Latin American Theatre Today 2005 in Connecticut

FALL2005 135 LatinAmerican Theatre Today 2005 in Connecticut TimothyG.Compton The sixth edition of Latin American Theatre Today was the first held away from the University of Kansas. The University of Connecticut hosted the event and provided its setting, Laurietz Seda organized it, gathered the resources and staff, and made sure that things ran smoothly. George Woodyard, who obviously relished his role as non-organizer, gave the Festival’s only keynote address the first evening, delivering the University of Connecticut “Luis Eyzaguirre Lecture” which he entitled “One Hundred Years of Plenitude: Key Moments in 20th Century Latin American theatre.” He identified and commented on what he considers to be ten key moments or forces in twentieth-century Latin American theatre, some of which were events (such as the 1968 Festival de Manizales), some were movements (such as the Teatro del Pueblo phenomenon in Buenos Aires) and others were people with huge impacts on theatre (such as Florencio Sánchez, Rodolfo Usigli, Seki Sano and Eugenio Barba). Mornings featured presentations of ponencias in concurrent sessions running five-deep, so some 100 scholars presented with representation from numerous countries. Many presentations dealt with the major theme of the conference, “Traducción, transgénero y transnacionalismo.” Early afternoons featured playwright roundtables with multiple playwrights each afternoon . These included Eduardo Rovner, Cristina Escofet, Nora Glickman, Héctor Levy-Daniel from Argentina; Frank and Reynaldo Disla from the Dominican Republic; Roberto Ramos-Perea,AravindAdyanthaya and Carlos Canales from Puerto Rico; Guillermo Schmidhuber,Antonio Zúñiga and Estela Leñero from Mexico; Migdalia Cruz, a Puerto Rican from New York; and Guillermo Gómez Peña, a Mexican now based in San Francisco. They spoke about their relationship with theatre and society, their work and fielded questions . Many of them personified the conference theme of transnationalism. 136 LATINAMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW Late afternoons featured workshops on translation or performance, “lecturas dramatizadas” of plays recently written by Estela Leñero, Carlos Canales and Nora Glickman, a live interview with Roberto Ramos-Perea, and screening of a film documentary. Two performances occurred nightly, with a bonus afternoon puppet show on April 6. The schedule of organized events ran from 8 AM to 10 PM, entirely on the University of Connecticut campus, which had beautiful facilities for all events. Plays at theatre festivals tend to be performed by small casts with minimal sets and technical requirements, and seek to break new ground in their content or technique. These traits largely describe the whole of the nine performances of this festival. Four of the plays were monologues. Four others had casts of two. The play with the largest cast had four actors. About half of the performances did not have a traditional story line and about the same number featured non-traditional visual imagery.Almost all lasted about an hour, with the longest lasting about 80 minutes. Four performances took place entirely in Spanish, one entirely in Portuguese, three almost entirely in English, and one had portions in English and others in Spanish. The highlight of the performances for me wasAravindAdyanthaya´s Prometeo encadenado, which he wrote, directed and performed himself. This was an “escritura dramatizada,” in which the set consisted almost entirely of a laptop computer on a desk with a chair and a large screen onto which was projected what Adyanthaya input to the computer. The major action of the play was just that, the inputting of data into a computer, which sounds rather dull, but in fact the audience seemed entertained and riveted to the monologue throughout. At first, when the only action was watching the performer type, the audience seemed to chuckle at even simple typographical errors. Perhaps the amusement stemmed from our surprise at seeing something so mundane as processing words transformed into theatre. Later the play become interactive with the audience, as Adyanthaya told the story of Prometheus, then interacted brilliantly with an audience volunteer, then went into the audience himself and finally led the audience in chants and word plays. Although some of this sounds silly, in fact this play examined several subjects in rather profound ways. One of the most striking was a profound look into the nature of symbols, and particularly letters...