Professor Interrogates Animals in Performance at 2025 ASTR Conference

In early November, Dr. Marin Laufenberg, teaching assistant professor of Spanish and director of the Spanish MA program at ISU, presented her original work titled, ”Staging Generational Memories. Turtles Transferring Trauma and Time in Argentina and the U.S.” at the annual American Society for Theatre Research conference held in Denver, Colorado.

Laufenberg’s research addressed how live turtles have been incorporated into theatre and film work in a pair of contemporary works to address how the inheritance of narratives passed between generations is in turn generative, or, productive. She showed how the subjective, ever-evolving, and affectively imbued nature of memories holds its own form of knowledge which brings families together in their shared experiences of the past. Using the examples of the theatre work Mi vida después by Argentine Lola Arias (2009), and the 2016 U.S. episode of the TV show Transparent, “To Sardines and Back” by Joey Soloway, Faith Soloway and Ali Liebegott, Laufenberg understands turtle figures on stage to serve as mirrors, sounding boards, or containers to hold and transmit memories for the humans characters on stage and those spectating. Turtles in these works deepen our own human understanding of the unmeasurable and undefinable, the careful passage of time, the slow experience of moving through memories and alternate ways of experiencing life.

Within the conference working group, “AI/Animal Intelligences and Generative Acts of Nonhuman Performance”, Laufenberg and fellow academics addressed the questions, “how does/can performance access nonhuman Animal Intelligence to foster interspecies world-making? What new knowledges and “acts” are generated and for whom?” Laufenberg and co-conveners also partook in a conference field trip to the Denver Zoo, where the working group got a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the innovative efforts this zoo is developing to connect their patrons with the messages behind animal conservation. Conference participants also experienced a Virtual Reality exhibit at the zoo, designed to immerse spectators within animal environments and perspectives. This performative technology allows urban zoo patrons to transport themselves via their senses (movement alongside 360 degree visual video, sound, etc.) to the wilds of African migrations or underwater to swim beside manta rays, for example. 

The research developed in preparation for this conference was inspired by working with her Spanish 6676 Animal Studies in Latin American Literature class during the past summer session. In that class, the students and Laufenberg examined a Mexican play by Valeria Fabbri titled “Hoy se murió mi tortuga” (“Today My Turtle Died”) in which human-turtle relationships are broached in a humorous yet melancholic light. This play will make its way into the longer analysis of turtle characters in performance that Laufenberg is developing. 

Laufenberg´s attendance to the ASTR conference was made possible thanks to a travel grant from the College of Arts and Letters.