1 The name of the press refers to Tablas, a Cuban journal for scenic arts, and a book series for performing arts named after José Jacinto Milanés's 1838 play El conde Alarcos. While the press's “photography-plus” collection does have a few unpublished versions of scripts, the playtext itself—typically the nexus of the theatre archive—is not a major component of the Tablas-Alarcos archive. However, the press has produced a large archive of Cuban plays through their output of books and issues of the journal Tablas, which usually features one script per issue. The last time I worked with the material part of the collection was in 2016. Since then, the physical materials have been moved out of the Tablas-Alarcos offices, although the press still hosts a significant digital photography collection.

2 For Cuban Theatre Digital Archive (hereinafter CTDA), see https://ctda.library.miami.edu, accessed 10 October 2020.

3 No doubt, there is a lot of overlap between critics and researchers, but in this essay, I use “critic” to refer to someone writing about a performance they witnessed live, and “historiographer” to refer to someone writing about a performance through its documentation alone and at a greater temporal distance from the performance event.

4 See Morson, Gary Saul and Emerson, Caryl, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 36–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bakhtin, M. M., Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Liapunov, Vadim, ed. Liapunov, Vadim and Holquist, Michael (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, “Intangible Heritage as Metacultural Production,” Museum International 56.1–2 (2004): 52–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 59.

6 Here I am thinking of Joseph Roach's genealogies of performance, Diana Taylor's cultural memory, Rebecca Schneider's discussion of repetition and memory in performance, Fred Moten's fugitive knowledge, Ann Cvetkovic's work with affect theory in reading queer archives, Alexandra T. Vazquez's insistence on listening in detail against reductive taxonomies and anthologizing practices, and Solimar Otero's concept of residual transcriptions in Afro-Latinx religious practices, among others. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011); Alexandra T. Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Solimar Otero, Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).

7 Taylor, Archive and the Repertoire, 19–21, quote at 21.

8 Ibid., 19.

9 See Roberto Gacio Papers, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami Libraries, https://atom.library.miami.edu/chc5297, accessed 21 March 2023.

10 Mary Elizabeth Anderson, Meeting Places: Locating Desert Consciousness in Performance (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 130–1.

11 Eric Mayer-García, “Thinking East and West in Nuestra América: Retracing the Footprints of a Latinx Teatro Brigade in Revolutionary Cuba,” Theatre History Studies 39 (2020): 140–68, at 148.

12 He refers to Yves Klein's Leap in the Void (1960) and Vito Acconci's Following Piece (1969) as examples of performed photography. Philip Auslander, Reactivations: Essays on Performance and Its Documentation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018), 9–16, 21–6.

13 Ibid., 8, 16.

14 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 46–7.

15 Jaime Gómez Triana, Victor Varela: Teatro y Obstáculo (San Antonio de los Baños, La Habana: Editorial Unicornio, 2003), 44.

16 The program for the production is available on the CTDA, http://ctda.library.miami.edu/digitalobject/10, accessed 24 June 2020.

17 Some date the gray years from 1971 to 1976, others from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s or 1980. For an overview of the debate around defining revolutionary culture beginning in the 1960s see Polémicas culturales de los 60, comp. and ed. Graziella Pogolotti (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2006). For an account of the marginalization censored artists experienced, see Antón Arrufat, Virgilio Piñera: Entre él y yo (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1994), 42–7.

18 Inés María Martiatu, “Una Carmen Caribeña,” in Teatro Cubano Contemporáneo: Antología, ed. Carlos Espinosa Domínguez (Madrid: Centro de Documentación Teatral, 1992), 935–40.

19 Inés María Martiatu, “Teatro de dioses y hombres,” in Wanilere Teatro, ed. Inés María Martiatu (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2005), 5–34, at 23–5; and Armando López, “Levitar en Santa Clara: Viaje a la semilla de Tómas González, dramaturgo que puso su dedo en la llaga del racismo,” Cubaencuentro, 18 April 2008, www.cubaencuentro.com/cultura/articulos/levitar-en-santa-clara-79506, accessed 21 June 2022.

20 Gerardo Mosquera, “Odebí el cazador, Oba y Shangó,” Tablas no. 2 (1984): 8–14, at 8, 11.

21 Inés María Martiatu, “María Antonia: Wa-ni-ilé-ere . . .,” Tablas no. 3 (1984): 35–44, at 38–9.

22 Mosquera, “Odebí, el cazador,” 11.

23 Ibid. In the early 1980s, Blanco continuously collaborated with Cuba's leading dance company, Danza Nacional. That collaboration spanned multiple productions, including Yerma, Lope de Vega's Fuenteovejuna in 1984, and a devised work based on José Martí's war diary, titled De los días de la guerra, which was presented both at the 1982 Havana Theatre Festival with Danza Nacional and in the 1984 festival with a mixed collective that included music by composer Leo Brouwer.

24 The playtext and images of the same production appear in Tablas: see Eugenio Hernández Espinosa, “Odebí el cazador: Patakín,” Tablas no. 4, Libreto no. 4 (1984): 1–19; Juan Carlos Martínez, “Odebí: Un poema para representar,” Tablas no. 4 (1984): 38–41.

25 Martiatu, “María Antonia,” 39–40.

26 Elinor Fuchs, “EF's Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play,” Theater 34.2 (2004): 5–9.

27 The details from this period in Gacio's life, which I summarize here, come from Norge Espinosa Mendoza, “Roberto Gacio: Un testigo de muy buena memoria,” Tablas (Anuario 2011): 230–4, at 232–3; and Lillian Manzor, “Roberto Gacio: Entervista,” video interview, 2012, Miami, CTDA, http://ctda.library.miami.edu/digitalobject/17144, accessed 8 August 2022.

28 Norge Espinosa writes that Gacio's memory of the theatre he experienced is so good that researchers often come to him to fact-check their work or to hear a funny anecdote related to the productions they research. See Espinosa Mendoza, “Roberto Gacio,” 230.

29 Roberto Gacio, phone interview with the author, 17 February 2022, Havana.

30 Indira R. Ruiz, “Pórtico a la bitácora personal de Roberto Gacio,” in Roberto Gacio, Amar la escena: Diarios teatrales, ed. Indira R. Ruiz (Havana: Ediciones Alarcos, 2021), 9–10, at 10.

31 Roberto Gacio, “Voluntad de permanencia,” Tablas nos. 3–4 (1995): 3–10.

32 Ruiz, “Pórtico,” 10.

33 Carlos Daniel Sarmiento Barlet, “El teatro lo acompaña y lo salva,” Amar la escena, 11–15, at 13.

34 Roberto Gacio, “Teatro Gay en los 90,” Tablas nos. 3–4 (1995): 30–4, at 32.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., 32–3.

37 Roberto Gacio, “La noche de los asesinos, mise en scène de Vicente Revuelta,” in Amar la escena, 69–81.

38 Roberto Gacio, “Virgilio Piñera: Problemática del actor y el personaje en siete de sus obras,” in Amar la escena, 219–33, at 223–4.

39 Ibid.

40 See Tania Cordero and Amado del Pino, “Con vicio de teatro: Entrevista con el actor y director José Antonio Rodríguez,” Tablas no. 2 (1996): 72–6.

41 Espinosa Mendoza, “Roberto Gacio,” 232; Roberto Gacio, phone interview with the author, 13 November 2021, Havana.

42 Guerra, Lillian, “Gender Policing, Homosexuality and the New Patriarchy of the Cuban Revolution, 1965–70,” Social History 35.3 (2010): 268–89CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, at 268–72, 281–8.

43 Jardón, Edgar Estaco, El monólogo de Casio, in “La química del oso” y otras obras (Santo Domingo, RD: Casa de Teatro, 2009), 29–44Google Scholar, at 41–2; translation mine.