The imminent meeting at Camagüey National Theatre Festival serves as an ideal starting point of this space, n ot only because that event is the largest biennial sample of Cuban theater , but because this fifteenth edition will host a meeting that will be the primary focus of our section “Pasos de Gato” (Catwalk).
The panel ¨Una isla, el teatro: Veinte años de intercambios culturales entre Cuba y su diáspora norteamericana¨ (An island, theater: Twenty years of cultural exchanges between Cuba and its American Diaspora) will take place next Wednesday, October 8, right in the middle of the event, to be held from Friday 3rd to Saturday 11th.
It is an “import” from the United States because it met there for the first time in a small room of the impressive Palmer House Hotel, in Chicago , where the latest international congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) took place last June.
At the end of the panel, the playwright Jaime Gómez Triana suggested its replication in Camagüey Festival to the National Council for the Performing Arts of Cuba (CNAE by its Spanish acronym), organizing body of the event. Gómez Triana himselfshould play as moderator of the new session at Casablanca cinema, in the City of Tínima River.
Lillian Manzor, r esponsible for the proposal before LASA 2014, Professor of Miami University and director of the Cuban Theater Digital Archive ( www.teatrocubano.org), will serve again as host of the session in Camagüey in addition to the Cuban director Alberto Sarraín, founder of La Ma Teodora in Miami, belonging to Akuara Theatre, group led by Yvonne López Arenal with which Sarraín has worked in recent years and with which he has just released ¨El Día que me quieras¨, byVenezuelan José Ignacio Cabrujas.
They will be accompanied by journalist and theater critic Maite Hernández-Lorenzo, from Casa de las Americas and the Master Yohayna Hernandez and this columnist , both dramatists of Tablas -Alarcos Publishing House, belonging to CNAE.
The Cuban -American playwright Pedro Monge Rafuls, director of Ollantay Magazine in New York, and the cultural manager and producer Ever Chavez, head of FUNDARTE agency in Miami, could not attend the event for various reasons.
However, Carolina Caballero , professor at Tulane University in New Orleans , who was born in the United States to Cuban parents, does will be part of the appointment.
As its name makes explicit, the panel deals with the various initiatives that, over two decades, have tended solid bridges of exchange between Cuban theater and its Diaspora settled in the United States.
Doing it again, with its historical and integrative view at the National Festival of the Cuban scene takes on special importance before the most representative Theatre group to which all parties belong by right and will. It will be a s ignificantpublic and institutional backing to a policy, a beautiful result and especially to those who have let us getting up to here.
The notice is given. We will discuss about what shall happen there in our next delivery.
Now it is enough just to know that conversations, letters, projects, visits, readings, events, publications, academic sessions, exhibitions, shows, joint productions … have become the rungs of a catwalk, that dangerous tool hanging on the roof ofthe theaters to place lights and mechanisms on the stage.
It has not been an easy process, neither happened at a stretch. It has been gradually developed as technicians compulsorily move through the narrow catwalks, hence the name of this section , which inspires me for Cuba and theater.
