Personal information

Surname: Mansur
First name: Nara
Born: 1969, Havana, Cuba

Biography

Nara Mansur was born in Havana in 1969.  She can be described principally as a poet, although this categorisation becomes closely linked with her identity as a dramatist.  She edited the theatrical publication, Conjunto, between 1997 and 2007, produced by the Casa de las Américas for which she has also worked as part of their Theatre department.   Since 2007 she has lived between Cuba and Argentina, working at the Estudio Teatral El Cuervo directed by Pompeyo Audivert in Buenos Aires.

Themes

In her work, Carlotta Corday. Poema dramático, Mansur uses the figure of the French revolutionary to revisit and critique Cuba’s past.  Mansur belongs to a generation which inherits Cuba’s recent history of the Cuban revolution and its mythologies, but her theatre treats this legacy with a certain distance expressed through a kind of process of disassociation and irony.

Style

Mansur’s identity as a poet is evident in her work as a dramatist.  Her theatre is non-naturalistic and at times her plays explore oblique thoughts and ideas.  Thus Mansur’s characters are freed from psychological realism.  Mansur also employs a dense intertextuality to build her dramatic composition, weaving together diverse and seemingly incompatible lexicons.

Plays in the database

• Ignacio y Maria (c.2001) / Ignacio and Maria

Other works

• Mansur, Nara. 2009. Desdramatizándome. Cuatro poemas para el teatro, dramaturgia. Cuba Ediciones Alarco (in Spanish)

• Mansur, Nara. 2002. Carlotta Corday. Poema dramático (in Spanish)

• Mansur, Nara. 2006. Venus y el albañil (in Spanish)

Useful reading and websites

• Prizant, Yael. 2007. Theaters of Revolution: Staging Cuban Identities After the Cold War. Los Angeles, University of California

Entry written by Gwendolen Mackeith. Last updated on 19 June 2012.

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