Acceso usuarios
Esther Fernández Rodríguez
Hispanic Catholic liturgical ceremonies since the thirteenth century have drawn upon material symbolic imagery of Cristos articulados (jointed Christ-figures) for staging episodes from the Passion of Christ during Holy Week, such as the "Veneration of the Cross", the “Holy Burial", the “Visit to the Sepulcher,” and the “Resurrection.” Similarly, Spanish early modern hagiographical dramas looked to the puppet as the player of choice for materializing the concept of the divine. Only the puppet, an entity supposedly deprived of independent consciousness, has the capacity to represent God and His saints without profaning their sacred content, recasting their metaphorical nature in various forms of religious drama. This article explores the spectacular and dramatic roles played by Cristos articulados and máquinas reales, puppet theater companies specializing in hagiography, in liturgical and dramatic contexts and in communicating the complexity of theological notions with figures that index the realities of pre-modern Christianity. In an endeavor to bring the puppet's agency closer to the present, I examine two productions: El misterio del Cristo de los Gascones (directed by Ana Zamora, 2007) and El esclavo del demonio (directed by Jesús Caballero, 2009), both of which have rigorously revisited and revived two long-forgotten dramas in the twenty-first century.
