Hacia un teatro situado: la dramaturgia inédita de Raúl Ruiz

This PHD project develops the concept of “situated theatre” to describe a form of theatrical practice in which the dramatic text, the performance space, and the historical, political, and social context transform one another. Moving beyond the traditional opposition between the text as a fixed work and performance as an ephemeral event, the study approaches dramaturgy as a permeable form of writing: one that preserves its literary specificity while remaining open to the material conditions of the present. Situated theatre does not treat space as a mere setting but incorporates its architecture, history, inhabitants, and conflicts as integral parts of the work.

The theoretical framework brings together literary and theatre studies, theories of performativity, site-specific art, Situationist thought, landscape-based architecture, and feminist epistemology. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges,” the thesis questions the supposed neutrality of space and the universalist claims of representation: every artistic practice emerges from a concrete, embodied position. This perspective makes it possible to understand place as an active entity and performance as a form of knowledge produced through the interaction of writing, bodies, territory, and audience.

The central corpus consists of Raúl Ruiz’s unpublished theatrical manuscripts, with a particular focus on Edipo Hiperboreo (1989). The study recovers a largely unknown dimension of the Chilean filmmaker’s work and examines the connections between theatre, cinema, literature, and exile within his poetics. It shows that Ruiz developed a multilingual, intermedial, and deliberately open form of writing that challenges the “theory of central conflict.” In Edipo Hiperbóreo, this poetics creates a dialogue between Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Cervantes’ The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, and Ruiz’s own experience of exile. The characters’ journey thus finds its formal counterpart in a text that moves across languages, traditions, and cultural spaces without settling permanently in any one of them.

The research combines literary analysis, manuscript study, translation, editing, and performance practice. The translation and edition of Edipo Hiperbóreo introduced blank spaces designed to be completed in response to each new performance location. This hypothesis was tested through a 2020 production at the Wildt’sches Haus in Basel. The experience demonstrated that artistic practice is not simply an application of theory, but a form of research capable of revising and expanding it. The production also revealed the decisive role of the audience as a living part of the context.

The thesis’s main contribution is the development of a model for research and artistic creation that brings text and performance, archive and present, literature and artistic practice into dialogue. At the same time, it initiated the critical recovery of Raúl Ruiz’s unpublished theatre and demonstrated that his permeable writing offers a particularly productive model for understanding how a work can move across periods and territories, engage with new contexts, and take on a different life in each performance.