Latinx Theatre

Café Onda (the Journal of the Latinx Theatre Commons) can’t make all our virtual dreams come true, but this space can celebrate the dynamic creativity and connectivity of Latina/o theatermakers as together we build our digital present.

Albuquerque, New Mexico: We have a varied company, and we’re always looking to put on kick ass plays. It’s pretty cool that we have a company where any of our actresses could play Hamlet. And not like, “Female Hamlet”, but you know, Hamlet. Or where people of different races play siblings, without comment or explanation, and our audiences don’t bat an eye.

Whether it is race, place, ethnicity, or personhood, Cuban and Cuban diasporic performances push the boundaries of linear logics of the body towards a tapestry of experiential becoming. Here, I would like to offer my experiences and reflections of this kind of world-making practice from my fieldwork with Cuban spirit mediums, or espiritistas.

Georgina Escobar writes about traveling from New York to New Mexico to see Cascarones at Teatro Paraguas, and the affirmation this production brought after she waited to see it staged.

There is so much that we, the new Latina/o playwrights, can learn from those who came before us. And if we as a cultural community are to keep working at diversifying the American stage, we need to be looking behind us as often as looking ahead. Mentorship is about paying it forward.

I wrote this summer, but all channeled through the Lorca lens. Translating when you are sad, I can say, is a very good thing to do. You can experience wild creativity within very safe margins. It’s Lorca’s play. But I get to stand in his skin, and pretend. I get to leave the sad couch of my mind, and go somewhere else. Lorca is my Virgil.

While "Hortensia's" sibling protagonists remain displaced, frozen in time, their limbo is markedly different than is typical for exiles. The characters share a peculiar “aging disorder;” like Peter Pan, they never grew up. The script calls for actors much younger than the characters they are portraying, a visual metaphor for the exiles’s lost years, to concretize the feeling of subtracted youth. Exile manifests psycho-physiologically, from the mind to the flesh, as displacement is visibly dramatized.

The book as a whole is a deeply moving, authentic, and relatable piece of writing. It begins by relating "The Panza Monologues" authors’ personal and social history, and then shifts gears into practical application, even including a DIY (do it yourself) production manual. "The Panza Monologues" illustrate the inherent value of theater and performance of and from a specific community and culture.

P. Carl interviews Michael Garcés, Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater, about their touring production California: The Tempest, which revisits ten California communities that were part of ten year’s of Institute Summer Residencies.

Teresa Marrero writes about the 2014 International Hispanic Theater Festival in Miami and how/why Latin American theater and American theatre are embedded differently in culture

“Dreaming in Cuban” is dedicated to performance as a way to evoke, remember, feel, create, long for, and traverse Cuba. The discussion in the blog series that follows on Cuban theater and performance includes new research on contemporary, historical, ritual, and experimental performance based in Havana and Miami.

I walk away, reflection upon reflection, moved and inspired. Even now, the questions that came up at the long table stay with me: What is your fire? What is it that you are here to uniquely do? As many of us prepare to meet again in Los Angeles this fall, we will keep these questions in mind. I can’t help but to think back to the idea of a spherical journey, which is the unstoppable future of the LTC and Latina/o theater in this the US.

As a Chicano director and writer, I am inspired by my own culture—the influence of poetry and magical realism, the contradictions and collision of European and Indigenous cultures, the corridos and huapangos of home, the memories of sitting on the porch hearing my family’s stories, and my own ever-growing inquiry into the nature of storytelling—from the specific to the universal—all came to mind in the design of the play.

Jamie Gahlon interviews José Luis Valenzuela on the LATC and the upcoming Encuentro 2014: A National Latina/o Theatre Festival.

The Los Angeles Theater Center (LATC) in downtown Los Angeles is looking for ten arts leaders of various backgrounds who represent the future leadership of the American theater to apply to our newly minted Artistic Leaders Fellowship. The Fellowship will take place from October 1 through November 21, 2014 at The LATC, and run concurrently with the 2014 LATC Encuentro—the largest National Latina/o theater festival in over twenty-five years. // El Los Angeles Theater Center (LATC), localizado en el centro de Los Ángeles, busca a 10 diversos líderes en las artes que representan el futuro liderato del Teatro Americano para que soliciten la nueva beca llamada Artistic Leaders Fellowship. Este programa se llevará a cabo del 1 de octubre al 21 de noviembre en el LATC en paralelo con el Encuentro LATC 2014—el festival nacional latino más grande en la nación en los pasados veinticinco años.

Association for Theatre in Higher Education pre-conference attendees made their way to Scottsdale, Arizona via bus, through a carefully planned route that covered important sites connected to SB 1070, labor history, and immigration. Through this tour, participants acquired a richer understanding of contemporary Arizona immigration policy and its implementation.

To understand the deep impact Latina/o artists have had in our collective history, it is crucial to discuss the varied artistic expressions that exist within the polycultural Latina/o theater landscape. The Encuentro seeks to understand how and why we arrive to each form—be it community-based, avant-garde, ensemble-based, playwright-driven, devised, or experimental work. // Para poder entender el impacto que han tenido varios artistas Latinos/as en nuestra historia colectiva, es necesario discutir las varias formas de expresión artística existentes en nuestro territorio multi-cultural mediante el teatro Latino. Este Encuentro busca entender el como y el porque de cada proyecto escénico—sea teatro de la comunidad, avant-garde, colectivo, basado en material original y en el dramaturgo, teatro ideado, o experimental.

In this installment, Maya Malan-Gonzalez details her experience attending the 2014 TCG Conference as a millenial and coming to terms with her mixed racial identity.

In this last installment, Armando Huipe shares his observations about the identity affinity groups at the 2014 TCG Conference.

In this installment, Lisa Portes reflects on her experience at the TCG Conference and ponders how artistic curiosity can influence a "polycultural American theatre."

In this second installment, Olga Sanchez discusses the act of physically and metaphorically crossing borders at the 2014 TCG Conference.

In this first installment, Luis Alfaro reflects on his experience at the 2014 TCG National Conference: Crossing Borders.

We are committed to providing a safe, crowd-sourced space for online dialogue and discussions around the topic of Latina/o theater. As the definitions of Latinidad and Latina/o theater continue to shift and evolve, so will Café Onda / Nos dedicaremos a proveer un espacio positivo, creado de opiniones publicas donde las conversaciones acerca de los temas de el teatro Latino/a puedan florecer. Así como es cambiante e indefinida la identificación académica y artística de lo que es Latinidad y el teatro que lo representa, así también Café Onda será siempre cambiante y evolucionará en forma colectiva.

Dani Snyder-Young writes about Generation Sex, a devised piece from Teatro Luna looking at misogyny, violence, Latina identities, modern femininity, and more.