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.”
Month: April 2012
Preview article about GUAPA in Austin
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.
Read the whole thing here.