Elm Shakespeare Company Presents DÁNDOLE VOZ: UNA EXPLORACIÓN DE SHAKESPEARE EN ESPAÑOL An Exploration Of Shakespeare In Spanish

Dándole Voz will be presented via Zoom and Facebook Live Thursday, May 13th at 7pm as the second event of Elm Shakespeare Company's free, online series, Building a Brave New Theater: Holding Space and Giving Voice. Join Yale School of Drama's Cynthia Santos-DeCure, Daniela Varon, and their Yale School of Drama students. They will share their experience and discoveries from a new class that explored Shakespeare's performance in Spanish.

"Playing Shakespeare in translation raises important political, philosophical, psychological, and personal questions, including questions around universality, specificity, cultural identity, and access," explained instructor Daniela Varon.

The class is a new addition this year. Presented with a year of remote learning at Yale School of Drama, the Acting Department had an opportunity to experiment with the curriculum and the canon. Inspired by a cohort of Spanish-speaking students, two teachers, Cynthia Santos-DeCure and Daniela Varon, decided to offer a 4-week elective, Shakespeare en Español. Their partnership made sense. Actor and voice/dialect coach Cynthia Santos-DeCure wrote "La Voz de Shakespeare: Empowering Latinx Communities to speak, own and embody Shakespeare's texts." This will be published in the upcoming book, Shakespeare and Latinidad (Edited Carla Della Gatta and Trevor Buffone) Edinburgh University Press, 2021. Along with New York-based director and teacher, Daniela Varon taught Shakespeare and advised the Shakespeare productions at the school.

Nine actors, including international and U.S.-born actors, some Latinx native speakers, and some who learned Spanish as a secondary language, rose to the challenge. In the class, they invited their students to center on imagination and identity. They asked: what may happen at the encounter of your fantasy, your lived experience, your body, and Shakespeare - in Spanish?

Associate Dean and author of The Latino Theatre Initiative/Center Theatre Group Papers, Chantal Rodriguez will moderate the conversation. In addition, the actors will share some of their scene work from Macbeth, with open discussion and questions following. The talk will be primarily in English, the scenes in Spanish, and the Q&A in either or both languages. Registration is required at https://www.elmshakespeare.org/dandole-voz.

This online performance and discussion are presented by Elm Shakespeare Company. The event is sponsored by the Elizabethan Club of Yale University and Webster Bank as part of the event series, Building a Brave New Theatre: Holding Space and Giving Voice. Elm Shakespeare Company designed this series to understand and amplify BIPOC artists' experiences of these plays and ask critical questions raised after centuries of Bardolatry. This new installment seeks to continue these questions and more.

Artistic Director Rebecca Goodheart is passionate about the complexity and importance of this series. Goodheart claims, "at the end of the day, we at Elm Shakespeare Company believe there is transformative power in these plays. We are committed to engaging not only with their magic and beauty but with the difficult issues they and their legacy can raise."

Registration is required for all events. For more information on the entire series: Building a Brave New Theatre: Holding Space and Giving Voice, visit https://www.elmshakespeare.org/bnt2021

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