From the Theater to the Plaza: Spectacle, Protest, and Urban Space in Twenty-First-Century Madrid by Matthew I. Feinberg (review)

Reviewed by: From the Theater to the Plaza: Spectacle, Protest, and Urban Space in Twenty-First-Century Madrid by Matthew I. Feinberg David Delgado Feinberg, Matthew I. From the Theater to the Plaza: Spectacle, Protest, and Urban Space in Twenty-First-Century Madrid. Mcgill-Queen's UP, 2022. 282 pp. ISBN: 978-0-2280-1069-2. The dynamic interplay between literary and urban studies has a rich history, yet it continues to offer fertile ground for exploration. In this regard, From the Theater to the Plaza takes center stage as it delves into the history of Madrid and its cultural production while developing a local, regional, and national identity. With a keen focus on the Lavapiés district and the portrayal of its conceived, perceived, and lived spaces, this book masterfully unveils the contingent and overlapping nature of the neighborhood and the metropolis as they have intercalated one another both historically and in the context of global competition between cities. This book particularly highlights the stage of Lavapiés as the multicultural heart of Madrid and, thus, of Spain. Through its five chapters, From the Theater to the Plaza offers readers a comprehensive history of Lavapiés, its theaters, the city of Madrid, and the cultural conflicts that have shaped the life and identity of this neighborhood and its inhabitants. Using Henri Lefebvre's space theory to identify and analyze the different dynamics coexisting in the city, the book demonstrates how, through its symbolic value, the cultural geography of a neighborhood folds into the scale of the metropolitan; the metropolitan folds into national economic and political agendas; [End Page 230] and all of these intertwine within the unfolding of administrative, cultural, and social bodies at the supranational level. Chapter 1 describes how theaters historically became the roots of the culturally reproduced imagined city of Madrid, laying the groundwork for understanding the relationship between theater and urban development in contemporary Lavapiés. Covering the last 500 years of Madrid's history, the chapter illustrates how theater helped produce the physical and imaginary city of Madrid as it became an urban center of theater production. This production helped the city sustain hegemonic influence over the rest of the country through culture, power, and language symbolized in the figure of the monarchy and the expression of this institution in the architecture of the city. Chapter 2 looks at counter-spectacles to demonstrate not only the way Lavapiés has been historically imagined as a site of resistance and popular culture but also how this counterculture has been appropriated to construct overlapping municipal and national identities. These imagined identities were produced thanks to drama plays through the centuries, i.e., auto sacramentales, sainetes, or zarzuelas among other genres, which generated a local identity at the urban scale that became imbued with national and international geographies, making Madrid unique and distinct, but simultaneously containing all provincial variations of the heterogeneous Spanish nation-state. Chapter 3 shows how the Centro Dramático Nacional–Teatro Valle-Inclán became a vehicle for the urban and cultural policies of Madrid's City Council and the national government. This space emerged as the 'abstract space' of Lavapiés or the space organized, imagined, sub-divided, and built for the dominant power structures, laid out in the Urban Plan of 1997. Thus, Lavapiés was part of a major process of rehabilitation that led to real-estate speculation and the neighborhood's gentrification. Facing the creative destruction of the neighborhood's urban fabric, Chapter 4 portrays the resistance actions that Lavapiés witnessed, particularly those organized by the okupa movement, and the social centers known as Laboratorios, which became an important locus of cultural and political activity in the city. These laboratorios generated radically public spaces because all the people that entered implicated themselves in the action of okupar. In this set of social centers, the chapter emphasizes the relevance of Laboratorio 03, an incubation space in which broad alliances emerged among political activists and those connected to the city's cultural apparatus who understood the street functioned as an important performance space for direct-action political theatrics. Hence, Feinberg shows how Laboratorio 03 became a space enmeshed with the...