Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The concept of mental illness has been hidden behind a curtain of stigma and dislike for a long time. The magnitude, suffering and burden in terms of disability and costs for individuals, families and society in general are overwhelming and do not correspond with the resources devoted to their research and attention. This document refers the importance of mental health within public health in Mexico. The presence of these mental disorders in society is reaching alarming figures and the forecasts indicate that they will increase. It is vital to highlight three main axes in the development of strategies that seek direct intervention in the population: prevention, hospitalization and social reintegration. It requires a great human and political will along with a great commitment of all health professionals to achieve a real change within the health system in Mexico regarding mental health.

Today, tobacco is a serious public health problem considered a risk factor in chronic diseases and its complications. Tobacco habit is a risk factor completely modifiable, so it is important to quit this bad habit at all ages. Due to tobacco epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) established the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) and the Monitor, Protect, Offer, Warn, Enforce and Raise (MPOWER) Brochures and the importance of the use of social marketing as a tool of educational communication to transmit health information clearly, and promote healthy lifestyles, reinforce knowledge, attitudes or behaviors.

The Laboratorio Escénico de Experimentación Social (LEES) is a Living Arts platform that brings together emerging Cuban and foreign artists. Through the curatorship and management of artistic programs, workshops, conferences and residencies, it assumes the "processes" as spaces for continuous experimentation. Some of his most powerful projects, which are carried out with the support of important cultural institutions, include Inservi, an artistic residence made for young creators who think their work of thought/action/creation together; and Documenta Sur, a program for the development of contemporary documentary theater that focuses on the exploration of new theatrical formats and socio-aesthetic research in Cuba based on work with "non-fictional documents" whose axes span the relationships between Theater and History, Theater and Memory, and Theater and Society. The exquisite corpse below is a playful-poetic approach that its members rehearse: Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas, Marta María Borrás, Yohayna Hernández González and Dianelis Diéguez.

Reflecting on the performing arts today implies thinking about a broad set of practices whose heterogeneity extends to the modes of creation, reception, training and all the gear that makes up the stage event. Hence, the challenge of considering a publication that reflects this complexity necessarily involves reviewing the dislocations and displacements that have occurred in the modes of representation. The genesis of this publication, to which we would like to refer briefly, places this dislocation at the center of your concern: our first motivation, within the Performing Arts area of "‹"‹the COCOA College of Communication and Contemporary Arts, was to enable a space for reflection for the most current Ecuadorian scenic practice, taking into account that there are few publications that exist to analyze it in the context of contemporary debate. Immediately afterwards, we realized that the diversity of these new practices went beyond those geographic and disciplinary territories that, in the first instance, we mapped out. Far from being limited to a specifically dance or theatrical performance, today the scenic is acting on a horizon of dissemination crossed by the performative, disciplinary contamination, the practices of the real, the modes of expanded research; On the other hand, we also feel that these displacements are necessarily framed within a broad network of thought and action that is in dialogue with regional and global processes. Then, our project was expanded with the desire to trace that complexity that materializes in this edition of post (s), through a plurality of voices and modes of writing, contexts and places of enunciation.

When we talk about education in the performing arts, we talk about the end of a long chain. The conservatoires1 for theatre and theatre-related disciplines, for dancers, singers, instrumentalists, actors, directors, stage and costume designers, result from a long development of an aesthetic convention. All these training centres were founded with the sole purpose of providing new talent for the representative institutions, which night after night perform ballets, operas, concerts, theatre and musicals. They are the result of an existing artistic practice in action, which is at least 100 years old - the basic premises for opera training are actually quite a bit older. They were not built in order to renew aesthetics, not to mention questioning the structures or institutions for which they educate. And thus the training for the existing "˜market"™ is the last and most inert link in a chain of art forms, arts institutions and education for the arts institutions. 

I make objects for as long as I can remember, I remember some that I played with: wooden carts pulled by rope, rockets with matches and aluminum, off-road tanks with a wooden reel, a garter, a nail and a stick, a cart with jars of cookies and recycled motors, furniture with metal soda lids and multiple models built with Lego that accompanied my childhood. They were all born as unique objects from a process of trial and error and according to the resources that they had or could recycle. I got to know the scenery in 1992, as an Industrial Design student, when I had the opportunity to work for a theatrical event. From that moment I became involved with the design of objects for the performing arts. I arrived in Quito in 1994, and I started my work in scenography, museography, exhibition montages, collaboration with artistic projects and university teaching in Product Design. In this essay, to reflect on the scenery and scenic objects, from my practice, I have returned to my blogs with the idea of "‹"‹reviving my memories and experiences.

This essay engages a 2019 photo-performance series by Emilio Rojas titled Instructions for Becoming. Rojas"™s series performs an homage to artist Laura Aguilart and, thinking about homage, the essay considers gesture as well as call and response as performance techniques by which bodies and artworks jump body to body, limb to limb. By way of Rojas"™s work Heridas Abiertas (A Gloria), the essay then moves to discuss the performance-photographic work Fringe,  by Anishnaabe artist Rebecca Belmore that can be read beside the Rojas/Aguilar amalgam. Belmore"™s appearance in the chapter ushers in work that  gestures to ancestral worlds, in her case indigenous, in order to body forth alternatives to the myopic forward march of capital-colonial registers of time. This is followed by a reading of Roberto Rossellini"™s Journey to Italy, read contrapuntally with Belmore, Aguilar, and Rojas. Rossellini"™s film, like Rojas"™s, Aguilar"™s, and Belmore"™s photo-performances, explore the jump of gesture between or among animate and inanimate materials, and human and nonhuman materials, such as stone statuary and human flesh or, with Rojas, tree limb and human limb. The effort, throughout, is to engage a practice of decolonial performance criticism.

Recovering the experience from the theatrical performance Higiene, I will try to focus on the aesthetic accomplishments generated not isolated by themselves but intertwined as a counterpart to the cognitive effort done by the authors of the play to try to grasp on three fundamental concepts of Jacques Derrida"™s philosophy; parergonality, decentralization and deconstruction were boiled down until they revealed their dramaturgical possibilities, as creative triggers for a theatrical performance that could defy the idea of thought as an exclusive faculty of the mind, instead, "Higiene" brings light on the actions of the body as procedures that convey and produce knowledge, in the context of theatrical representations.

This article conceptualizes New Ecuadorian cinema as small, glocal and pluri- national. It makes the case that it is a propitious time to study this emergent cinema. However, while it is a heterogeneous film scene, this article argues that it is still traversed by long-standing ethnoracial, class and regional in- equalities. After inserting Ecuador"™s largely unknown film history into regio- nal trends, different spheres of production are analyzed, including mestizo fictionalized narratives, activist documentaries, indigenous and community filmmaking and coastal "˜guerilla"™ filmmaking. The article looks at both the accomplishments of the sector and current challenges. It proposes that more state and private funds invest in fostering plurinational and regional initiati- ves, and cultivating diverse makers and audiences.