Category: News

Caridad Svich Awarded 2012 Village Voice OBIE for Lifetime Achievement

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Photo by Emily Tan via villagevoice.com

Michael McKean presented the citation, written by Jose Rivera:

And now our final award of the evening. Certain artists see borders and stop at them. Others see borders as an opportunity for transcendence. Few artists can claim to have crossed so many boundaries at birth: Cuba, Argentina, Spain, and Croatia. Few have created so many bodies of work in so many disciplines: playwriting, songwriting, essay writing, teaching, translation, reviewing, editing, and mentoring. For her prodigious output as one of America’s most daring and provocative Latina writers, for her indefatigable energy, for her selfless and consistent advocacy of artists of all backgrounds, for her dizzying array of intellectual interests and pursuits—yes, for the very poetry that is her life’s energy—the judges are proud to give this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award to a nomad, a storyteller, and a true woman of the theater: CARIDAD SVICH

See the full list of winners here.

Watch the Presentation and her Acceptance Speech

Read her acceptance Speech Below:

“Make a spirit thing out of nothing. Call it a play.”

Theatre begs ascension.
Its vertical pull Tugs at the heart
And heavens
Whilst reminding you to
Keep your ear to the ground
Alive to the beauty in the dirt.

As you stand at theatre’s door – Strange, mysterious, elusive, maddening –
You are nonetheless charmed by it s glamour. What beggar this, the door says?
And so, we walk in.

Young night of silver stains
as we stand in smoke
Inside the den where loud and fast
meets the acid glow
Of rushing boys
and lingering girls
and cigarettes dangling from canvas totes
We pose and slack
and hang in throes
never letting on.

This is the way we all go
As we face the slanting light in the unknown dark:
A wee holler, a wild shout, exclaiming the furious game of living –
Hold on, we say,
While we wrestle the demons in our midst,
Hold fast n strong
And never, never let on
Cuz the truth will find you
the truth of making will catch you
and maybe, just maybe, sometimes when you’re not (even) looking,
save your very soul.
But we won’t let on, right?

Cause to let on would be
To let on Would be Like, the worst thing Ever…
All seen All been  All there and now Never letting on

EFE News covers OBIE win for Latin America article/interview link

DRAMATIS PERSONAE WORKSHOP with CARIDAD SVICH

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DREAMING A PLAY: Fast First Draft with Caridad Svich
ONLINE for five weeks starting the week of May 28, 2012
$125 ScriptWorks members/ $175 General

INFO/RESERVATIONS:
info@scriptworks.org; 512-454-9727

Nationally recognized playwright Caridad Svich, of Salvage Vanguard Theatre’s Fugitive Pieces, Thrush, and Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), guides you through a group and individual writing process to write a fast first draft of a new play in five weeks.

Open yourself to diving into character work and structuring new writing, reading different models and applying them to thinking about live performance using methodology geared toward creative visualization, dreaming and re-mapping dramaturgical strategies for the stage.

Enrollment is limited, so claim your spot today.

 

More info

THE WAY OF WATER May 29, 2012 at 7 PM at EST

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*************************************************
Ensemble Studio Theatre, New York City
(William Carden, Artistic Director)
invites you to a reading of

THE WAY OF WATER
a new play by Caridad Svich

Directed by Jose Zayas

May 29, 2012 at 7 PM at EST
549 West 52nd Street, 2nd Floor
(between 10th & 11th Aves), New York, NY 10019

The Way of Water is a play that pits the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico next to the lives of those directly affected by it. It’s a story about four people making do as best they can, living their lives, and trying to stay afloat in the land of many compromised dreams, as the devastation of a health and environmental crisis in the US Gulf is played out on a human scale. It’s a play about poverty in America, rumors and truth, what is said and what gets written, and the quest for an honorable life.

The Way of Water was developed at the 2011 Winter Writers Retreat at the Lark Play Development Center in New York City.

This reading is presented as part of an international reading scheme in collaboration with NoPassport theatre alliance. Dramaturgy: Heather Helinsky and R. Alex Davis. Official web page at http://nopassport.org/wayofwater

preview article about 2012 NOPE Conf in AZ

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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.”

Read the whole thing

Preview article about GUAPA in Austin

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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.

Read the whole thing here.

Iphigenia… (a rave fable), by Caridad Svich @Center Ithaca

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Incognita Presents Iphigenia…(a rave fable) in Downtown Storefront this March

“…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.

Read the whole article

 

News: Just published OUT OF SILENCE edited by Caridad Svich

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New from Eyecorner Press:

 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