FITLA 2003
Journeys of the Iberoamerican Theatre

The second season of FITLA’s International Latino Theatre Festival of Los Angeles returns November 7-16, 2003. The events, sponsored by the Cultural Affairs Department of Los Angeles, among others, are part of Hispanic Heritage Month and will take place at the Japan America Theatre, Los Angeles Theatre Center and Claremont McKenna College.

World renown theatre groups from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Spain and the United States will participating in FITLA 2003, totaling 15 internationally acclaimed shows, including student oriented plays, puppets for adults, and theatrical dance pieces. The theatre showcase Escena Latina will be extended to theatres in San Francisco, CA and Houston, Texas.
The Dionisio Awards will be given this year to the theatre group Malayerba from Ecuador and to the Iberoamerican Theatre Festival of Cadiz (Spain) and director José Bablé, in recognition of their work and accomplishments to develop and promote Latino theatre throughout the world.

In addition, the National Performance Network and Elia Arce will sponsor the academic-level Symposium in which prestigious professors and specialists in the area will hold discussions about the theme ²Theatre and its intercultural practices in contemporary times.²

One of the main components of FITLA is the Theatre Creative Workshops, sponsored by Academia Latina de Arte Dramático de California and Folgueira´s Itinerant Theatre. Theatre students from different countries who want to share a working experience along with distinguished theatre teachers in the Iberoamerican Theatre will participate in the workshops.
There will be four workshops leaded by the following teachers:

• María de Rosario Francés and Arístides Vargas (Ecuador). Founding members and directors of the theatre group Malayerba.
• Marianela Boán (Cuba). Choreographer and dancer. Director and founder of the theatre company DanzAbierta.
• Rosa Luis Márquez and Antonio Martorell (Puerto Rico). Márquez is a theatre director and a professor at University of San Juan. Martorell is a recognized plastic artist and has collaborated with Márquez for the last 19 years in graphic-theatre projects.
• Franklin Caicedo (Chile-Argentina). Distinguished actor and theatre teacher.

Actors, theatre students, cultural activists, teachers, scenic artists and anyone else interested in using art in education, rehabilitation and social work who wish to attend the Creative Workshops at FITLA 2003 must send their application via email to Jorge Folgueira at foltheatre@yahoo.com with the following information:
1. Name
2. Theatre group or organization (if any)
3. Workshop interested in attending (in order of preference)
4. Curriculum Vitae

The deadline for submission is September 15, 2003.
Those who are selected will be informed by October 2003 to initiate the process of visa applications, if needed to enter the United States.

The cost of the workshop is $500, which must be paid at the FITLA office on November 6th, 2003. The payment will cover the workshop, tickets to all shows in the festival, the academic symposium, and lodging and meals from November 5-17, 2003. However, participants are responsible for their plane ticket and transportation to and from their airport. Please see www.fitla.org

WORKSHOPS AND TEACHERS

I. Technique and Utopia

Practices of utopia; theatre as a workshop for the impossible. This workshop will challenge creation as an invention of the unpredicted; the internal, infinite possibilities of the theatrical experience. It will explore the frontiers with other forms of _expression such as dance, singing and dramatic literature. The activities are based on body movement, emotions, memories, dreams and certain other areas derived from this kind of work. The objective is to work on the improbable, on what cannot be supported by reason.

María del Rosario Francés, Spain. Founder and director of the theatre workshops of the group Malayerba, as well as the acting coach of all plays presented by the repertory. She has also worked as director for the films: La Tigresa and Entre Marx y una Mujer Desnuda and the movie made for television En un Rincón del Alma . Among other plays, she has directed Robinson Crusoe, El Sr. Puntila, and for the group La Trinchera Ana, El Mago y el Aprendiz.

Arístides Vargas, Argentina. Actor, director and playwright. He has directed among many others, El País Inhabitable by Tennessee Williams, Adiós Robinson by Julio Cortazar and Tartuffe by Moliere. In addition, he has directed his own plays: Jardín de Pulpos, Pluma, La Edad de la Ciruela, and El Cuco de los Sueños. At FITLA 2003, he will present the celebrated play Nuestra Señora de las Nubes, as well as Donde el Viento Hace Buñuelos, in collaboration with Rosa Luisa Márquez. As a director, he has also worked with the National Company of Costa Rica, the group El Sótano from Mexico, and in Ecuador with the groups Tragaluz, El Callejón del Agua and La Trinchera. In film, he has acted in main roles in the movies Apareceres, La Tigresa and in Entre Marx y una Mujer Desnuda, for which he also wrote the screenplay and won the Best Screenplay Award at the Trieste Film Festival in 1999. He has also written the plays Ana y El Espejo, Las Mariposas doradas del Amazonia and El Deseo más Canalla.

II. Contaminated Dance

Creation and composition of choreography, improvisation strategies and investigation of the aesthetic methods used by DanzAbierta where the movement is the base of _expression open to other possibilities such as the use of voice, gestures and emotion. The focus is on dramaturgy as a base for the construction of choreography. Intuition and chance will be explored as part of the process of stimulation, observation and selection to create a strategy for surprise.

Marianela Boán, Cuba. She was member of the company Danza Contemporánea de Cuba for 15 years. During this time she did extensive work as a choreographer and performer in dance, theatre and film. In 1988, she founded DanzAbierta, an emblematic company of the vanguard dance movement in Cuba for the last two decades. Her company has taken their work to over thirty countries in Europe, Asia and America for which the company has won numerous national and international awards from critics, conferences and festivals.

As the general director, choreographer and dancer of DanzAbierta, Marianela Boán gathers young dancers and choreographers, who while maintaining their own personal style, create projects following the aesthetic, defined values of the group. Some of the artistic values include the rupture with the limits of movement; the use of dramaturgy in dance; the investigation of kinetics; the marriage of different languages in choreographic creation such as posture, gesture, text, voice, dramatic action, masks, emotional space and pure movement. Consequently, she focuses on the training of performers capable of combing all these forms of _expression within the open structures of composition. Marianela Boán and DanzAbierta will participate in FITLA with the show Chorus Perpetuus.

III. From Installation to Theatrical Action

This workshop will explore the transformation of the empty space and the habitual into an extra-ordinary place in which to perform. Through theatre games, the use of junk materials, and in a frame of limited space and time a place of fiction, dreams, expectations and hopes will be created: a sanctuary for wishes and incantations…

Rosa Luisa Márquez and Antonio Martorell, Puerto Rico. Since 1984 Márquez and Martorell produce merging experiences between plastic and theatre arts, between space and time, between actors, non-actors and audience members. They work with structured instances of artistic play originated by the space, the participants and the work materials. These experiences have been developed in schools, museums, theatres, plazas, prisons and churches in countries such as Puerto Rico, Mexico, Cuba, Spain, Brazil and the United States. Their objective is to create implausible miniature societies, through collective work and an overflow of utopias, leaving in our memory enduring impressions.

Rosa Luisa Márquez. Founded the theatre group Anamú in 1971. She holds a master’s degree from New York University and a Doctorate from Michigan State University in contemporary theatre. She started her teaching career at the theatre department for the University of Puerto Rico in 1978. In 1979 she created the production of Cuentos, Cuentos, y más Cuentos. She developed the current curriculum of Drama Activities, which she teaches in her workshops at schools and in community agencies. Her directing projects include Romeo(s) y Julieta(s), Historias par ser Contadas, La Leyenda del Cemí, Procesión, Waiting for Godot, Jardín de Pulpos, Absurdos en Soledad, El León y la Joya, among others. In conjunction with Martorell, she created the concept of Itinerant Performers (1987-1990) resulting in twelve productions. Márquez has written several books about theatre and is also a member of the board of directors and pedagogical team for the EITALC´s International School of Latin American and Caribbean Theatre. At FITLA 2003 she will present Donde el Viento Hace Buñuelos in collaboration with the group Malayerba.

Antonio Martorell. Developed in the last 19 years numerous graphic-theatrical projects in association with Rosa Luisa Márquez. Together, and with the help of many workshop collaborators, they have worked on more than two hundred installations, performances, dramatized conferences and productions in Puerto Rico, the United States, the Museum of Fine Arts of Venezuela, Casa de las Américas in Cuba, the National Fine Arts Museum of Chile and at the Modern Art Museum of Mexico, among others places. Martorell has also worked in film, television and radio, and has published several books. Martorell has been awarded by the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the Biennial Festival of Latin-American Print of San Juan and New York, and by the international biennials of Freshen and Florence.

IV. The actor, the Feeling and the Text.

This workshop will focus on the study of methods to obtain truth in acting through the relationship to the text. Searching for truth and feelings, the problems arising when working with the text and the points of disassociation and coincidence are the main elements of exploration.
Franklin Caicedo, Chile. Worked at the theatre of the University of Santiago (Chile) as an outstanding actor in many plays such as Marat-Sade, directed by William Oliver from the University of Berkley. Since 1969 he lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina where he works in film, theatre, and teaches theatre. With his one-man shows he has succeeded on stages in Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Cuba, Puerto Rico, New York, Washington, Israel, Sweden and Spain, where he also directed a show by Federico García Lorca. Representing Argentina and Chile, he participates in FITLA presenting the play El Emperador Gynt by Henrik Ibsen and the one-man shows Neruda, Déjame Cantar por ti and Tengo Tantos Tangos.

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Agosto - 2003