic experience and practice are best understood for their capacity to agitate at the level of sensation … . The communicative model of art —the focus on the impact, message or precise revelation— is countered with a notion that the stimulation of affect is what compels the participant to thought and to be engaged at every level (Thompson 125). In other words, like Argentine author Luisa Valenzuela has always maintained, the power of art lies in its potential to disturb us, to move and shake our very core. Susan Sontag concurs with regard to the power of photography: For photographs to accuse, and possibly alter conduct, they must shock (81). Thus, emotional impact is the core of art. And yet, why would we desire to be emotionally moved if this were completely purposeless? Thompson postulates that aesthetic intensity is in itself the propellant of political action (127) and Jill Dolan concurs: emotions might move us to political action (15).

Political will grows as affects linger. As with images, there is a liminal quality to affect. Feeling work is never immediately completed. According to Thompson:

Affects last beyond the event and … they can linger … the term ‘lingering’ implies that affect does not have to happen at the moment of the performance but can either be sustained beyond it or occur at a different time … Affects … do not … disappear once the object is withdrawn … the play is not there anymore but the force of affect continues dynamically. Giving affect ‘serious attention’ therefore, intentionally extends the range of a performance event. (157)

Moreover, because feelings are never linear and are touched by so many forces, the emotional impact wavers in intensity and opens gaps for sustained impact and deeper and broader contemplation. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht highlights the necessity of pauses before trying to make sense of an artifact or a worldly experience. In the pause, we will feel the force of affect, and if we can hold onto this experience we are more likely to do it justice in any account (126). The pauses provoked by viewing art and the emotions that are allowed to emerge and flourish during those pauses open contemplation and can inspire judgment. In The Work of Art in the World, Doris Sommer argues that a great value of art is that it hones our innate faculty of judgment, which is the essence of our freedom. By creating a pause where humans can practice judgment on things that don’t matter but that make them excited enough to want to think about them, art surprises us and urges us to contemplate, make free choices, and practice judging the world: Judgment matters for all human activities, and the best way to develop it is through aesthetics (85).

Art also turns the subjective into an intersubjective experience, calling us to share the beauty, horror, risk, or wonder that the work of art embodies (Sommer 150–52). Art impacts us and can confuse us and, thus, it makes us pause to measure, contemplate, and connect with others around the experience. Teresa Brennan maintains that these kinds of pauses and the act of forming judgments are crucial to the transmission of affect: "But critical in complex transmission, especially, is the moment of judgment … . the projection or intro jection of