Classical Theater in New Forms

In a recent Howlround article, “Classical Theatre in Another Strange Land,” Diversifying the Classics’ collaborator Esther Fernández (Rice University) explores the opportunities for classical theater in the new digital mode necessitated by the pandemic. She examines En otro reino extraño (In Another Strange Land), a piece created in Spain earlier this year which “situates excerpts from Lope de Vega’s plays and poems within a contemporary digital framework and weaves in a twenty-first-century perspective and reactions from the actors staging the works.” Can digital theater capture the magic of live performance? Can it, in fact, surpass traditional staging practices to produce greater intimacy and relevancy for the classics? What happens when digital theater transitions back to “in real life”? Read the article here: https://howlround.com/classical-theatre-another-strange-land and check out how Diversifying the Classic’s festival of Hispanic classical theater, LA Escena 2020, has transitioned into an international, virtual celebration of theater’s unifying power across cultures and distances. See the festival schedule and get free tickets here: https://www.anoisewithin.org/la-escena-2020/ 

Photo credit: En Otro Reino Extraño. Photo by Sergio Parra.