Latinx Actor Training ed. by Cynthia Santos DeCure and Micha Espinosa (review)

Reviewed by: Latinx Actor Training ed. by Cynthia Santos DeCure and Micha Espinosa Patricia Ybarra (She/Her) Latinx Actor Training. Edited by Cynthia Santos DeCure and Micha Espinosa. New York: Routledge, 2023; pp. xxiii + 233. Unless they have been living under a rock, readers of this review and future readers of this volume know that there has been a recent reckoning in the "American Theatre" regarding the treatment of artists of the global majority in our field. Motivated by the desires to end the horror of widespread violence against Native American, African American, Latinx, and Asian American communities and to change the unhealthy and often racist conditions with our own artistic spaces, global majority artists have asked for change—not only to attain "fairness" in relation to "opportunities" but also to undo the damage of Eurocentric pedagogies masked as universal within our educational spaces. This imperative asks us, as educators, to 1) learn, enact, or hire experts in performance methodologies of the global majority in our classrooms and 2) transculturate or transform US and European methods (such as Grotowski's "poor theatre" or Fitzmaurice Voicework) for the purpose of inclusion and liberation. Latinx Actor Training, edited by Cynthia Santos DeCure and Micha Espinosa, will help make this imperative a reality. Latinx Actor Training comprises twenty-five chapters divided into two parts: one dedicated to history, the other to acting. Most of the contributions are essays; although interviews with or testimonials by Latinx artists constitute a fair number of the offerings. This is understandable given that many of the artist elders in our community had the experience of being "firsts" in their theatre spaces or universities. Many had to be autodidacts or were impelled to adapt their Eurocentric training to their Latinx cultural realities, which are culturally, racially, and linguistically heterogeneous. That the volume uses the word "training" rather than "methods" is significant as many of the essays are primers on how to live as a Latinx actor as much as they are essays about theatrical techniques. Examples include "Dr. Alma Martinez: A Narrative Toward Becoming a Chicanx Actor," Christin Eve Cato's "Afro-Latinas in Conversation: Interview with Debra Ann Byrd, Founder of Harlem Shakespeare and Creator of Becoming Othello," Mónica Sánchez's "School of Autodidacts," Saúl García López aka La Saula's "Confessions of a Racial Nomad," and Micha Espinosa's "On Latinx Casting: Interview with Peter Murrieta, Emmy Award-Winning Writer and Producer." While the authors' experiences of racism, sexism, homophobia, and linguistic chauvinism (i.e., being asked to get rid of an accent or being expected to know accents from all of Latin America in audition processes) are addressed, each author offers insightful advice for emerging artists developed from trial and error within academic and professional spaces in the US and Mexico. Contributions on the methods and theories of training Latinx actors reveal the wide range of approaches that Latinx artists engage to make creative work, including conceptions of shamanism (La Pocha Nostra), duende, Theatre of the Oppressed (Augusto Boal), danza de unisono, The Four Agreements (Don Miguel Luis), and Theatre of the Sphere (El Teatro Campesino). Most of these methods, although used in the US, are Latin American and/or transnational in origin. And, notably, they all have spiritual, mythological, or cosmological components. Lest readers decide to exoticize these methods, the authors are careful to underscore how they adapt these techniques to their present cultural realities, often combining them with and/or transforming them alongside US acting pedagogies such as The Method, or Grotowski's "poor theatre." I emphasize this point to make it clear that many Latinx methods are in fact global and heterogeneous. One might read Marissa Chibás's essay "From Method to Mythic: Why Latinx? Why Mythic? How Mythic? Why Now?" to understand the Islamic heritage of Spain as it affects the Lorcan concept of duende, making it applicable to US-based training of racially and culturally heterogenous Latinx actors. Her essay proffers the promise of truly expansive globally minded actor training. In addition, CarlosAlexis Cruz's incorporation of both Latinx dance practices from Puerto Rico (bomba y plena), Mexico (Totonac voladores), Brazil (capoeira), and Latin American...