Staging Migrant Identity in Spanish Contemporary Theatre: Cultural Reconstruction from Aesthetic Drama Towards Social Ritual

This chapter analyses the paradigm shift regarding the cultural construction of national identity in Spanish theatre that thematises the immigration boom in the late twentieth century. It studies the development of recurrent dramatic motifs in plays published from the 1990s to the first decades of this century. At first, the dramaturgies of the final decade of the last century revisit the theme of the historical antagonist, the American Indian, and opt for a postmodern deconstruction of colonial history through theatrical metalanguages that allow for the subversion of the concept of identity and cultural otherness (e.g. Sanchis Sinisterra 1992; Morales [1995] 2000; etc.). At the same time, other authors begin to address the social polarisation caused by growing immigration, emphasising its marginal and disruptive character as a threat to the monolithic national system (Del Moral 1992; López Mozo 1997; etc.). However, the first decade of the twenty-first century introduces new approaches in which intercultural contact begins to generate a positive change in the development of society (Alvear 2005; Belbel 2006; etc.). Likewise, social theatre projects (Nuevo Teatro Fronterizo 2010; etc.) start to promote the collective dramatic creation of post-national identities that are flexible and resistant to the changes of the globalised world. In addition, the concept of the border as a line that separates and breaks the homogeneity of migrant history is transformed into the symbol of a contact zone and a dynamic social element in constant movement across ethnicities, genders, races and classes. In this study, we do not limit ourselves to analysing the dramatic text as a mere reflection of the social situation, but we explore the mutual interaction between artistic production and social reality in both directions. From a social and anthropological perspective (Turner 1982; Schechner [2002] 2013; Fischer-Lichte 2008), we observe the reciprocal influence between theatrical creation and the rituals inherent in social movements and their public representations that are transforming the binary concept of identity/otherness towards a cross-cultural representation of the common cultural heritage in today’s world.