Criollismo espectral en Atra bilis de Laila Ripoll: transculturación, posmemoria y grotesco escénico

The article examines Laila Ripoll’s Atra bilis (cuando estemos más tranquilas) from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together women’s dramaturgy, the theatrical grotesque, and postcolonial memory. It proceeds from the hypothesis that the play constructs a grotesque matria: a women‑led domestic space in which mourning unfolds as a failed ritual—shot through with dark humor, proverbial registers, and verbal violence—that blocks any reparative symbolic closure. The study is organized around three analytic axes: transculturation as the spectral return of colonial imaginaries; a phantasmatic criollismo embodied in the absent figure of José Rosario Antúñez Valdivieso; and the grotesque scene as a mode of tension between collective memory and the domestic archive. Methodologically, the article combines dramaturgical and scenographic analysis with contributions from transculturation theory [Ortiz, Rama], hauntology [Derrida, Gordon, Labanyi], and postdramatic theatre [Lehmann]. It introduces the notion of the arrested biome to approach scenography as an affective archive. The findings confirm that the wake does not function as a recognizable liturgical convention but as a scene of ritual tension that intensifies contradiction and keeps it open across body, language, and space. In this light, Atra bilis is consolidated as a key work for thinking—through women’s dramaturgy—the intersections of gender, political memory, and transcultural aesthetics of mourning in contemporary Spanish theatre.