Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform

Holy Terrors presents exemplary original work by fourteen of Latin America’s foremost contemporary women performance artists. Many of the pieces–excerpts from plays, one-acts, manifestos, and lyrics–appear in English for the first time. From Griselda Gambaro, Argentina’s most widely recognized playwright to renowned performers including Brazil’s Denise Stoklos and Mexico’s Jesusa Rodriguez, these women are involved in some of Latin America’s most important aesthetic and political movements. Of varied racial and ethnic backgrounds, they come from across Latin America–not only from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, but also from Chile, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Peru, and Cuba. This volume is generously illustrated with over seventy images. A number of the performance pieces are complemented by essays providing context and analysis. The performance pieces in Holy Terrors are powerful testimonies to the artists’ political and personal struggles. These women confront patriarchy, racism, and repressive government regimes and challenge brutality and corruption through a variety of artistic genres.Several have formed theater collectives–among them FOMMA and El Teatro de la Capilla in Mexico and El teatro de la mascara in Colombia. In addition to citing some of the great women performers of the mid-twentieth century, the more recent performers whose work is represented here draw liberally from popular theater styles of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century known as teatro frivolo or frivolous theatre. They combine the various styles of teatro frivolo such as cabaret, sketches, teatro de revista (revue), teatro de carpa (itinerant theatre), and street theatre. Holy Terrors is a unique English-language presentation of some of Latin America’s fiercest, most provocative art.