What i am…is theater. 100 years after the birth of Rodolfo Usigli (vols. I, II & III)

Presentation: Rodolfo Obregón

DVD (Creators and Personalities Collection, in Digital Library 2)

As a form of national tribute that cultural, national and foreign institutions, pay to Rodolfo Usigli (1905-1979) on the 100th anniversary of his birth, CITRU organized a colloquium in which the researchers Guillermo Schmidhuber, José Ramón Alcántara, Octavio Rivera, Guillermina Fuentes, Alejandro Ortíz y Rodolfo Obregón - also presenter and host of this encounter – converse and reflect, throughout the course of three meetings, about Rodolfo Usigli’s many battles to give Mexico a modern and professional theater. In the first roundtable (“Rodolfo Usigli, the man”) the dialogue focusses on his life, his influences, his academic and artistic knowledge, his character and the relationship of these aspects with his theatrical profession, to configure a semblance that, well beyond the biographical details and anecdotes, reveals that aspiration of totality that Usigli exercises as a dramatist, director, historian, critic, businessman and theatrical promoter. In the second roundtable (“Rodolfo Usigli and Nationalism”), he is evoked as a thinker who, while constructing a powerful dramatic works generates the critical reflection in which his own creation stands, both committed to the construction of a new type of theater, a new type of nation and a new Mexican identity, with modern institutions, like those known in Europe and the USA. The last roundtable (“Rodolfo Usigli and his Validity”) analyzes the current use of his ideas as a historian and theorist of Mexican theater; it values his poetry, narrative and critique, genres in which he was also involved; and it revises the impact of his work and the concepts of “anti-historical theater” and “realism” in successive generations of Mexican dramatists. The videos are illustrated with images of personal photographs, stage presentations, audience programs and posters of “What I am…is Theater”, an exhibition which took place in the vestibule of El Palacio de Bellas Artes (the Palace of Fine Arts), where these conversations around the personal and creative universe of Rodolfo Usigli were also recorded, practically in real time.