<i>Secular Saints. Performing Frida Kahlo, Carlos Gardel, Eva Perón, and Selena</i> (review)
2010; Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Kansas; Volume: 43; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/ltr.2010.0049
ISSN2161-0576
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
Resumo216 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW fuentes, este libro representa una contribución imprescindible al estudio del teatro rioplatense. Ariel Strichartz St. Olaf College Misemer, Sarah M. Secular Saints. Performing Frida Kahlo, Carlos Gardel, Eva Perón, and Selena. Woodbridge, UK and Rochester, New York: Tamesis, 2008: 183 pp. With Secular Saints: Performing Frida Kahlo, Carlos Gardel, Eva Perón and Selena, Sarah M. Misemer adds a significant tome to the ever-growing bibliography on performance studies. That the book is written in English and deals with three famous entertainment and political icons (and one music star renowned in a more limited regional context) hopefully means that it will enjoy a readership larger than the usual one for Latin American performance studies. Misemer re-reads the biographies of these four figures, to show how they are the product not only of others “performing” their “stellar” lives, but also of the stars’ own performances of themselves, both on and off their public and private stages.As Misemer underscores, “[t]he thread that unites all of these icons is their ability to represent secular ideologies and discourses through their own performances and this in turn makes them attractive on the stage for others to add and perform new interpretations” (15-16). Secular Saints… covers a wide range of topics: icons and images; political and social history; performance and film studies; theatre semiotics, among others. In Chapter I, “(S)Ex-votos: ‘Miraculous’Performances of the Body and Politics in Frida Kahlo,” Misener focuses on Kahlo as an early performance artist, for the way that she used her body to write three narratives: the personal one, primarily of her accident and her turbulent life with Diego Rivera, that together are the script for Frida Kahlo, the woman; the artistic one, whose rich intertextuality with the personal narrative make them almost mirror images of each other; and the political one of Kahlo’s performance as a card-carrying Communist and a fierce Mexican nationalist; again, this narrative is so intertwined with the others that they are nearly impossible to separate. The chapter “Performing Palimpsests: Scraping Together Carlos Gardel,” looks at the multilayered identity that Gardel created for and of himself, through the mysterious and conflicting stories about his origins and early history, the lyrics he introduced to tango music and their implied reference to himself, through his dress and his films, his manner of speech and his “romanticized” private life. Like a palimpsest, then, one needs to scratch the surface repeatedly to get to the original, which the end has been permanently blurred by the many others layers covering it. As with Kahlo, Misemer sees Evita Perón (Chapter 3, “Corpse and Corpus: The Incorruptible Santa Evita”) as an early performance artist, with a corpus of roles and scripts, which together create SPRING 2010 217 her double identity as saint and whore, as poor little country girl transformed into Cinderella, as champion of the masses and robber of state coffers. Unlike Kahlo, however, Evita’s performance(s) had profound political repercussions forArgentina; as Misemer notes, “what is unique about Evita is the extent of her manipulation of the public through texts in which she describes the creation of her dual roles” (103). Perhaps her most manipulative performance was in death, when her body laid state to be worshipped and mourned by a devoted audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, and then afterwards, when it began its surrealistic journey from one place to another. “The Brown Madonna: Crossing the Border’s of Selena’s Martyrdom,” looks at how the Queen of Tex-Mex shares with her fellow icons a dramatic death and subsequent mythologizing of her life. While alive all four were idolized (or in the case of Evita, reviled) figures; in death, they become sacred myths of contemporary popular culture, the secular saints to whom Misemer refers in the title of this beautifully written and well-researched study, which not only looks at these “saints” but also at a body of plays that recreate them as polyvalent signifiers for equally unstable, and therefore, forever fascinating (and exploitable), signifiers; for example, Alberto Castillo’s El espíritu de la pintora, about a young man who is...
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