Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage (Paperback)

This text is an abridged version of the book Practicing the Realon the Contemporary Stage (Prácticas de lo real en la escena contemporánea) published in Madrid in 2007, and in a new edition in Mexico City in 2012. The book was the result of a seminar given at the CITRU, part of the INBA (National Fine Arts Institute) in Mexico City between August and September 2004 and later investigations and successive conferences and seminars on the same topic in various countries.

Practising the Real is an analysis about how what we call reality and “the real” is present in contemporary artistic creation. In this research there is an especial emphasis on performing arts, but it also considers literary, visual, theatrical and cinematographic referents. This work examines the responses given by performing arts to the importance placed in reality beyond representation, as well as analyze the irruption of the real onto the stages, be them artistic or not.

This book proposes four historic itineraries defined by the ways in which the issue of the real is addressed: The representation of the visible reality and its paradoxes, the place of the real on the lived body, and the limits placed on representation by experiences of pain and death. The fourth itinerary would follow the activist, ludic and essayist practices that denounce the real.