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Conference on Spanish Theater Features Performances from Spain at UMass Amherst and Amherst College on Sept. 21-22
AMHERST, Mass. – Two professional theater companies from Spain will offer free Spanish-language performances during a two-day conference, “Theaters of Marginality,” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College on Sept. 21-22.
The conference will include panels on Spanish, Catalan and Galician theater and performances dealing with topics of exile, gender, sexuality, religion, translation, adaptation and performance traditions.
La Quintana Teatro will premiere its play Desde lo invisible at UMass Amherst’s Rand Theater on Friday, Sept. 21 at 7:30 p.m. The award-winning play exploring intellectual disabilities was showcased at the Centro Dramático Nacional in May, and will be featured at Teatro Pavón-Kamikaze in Madrid in October.
On Saturday, Sept. 22 at 5 p.m., the U.S. premiere of De algún tiempo a esta parte, a monologue by Max Aub, Spanish exile author in Mexico, will be performed at Amherst College’s Holden Theater. Spanish actress and researcher Esther Lázaro has adapted and played Aub’s monologue in the theaters of Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico City, Paris and Vienna. The play chronicles the harrowing experience of a Jewish woman in the Vienna of 1938, before the onset of World War II.
“Theaters of Marginality” is the second biennial conference of the Iberian Theater and Performance Network (ITPN), which will bring to town scholars from more than 20 universities working on theater and performance studies from the early modern period to present times. Assistant professor David Rodríguez-Solás of the Spanish and Portuguese studies program in UMass Amherst’s department of languages, literatures, and cultures, and Amherst College Spanish professor Catherine Infante co-organized the conference. Professor María Delgado from Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, will deliver the keynote address on Friday at 4:30 p.m. in S240 Integrative Learning Center. Delgado will talk about her groundbreaking research in film and theater “observing rehearsals and discussing the setting up of the sequence of actions that makes up the theatrical performance.”
More information about the conference, including a complete schedule and details of the Spanish-language performances, can be found at http://blogs.umass.edu/marginality.
The conference is made possible with the generous support of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts and the department of languages, literatures, and cultures at the university; Lamond Lecture Funds and the dean of the faculty at Amherst College; the Embassy of Spain, and the Five College Lecture Funds. With additional support from UMass Amherst: Spanish and Portuguese studies; Modern European studies; interdepartmental program in film studies; Translation Center; Institute for Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies; department of women, gender, sexuality studies; department of theater and the Graduate School. Amherst College: Spanish department, European studies department; sexuality, women’s and gender studies department; theater and dance department. Mount Holyoke College: department of Spanish, Latina/o, and Latin American studies. Smith College: Spanish department. Mosaic: Five College Multicultural Theater Committee.