Join us to celebrate Hispanic classical theater at this year’s LA Escena Festival! From September 17th-20th, Diversifying the Classics will be hosting the fifth edition of our biennial theater festival at UCLA’s historic Nimoy Theater.
Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan will present DTC’s translation of The Courage to Right a Woman’s Wrongs by Ana Caro from March 19th to March 29th. The production will be directed by our long-term collaborator Oscar Quiroz, who previously directed Sor Juana’s Love Is the Greater Labyrinth.
DTC is thrilled to share that the Department of Theatre, Film, and Digital Productions at the University of California, Riverside will present Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna, or Like Sheep to Water, translated by Curt Columbus and directed by long-term DTC collaborator Melanie Queponds. Barbara Fuchs will lead a post-play discussion on Friday, Feb, 13.
We are delighted to announce that our director, Barbara Fuchs, will be sharing her family-friendly adaptation of Fuente Ovejuna as part of the Folger’s Reading Room Festival on January 24th at 11:30 am. This adaptation invites young audiences to imagine solidarity in the face of tyranny while crafting and making music. Before the reading, there will be a hands-on workshop for the audience to create the props to be used in the play. Admission is free for children under 12 and students with ID, $20 admission for others.
On November 17th, DTC’s newest translation, The Travels of Teodor by Lope de Vega, premiered at Red Bull Theater in New York City. The performance was the sixth iteration of the Hispanic Golden Age Classics reading series, a long-running collaboration between DTC and Red Bull. The phenomenal reading was directed by Melissa Crespo and featured Isabel Arraiza, Jordan Bellow, Rajesh Bose, Darryl Gene Daughtry, Andy Grotelueschen, Jesse Cao Long, Keren Lugo, Melissa Mahoney, David Mattar Merten, Ajay Naidu, Alfredo Narciso, and Randolph Curtis Rand.
DTC Members
In early September, Diversifying the Classics visited Mexico City for a colloquium on classical theater titled “De los textos a las tablas: El teatro de la modernidad temprana (s. XVI-XVII) en su proyección geográfica, mediática y temporal,” hosted by the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (FFyL) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). This colloquium was one outcome of the work we have been doing through Mex-Clásicos, a collaborative project between UNAM and UCLA, funded by the UC’s Alianza-MX office.
We are thrilled to share that students at the Bresee Foundation have won the Audience Choice Award at the REACH Media Festival for their comedia music video composed as part of DTC’s collaboration with Bresee and based on our translation of The Beast of Hungary. Students adapted the comedia with a rock and roll twist. We are so proud of their dedication and hard work as they composed the music, wrote the lyrics, and filmed, directed and edited the video. Congratulations to all the students who helped create the comedia music video and thank you to those involved: Bresee Foundation Teen Tech Center team, ArtsBridge artist-educators, and members of DTC.
The Hispanic Golden Age Classics series continues with a reading of Lope de Vega’s La doncella Teodor in our brand-new English translation.
DTC is pleased to announce that with support from the UCLA Global Research Grant Award, we are expanding our Latin American collaborations on Hispanic classical theater to Argentina. In addition to our ongoing collaborations with Mexico, we will now be partnering with Argentine theater artists and the Universidad Torcuato de Tella (UTDT) in Buenos Aires. Theatermakers Lolo & Lauti and Tamara Tenenbaum have been commissioned to produce new adaptations of classic comedias—stay tuned for news of their work! The Global Research award will enable critical dialogue among scholars and theatermakers on the relevance and potential of Hispanic classical theater across the hemisphere, while producing new adaptations that directly engage local audiences today.
Join us at LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes on November 20th for readings of three original comedia adaptations from DTC’s 2024 anthology Golden Tongues: Adapting Hispanic Classical Theater in Los Angeles. Through their work, playwrights Diana Burbano, June Carryl, and Luis Alfaro explore how comedia can help us better understand California’s past. They will offer pre-performance remarks and our director, Barbara Fuchs, will introduce central themes of their respective plays.