Practices and Projections: on Siglo de Oro Theatre

In a contemporary climate where categories such as affect, nostalgia and alternative facts are called upon when considering history as a cultural practice, the imagination of a past Golden Age and its subsequent retellings gain importance as a pattern of localizing identities in and as (historical) performance. This project takes its trajectory from a double observation of Siglo de Oro theatre as, on the one hand, a performance practice, and as a cultural mainstay on the other hand: the Siglo de Oro, coined as term only in retrospect, is omnipresent as cornerstone of Spanish cultural heritage in politics, academia and education, yet its canon theatre repertory figures less in performance than as a reference and a high- profile area of research, which invites inquiry into practices of history as much as into practices of theatre. Investigating the divide of practice past and projection present, the aim of the study is two-fold: it examines the Siglo de Oro narrative as a site of staging national and cultural identity, addressing its own position, and contrasts it with a look at performance practices of the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly in regard to their moving in and out of a realm of newly forming professional secular theatre against the larger backdrop of Iberian festival culture. The Madrid de los Austrias Hapsburg Madrid - serves as a focal point to examine the intricate negotiations, through performance, between urban and rural representation, appropriated and othered identities, centralized and mobile cultures, and literate and illiterate practices. Ce nsorship and institutionalized structures left a mark on what was considered professional theatre, and what was not; yet even from within the canon of Siglo de Oro theatre from its plays, treatises and legal frameworks , the ostracized practices at the margins still shine through and give testimony to their continued influence on an official theatre culture and on the way it understands itself. Siglo de Oro theatre, while a central field of studies within Spanish Philology with a rich scholarly tradition, has received far less attention from a perspective of Performance Studies a field not institutionalized in the Spanish university system , which is in turn the aim of this project. In addition to amplifying research on Early Modern dynamics of festival and theatre, it also looks at the performance of history as a place of identity, and asks whether strategies applied during the Siglo de Oro might, again, apply today.

How do theatre history and theatre historiography impact our socio-political present? How can a different approach to actors of the past build toward not only a broader understanding of that past, but also toward a broader social participation in the present? - "Practices and Projections. New Perspectives on Siglo de Oro Theatre" explores these two questions using a prominent example. The theatre of the so-called Siglo de Oro and its history - as presented in encyclopaedias, curricula, theatre programming, and in academic research - are an impactful example of how historical facts and people can be overlooked and overwritten by history. If theatre history is told primarily as the history of a national drama canon (a common pattern not unique to Spain), then theatre formats outside of this canon are less present, as are ethnically and culturally diverse makers of this theatre. The result is an uneven - if not distorted - picture of past theatre and of the people who created it. At this junction, the project intervenes: first, by analyzing the Siglo de Oro as a "master narrative:" as a discourse that involves politics, the cultural industry, the education sector and research alike, from street names to exhibitions, from season programming to schoolbooks. Second, by asking how the study of overlooked and overwritten practices and people can bring forth a broader, clearer picture of the past - in this case, of the of the early modern theatre industry in Spain and the people that contributed to it. Such an approach holds research itself accountable: by asking whom it depicts, who conducts it, and what a theatre historiography beyond "master narratives" can look like, when it considers in both past and present a multitude of voices, sources and formats. This approach entailed the development and adaptation of methods that can make this multitude visible and accessible to research in the first place. For this project, such developments meant work with overwritten knowledge in treatises and manuscripts, with bodily knowledge and its transmissions, with different performance contexts such as festival community, but also with traces and absences of marginalized contributors to early modern theatre little considered by its conventional history: beggars, Roma, and enslaved people. Their performance skills and knowledge were an important part of the early modern professionalization of what we still know today as the Western theatre industry. Using the example of early modern Spain, the project shows how omissions have enabled the master narrative of the Siglo de Oro for theatre history. It details some of these omissions and makes them accessible, devising methodological tools apt also for other time periods, geographies, and phenomena beyond the field of Theatre Studies.