I first dipped my toes into a swimming pool when I was five years old. I was at a hotel in Miami, Florida on holiday with my parents. We had a week in the sun before traveling back to Paterson, New Jersey, where we lived at the time. I was absolutely terrified of swimming, but was attracted to the water, and moreover the freedom everyone in the pool seemed to possess with such remarkable ease. There was something thrilling, sensual and dangerous about the pool, and I was eager to let go of my fear and take my first stab at this thing called “swimming.”
My dad, a former athlete and enviably powerful swimmer, called at me from inside the hotel pool. “Dip your toes in,” he said in his Argentine-inflected Spanish, “and then slowly let yourself in. We’ll learn one step at a time.” The combination of south Florida sun and the slightly inappropriate beauty of a hotel swimming pool steps away from the Atlantic Ocean was too much to resist, and so, I, stepped in.
I don’t know what I expected. Some sort of magic? Life transformation? But the water was just water. Warm from the sun with a slightly cool undertow. I tugged at my blue bathing suit and kept walking into it. My dad was waiting for me and held my hand, and slowly, slowly, I had my first swimming lesson. What I remember most was the feeling—one that continues to this day when I swim, especially in pool water—of absolute yet controlled freedom, and at the same time, eerie otherworldliness. If swimming in the ocean is meeting Nature, swimming in a pool is about meeting yourself, and also an extension of yourself.
Category: News
THE WAY OF WATER is now live from StageReads!
Caridad Svich’s play THE WAY OF WATER with a foreword by Henry Godinez from the Goodman Theater, is the first issue of StageReads founded by Meredith Lynsey Schade and Jody Christopherson. Now available for download. Please visit the newly launched website for details!http://stagereads.com/“
2012 finalist for PEN Center USA Literary Award in Drama
MAGNIFICENT WASTE
a play by Caridad Svich is finalist for the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Drama.
GUAPA receives grant from Edgerton Foundation
Caridad Svich’s new play GUAPA is recipient of an Edgerton Foundation New Play Award grant for its October 2012 production at Borderlands Theatre in Arizona.
new writing class August-September
NoPassport Writing Extension: Revision and Re/Making the New
with Caridad Svich
August 28-September 28, 2012
A playwriting intensive focused on revision of work, but also, where necessary, creating new work building upon themes from a previous work. All work done via email.
Total cost: $125
Class size maximum: 20
Payments directly online to http://www.fracturedatlas.org/donate/2623
Scheduled Premieres in the 12-13 Season
Scheduled world and area premieres for OBIE-winning playwright Caridad Svich in the 2012-2013 theatre season:
Her new play GUAPA will receive an NNPN rolling world premiere at Borderlands Theatre in Arizona, Phoenix Theatre in Indianapolis, and Miracle Theatre in Oregon; her play based on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ Love in the Time of Cholera will receive its Spanish language world premiere at Repertorio Espanol in the fall in New York City, and her play The Tropic of X will receive its English language premiere at Single Carrot Theatre in Baltimore, MD.
There will also be regional premieres of her bilingual version of In the Time of the Butterflies (based on the novel by Julia Alvarez) at Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis and The House of the Spirits at Gala Hispanic Theatre in Washington D.C.
Academic productions in 2012-2013: 12 Ophelias (a play with broken songs) at USC-Los Angeles, and Chico State in California; The Archaeology of Dreams at University of Nebraska-Omaha.
“La Casa de los Espíritus” en Bolivia
Caridad Svich Awarded 2012 Village Voice OBIE for Lifetime Achievement
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
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.
THE WAY OF WATER May 29, 2012 at 7 PM at EST
******************************
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/