Join us to celebrate Hispanic classical theater at this year’s LA Escena Festival! From September 12-17th, Diversifying the Classics will be hosting the fourth edition of our biennial theater festival at UCLA’s historic Nimoy Theater, newly remodeled and revitalized right here in Westwood – https://cap.ucla.edu/ucla-nimoy-theater
On Tuesday, April 23, Diversifying the Classics welcomed Carlota Gaviño, Iñigo Rodríguez-Claro, and José Pablo Polo of Grumelot Teatro for an online roundtable about their new production, Amar por ver amar o recuperar lo perdido. At the event, Grumelot performed a preview of their work-in-progress, an exploration of love and loss inspired by Lope de Vega’s comedy, El perro del hortelano. After the preview, we held a Q&A about Grumelot’s process and their next steps as they prepare to bring the production to LA Escena, DTC’s biennial theater festival taking place this September. Thank you again to Hispanex for making this production possible!
Producing comedias is often a challenging discussion amongst my Latiné community because of the irreparable harm brought on by Spanish colonialism, especially when producing them at predominately white institutions (PWIs). Yet by not doing them we are silencing the collection of progressive works by artists like Ana Caro, who challenged political agendas, religious ideologies, and societal norms and whose plays encourage present-day artists and patrons to look inward for personal and communal change. So, when Professor Margaret E. Boyle (specialist in Hispanic women’s literature and comedia history) invited me to work with her and her colleagues Professor Ireri Chávez-Bárcenas (musicologist in the early modern period) and Professor Germán Cárdenas-Alaminos (scenic designer) on Valor, agravio y mujer, the first bilingual theatrical production in Bowdoin College’s 230-year history, I couldn’t say yes fast enough. Their passion and kindness jumped beyond the Zoom screen with a joyous welcoming spirit that promised a rewarding creative adventure.
Please join Diversifying the Classics on April 23 from 12:00-3:00 pm PST for an online roundtable with Madrid-based Grumelot Theater Company! We will be discussing their exciting new production, Amar por ver amar o Recuperar lo perdido, which will be performed at LA Escena 2024, Diversifying the Classics’ biennial theater festival.
In 2023, Diversifying the Classics received an Alianza-MX grant to expand our mission of
promoting Hispanic classical theater to collaborate with Mexican artists and educators. With this
grant, Diversifying the Classics partnered with Professor Gabriela Villanueva of the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) to create MEX-Clásicos with a team of UCLA graduate
students including Saraí Jaramillo, Rachel Kaufman, Galo Lopez, Rebecca Smith, and Sofía
Yazpik and postdoctoral fellow Isaac Giménez.
In this illuminated lecture, Professor Barbara Fuchs addresses Miguel de Cervantes’s surprisingly timely take on the trustworthiness of media. How does who we are shape what we see and believe? And how do the purveyors of media manipulate those distinctions?
Diversifying the Classics’ latest translation has been out adventuring from coast to coast, from Red Bull Theater in NYC to UC Irvine here in Southern California. Don Quixote de la Mancha—Guillén de Castro’s theatrical adaptation of Cervantes’ classic novel—recently delighted audiences for two nights at UCI, in collaboration with the New Swan Shakespeare Center and Brown Bag Theatre Company.