| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Theatre Journal 53.4 (2001) 607-632 [Figures] Over the last few decades scholars, artists, and activists have expanded the breadth and depth of the feminist practice of recuperating women's lives, voices, and worldview. They do so by filling the gaps in the story of humankind as they uncover the myriad ways that the structures of knowledge, memory, value, representation, and power inextricably intertwine. In this tradition, in Las Horas de Belén. A Book of Hours, a team of U.S. and Mexican women artists utilizes the body and the lived experiences of both performer and spectator as instruments to excavate and record the multiple dimensions of women's realities, the systems constructed to dominate them, and their subsequent strategies of resistance. Through performance, the artists wrench previously obfuscated consequences of those systems from the domain of the symbolic. They make visible the real bodies that bear the markings of violence perpetrated upon women. In this way, the body materializes as both vehicle and message, caught between the spaces where discourses of culture, aesthetics, gender, and identity intersect with those of power in its multiple manifestations. The award-winning production of Las Horas de Belén. A Book of Hours took shape over a period of two years, debuting in Mexico City and then opening in New York in 1999. The collaborators included Ruth Maleczech, director of New York-based Mabou Mines; visual artist Julie Archer; Jesusa Rodríguez, Mexican director, actor, writer, and feminist activist; her partner, Argentine-born singer-composer Liliana Felipe; and poet Catherine Sasanov who, at the time, was writing poems inspired by the history of Mexico City and the circumstances of the founding of Belén (1683), an infamous sanctuary/prison for women in Mexico City. Sasanov's poetry, influenced by the writings of Rosario Castellanos, Eduardo Galeano, and Charles Bowden (among others), served as the basis for a script consisting of minimal director's notes, song lyrics and projected writings. While working on Las Horas de Belén, the women were deeply affected by current reports of unsolved rapes and murders of hundreds of young women working in the maquila factories in U.S.-Mexico border towns. Official indifference to this violence echoed the stories that they were uncovering about these women. As the collaborators engaged in a type of archeological dig through the technologies designed to perpetuate certain cultural forms and stories while erasing others, they were also discovering the heterogenous, hybrid nature of Mexican society. This hybridity is due in part to the failure of hegemonic forces as witnessed by the historical coexistence in Mexican culture of transgressive social subjects and imposing dominant forces -- traces of which surfaced during the research for the piece. The artists found broad but related discrepancies, gaps or slippages, between proscribed female behavior and what women were actually doing on all social stages. Versions of female identity supposedly cemented into powerful symbolic systems did not account for the variety of manifestations of being woman evident in Mexican society. For the last 30 years in Mexico, where the female body has served as the stage upon which national identity has been constructed, feminist scholars, writers, and artists have devoted much energy to the task of locating the persistence of women's intervention into spaces to which they supposedly were denied access as well as to representing women's resistance to systems designed to control every aspect of their life. In particular, collaborator Jesusa Rodríguez has dedicated much of her artistic and social activist work to re-creating performative acts as she creates new ones. This has been important not only for the sake of adjusting the historical record but also for expanding the culturally imbedded, albeit hidden, repertoires available to Mexicans today as they constantly reinvent themselves in the face of the crises inherent in modern life in a country, as the saying goes, "so far from God, so close to the United States." Through the collaboration with Mabou Mines and their director Maleczech, this work continues in Las Horas de Belén. The artists demonstrate how Mexico's controlling elites establish authority and memory through technologies that create and circulate symbolic systems, and how...
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