Historic and symbolic violence in the Romani Fuenteovejuna by TNT-El Vacie: Gender, ethnicity, and interculturalism
I address here the performance of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna undertaken by TNT-El Vacie, giving particular consideration to the ways in which Antonio Álamo’s adaptation, Pepa Gamboa’s direction, and the staging of El Vacie, a company composed exclusively of Roma women, constitute a site of resistance as well as a performance of gender, identity, and place. From this vantage point, I wrestle with issues of agency, dialogism, and intercultural communication to make sense of ontological as well as hermeneutic aspects of the performance text: deletions and additions; orality and authority; meta-theatricality and self-reflexivity; acting and becoming. In addition, I bring to bear the fact that the name of the company, El Vacie, bears witness to the impoverished settlement or shantytown where the women reside, which stands within a mere two hundred yards of the theater where the play is performed. The name of the company signals the identification of the actresses with the marginal space in which they live, enriches the text, and further complicates their reading of Fuenteovejuna by adding levels of referentiality and indexicality that redefine boundaries as well as processes of exclusion and inclusion. While this is not the first collaboration between TNT and El Vacie—it was preceded by the successful and award-winning 2009 staging of La Casa de Bernarda Alba—I consider this performance a particularly important contribution to the construction of a historicized cultural politics of identity that makes the Romani community visible by positioning the women of El Vacie center stage as participants, creators, and interpreters of the national cultural patrimony. Through this cultural intervention, certain spaces and markers of the Roma community acquire visibility as they get inserted into a national historical discourse from which they previously had been historically excluded. © 2018, © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.