Arizona State University will host the sixth annual NoPassportTheatre Conference, “Dreaming the Americas,” which is an event meant to break down borders of the mind.

The title of NoPassport’s 2012 conference is “Re:Connecting –Translocalities in Performance.” The event’s focus is movements of peoples and ideas over borders. Plays, performances and discussions will be used to examine this theme.

For the past five years, the conference has taken place in New York.NoPassport will host this year’s conference at ASU to analyze Arizona’s issues with physical and metaphorical borders, said Tamara Underiner, the program director of the Theater and Performance of the Americas at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts.

As a member of NoPassport, Underiner said she attended the past five conferences. Although it went well on the East Coast, Underiner said she wanted to bring the event to Arizona. She said she worked closely with fellow co-planner Micah Espinoza to make that happen for her own benefit as well as that of her students.

“It’s the perfect link for our students to meet the real people we’re studying,” Underiner said. “It’s hugely good for theprogram.”

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In one sense, new plays are old news in Austin. Local theatre companies have been spotlighting work by hometown playwrights for more than 30 years, and for half that time, new plays have constituted more than a quarter of the work produced on area stages every year. However, when you consider that only a small fraction of those Austin originals have come from writers of color and that Teatro Vivo – one of a handful of companies that consistently mount new works by Latino writers – only launched its festival devoted to such writers last year and that that inaugural festival attracted standing-room-only crowds to its staged readings of three plays, well, it’s clear that new plays are still making news here.

This weekend, Teatro Vivo follows up on that initial success with another trio of dramas fresh from the keyboards of Latino playwrights. For the second round, Artistic Director Rupert Reyes sought scripts from beyond the state’s borders as well as inside them and made room specifically for younger voices. As a result, this festival includes work by a University of Texas student, Arthur Marroquin, and a nationally prominent writer known to local audiences: Caridad Svich, who’s had three plays staged by Salvage Vanguard Theater.

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“…a throbbing, daring multimedia freakout.” (Denver Post)

MEET THE PLAYWRIGHT: Caridad Svich will speak at CSMA at 7:30 Wed Mar 14 about her work as a playwright and Incognita will present scenes from IPHIGENIA.

The full title of this astonishing play by award-winning playwright Caridad Svich is “Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable)”

As Svich describes her work, “This play hurls one of Greek tragedy’s most compelling sagas into a sleek netherworld of sex, drugs and trance music. Iphigenia is the daughter of a political celebrity who embraces sensuous excess with a transgendered glam rock star named Achilles in a desperate attempt to flee her inevitable fate.”

Incognita proudly collaborates with Cornell’s Teatrotaller and the Latino Civic Association to present the regional premiere of this play by one of our leading Latina playwrights.

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 OUT OF SILENCE: Censorship in Theatre & Performance

(theatre, performance, criticism)

CARIDAD SVICH, editor

JUST RELEASED: February, 2012

ISBN: ISBN: 978-8792633149

This collection of essays on the subject of theatre and various forms of censorship gathers in an original and stimulating manner the voices of academics, practitioners and artist-scholars, among them Chantal Bilodeau, Stephen Bottoms, Marvin Carlson, Tim Crouch, Stephen J. Duncombe, Rinde Eckert, Randy Gener, Matthew Goulish, Baz Kershaw, Joanna Laurens, Carl Lavery, Christopher Shinn, and Aleks Sierz. Edited by playwright, scholar and activist Caridad Svich, Out of Silence is an impassioned volume that focuses not only on governmental censorship, but also on the self-censorship of theatre artists in the process of theatre-making and performance.
“This insightful book should be read by theatre practitioners and administrators, and especially by those who guide the future generations of theatre artists who hopefully will be able to help create a vital theatre.” – Ted Shank

EYECORNER PRESS is an independent academic publishing house started as a collaboration between the universities of Roskilde and Aalborg in Denmark, Oulu in Finland, and Gainesville, Georgia, USA.

THE PRESS focuses on promoting academic writing with an edge.

THE PRESS gives priority to works that engage with rigorous thinking, but which are yet informed by a creative style, and irreverent approaches to literature, culture, philosophy, and visual art.

THE GENRES represented are academic interdisciplinary writing, poetry, aphorisms, fragments, and other borderline manifestations. The fiction manuscripts honor Raymond Federman’s precepts for the writing of critifiction, the conflation of criticism with fiction.

ALL MANUSCRIPTS undergo peer review. Readers include academics from both sides of the Atlantic.

THE PRESS publishes works in English, Danish, French, Romanian, and bilingual editions.

http://www.eyecornerpress.com

Teatro Vivo in conjunction with the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center and ScriptWorks will present the Austin Latino New Play Festival April 5 – 7, 2012. This second annual festival will showcase staged readings of three new plays (one per evening). The plays chosen this year from submissions are Guapa by Caridad Svich, Cura by Raul Garza and Rosalia by Arthur Marroquin.

Where do you look for inspiration?
Politics, poetry, music, film, literature and human experience

What’s your favorite book / movie / line from a play / pop culture guilty pleasure / cocktail?
Too many favorites but among them in random order are the films – Terence Malick’sDays of Heaven, Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, Allison Anders’ Gas Food Lodging, Jane Campion’s Bright Star, and Sidney Lumet’sDog Day Afternoon.

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