Theories in the Flesh: Performance as Popular Scholarship in Chicago Latina Theater

Teatro Luna is Chicago's first and only all-Latina theater company, best known for creating ensemble based performance based on "true life stories and family histories."  While this work is largely autobiographical, in the past two years Teatro Luna has begun to explore alternative ways of creating "true life" performance, using ethnographic interviews, contemporary newspaper articles, and historical archives as the starting point for work that explores a range of topics relevant to Latina lives.  In doing so, Teatro Luna aims to use performance as the starting point for dialogue around complex issues facing Latina/o communities, as a way of presenting scholarship and research to an audience that may not have access to academic institutions or archived research.  Performance has long been understood as a site of embodied knowledge, a place where "theories in the flesh" are enacted.  Using Teatro Luna as a case study, I look at the ways in which performance might be understood not just as material for scholarly analysis, but as its own scholarly intervention, a way of  analyzing and presenting research to a wider public audience.