A roundtable on scholars collaborating with New York’s Red Bull Theater, organized by Prof. Jean Howard of Columbia University, allowed us to share our vital partnership, “Hispanic Golden Age Classics,” with a large audience of early modernists.
A most welcome note from Noémie Ndiaye, Associate Professor of English and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago, on her experience teaching DTC’s The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs:
In case you missed it at LA Escena, Rosie Nagasaki’s I Put a Spell on You, based on Ana Caro’s El conde Partinuplés, will have a staged reading this weekend as part of EST’s festival of new plays, Winterfest!
When: Saturday, April 5, 8pm
Where: 3269 Casitas Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90039
For more information:
To celebrate Women’s History Month, Expand the Canon, an organization that supports the study and production of classic plays by women and underrepresented genders, will host a digital discussion of Ana Caro’s Valor, agravio, y mujer. The discussion will take place on Sunday, March 30th at 10 am PST on Zoom. Diversifying the Classics is excited to join this discussion of Caro’s timeless text, which we translated as The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs in 2019. Contact emily@hedgepigensemble.org for more information.
We are thrilled to announce the release of Golden Tongues: Adapting Hispanic Classical Theater in Los Angeles, an anthology that brings Hispanic classical theater into vibrant dialogue with contemporary storytelling. This collection, born of the collaboration between Diversifying the Classics and Playwrights’ Arena, features seven English-language adaptations of comedia classics by Los Angeles playwrights. These plays offer fresh perspectives on themes of gender, race, cultural identity, and social justice, connecting centuries-old narratives to the challenges and experiences of modern audiences.
On December 3rd, Diversifying the Classics was delighted to welcome the acting professor and voice coach Paul Wagar to speak to the translation workshop. Paul worked with the actors in TFT’s extraordinary production of The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs by Ana Caro, directed by Michael Hackett. Paul shared invaluable insights about how actors receive translations of Hispanic classical theater and how DTC’s translations can be best adapted to the stage. Paul taught the workshop how details such as punctuation, line breaks, and sounds affect the way actors perform our texts, helping us make informed decisions in our scripts that will allow our translations to shine in the mouths of actors.
On October 17, 2024, more than five hundred members of the UC San Diego community attended a staged reading of Love is the Greater Labyrinth by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. In his introductory remarks before the performance, Manuel Vargas, a professor of Philosophy at UC San Diego, mentioned that he never would have believed five years ago that such a large audience would come out for a play by a seventeenth-century Mexican nun at what has long been considered a STEM-focused institution.
We are excited to share the publication of the first of two special issues of The Bulletin of the Comediantes dedicated to the sueltas, cheaply-printed texts which made comedias widely accessible in the early modern Hispanic world. This issue highlights the work of Szilvia Szmuk-Tanenbaum, founder of the extraordinary database Comedias Sueltas, an interactive online resource dedicated to cataloguing sueltas and enabling research on them. Read the issue here!
We are excited to announce TFT’s upcoming production of The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs by Ana Caro, translated by UCLA’s Diversifying the Classics and directed by Michael Hackett. Performances are this week, November 21-26, at UCLA’s Macgowan Hall 1340.
Join us as members of Diversifying the Classics meet for a panel discussion titled “Reaching New Audiences Through Translation and Adaptation.” The panelists will present on a variety of projects currently underway at DTC, including the adaptation series Golden Tongues, which invites local playwrights to adapt Hispanic classical theater to a modern Los Angeles, and MEX-Clásicos’ children’s book project, which focuses on developing materials for young audiences. Moreover, the panel will explore the role of technology and multimedia platforms in expanding the reach of classical works to broader demographics, particularly younger audiences. We hope to see you there as we discuss best strategies for embracing the richness of diverse perspectives and narratives so that we can ensure that classical literature remains vibrant and relevant in an ever-changing world.
