Hollis International Scholars

Field Study 1996: Investigating Latin American Theatre in Miami and Puerto Rico

Description of the Project


The Hollis International Scholars Program is a "mentored experience" program whose aim is to foster faculty-student collaborative learning in and about non-English-speaking countries and cultures. The chief feature of this program in terms of its educational objectives is to give both faculty and students first-hand contact with the country/culture under study, not as tourists, but as field researchers and on-site participant-observers.

In this pilot project, the Spanish-speaking theatre cultures of South Florida and Puerto Rico will be the subject of study. We hope to use the art of the theatrical performance as a cultural bridge, and like many bridges, the traffic flows both ways. Together, students and their professors will encounter these theatres and their artists using our own expertise and experience in the theatre as both a knowledge base and a means of exchange.

The theatre, because of its nature as an interchange between theatre artists and their community, can provide a direct window into the culture of which it is a product. Choices in performance styles, materials, and techniques are made not only with the availability of resources in mind, but also address the expectations and demands of a particular audience as a cultural group. Moreover, performance is an act committed not only by theatre artists, but their audiences as well; theatre is a shared activity, which builds a community between and among performers and audiences. The theatre can provide a direct and immediate entry into a culture by granting all participants a kind of cultural membership in the moment of performance.

The specific features of the program consist of traveling to Miami throughout the Fall 1996 semester in order to attend selected plays, meet the theatre artists, conduct interviews, and participate in other activities related to this discovery and investigation of Miami's Hispanic Theatre community. Also during the semester, they will prepare their own theatrical production which will be performed first at Stetson, then in various locales throughout the island of Puerto Rico in December 1996. Chief among these is a full-scale production in the Teatro Braulio Castillo in the Municipio de Bayamón.

The program is based on the following principles:

  1. theatre people are the same all over the world; we are members of the same family that share something inherent in our common work; and
  2. that which is different is the audience and their culture, through which the interchange between actor and spectator in the act of theatre takes place.
  3. as theatre people, we speak the same language -- the language of performance -- and this common element can serve as a bridge between the different cultures that form the base of the theatrical experience.

As a part of the project, the Department of Drama at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras will host a round table discussion/symposium on some of the issues associated with negotiating cultural differences through the theatre. This event will take place on Tuesday, December 10 at 10:00 a.m., and will be followed by a workshop performance of the show that will open at the Teatro Braulio Castillo in Bayamón the following weekend.

Some of the organizations that have expressed an interest in participating in our endeavor are:


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Last Update: Nov. 10, 1996