Traversed Bodies and Border Bodies: the Acting professionalization in the Rio de La Plata Theater

Abstract

This article is organized in two sections. First, we will examine the categories of "border body" and "traversed body" (cuerpoatravesado, Anzaldúa, 1987), as useful tools to analyze the construction of the actor/actress identity and the theatrical practice itself. In this sense, we will take up again the cultural studies on frontiers to propose actors and actresses as bodies that perform symbolic, social and identity displacements. Secondly, we will seek to turn this theoretical–methodological discussion to the comparative analysis of the performance poetics of the La Ranchería company (1783-1792) and the Podestá-Scotti company (1872-1937), investigating the material and symbolic frontiers that these subjects inhabited in their specific context. In this sense, we will focus on the development of the professionalization of acting in both moments, paying attention to the political role of theater within the viceregal order –in the first case– and the development of the nation state –in the second–.