Celebrating the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Cádiz
A new book documents 22 years of this influential theater festival
By Professor Luis Ramos-Garcia
Since 1986 the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro (FIT) de Cádiz has taken place in auditoriums, open spaces, and in the streets of Cádiz, Spain. The festival lasts for at least three weeks each year with three performances per night. Daytime activities usually include talks by distinguished scholars, open forums, projects investigating the roles of women and minorities in theater, discussion sessions with directors and actors about their performances, and creative encounters with journal directors, researchers, international reporters, and scholars specializing in Latin American, United States Latino, and Spanish theater. In addition to conventional theater performances, spectators have also been treated to delightful puppets and marionettes, dance theater, storytelling, and lively street theater performances featured across parks, plazas and other public sites. The main objective of this festival, sponsored by Spain’s Ministry of Culture, the City of Cádiz, and several European artistic organizations, has been to showcase Iberoamerican theater (Spanish and Portuguese) and, above all, to promote better understanding and cooperation between European, Anglo-American, and Latin American cultures and groups. The imaginative quality of the past 22 festivals has attracted outstanding independent theater groups as well as a select group of ground-breaking scholars from many different countries.In 2005, José Bablé, FIT-Cádiz director, along with Beatriz Rizk from the International Hispanic Theater Festival-Miami and Luis A. Ramos-García from University of Minnesota, formed an artistic and academic alliance with The State of Iberoamerican Studies Series (housed at the U of M) to publish a research book on the festival’s influence on Latin American theater groups who have participated in the FIT over the years. The book had three primary goals. The first was to publish annotated critiques of the activities of the festival, inviting reputed Latin American theater scholars to contribute to the volume. The second was to research, historicize, and propose problems around artistic and theoretical influences exchanged by the FIT de Cádiz, including its contribution to the construction of a vibrant new Latin American theater. Finally, the book’s third goal was to provide a cohesive view of drama production and the ever important preservation of cultural identity in a multicultural world.Edited by Luis A. Ramos-García and Beatriz Rizk, in collaboration with Nelsy Echávez-Solano from St. John’s University in Minnesota, Panorama de las artes escénicas ibérico y latinoamericanas: Homenaje al Festival Iberoamericano de Cádiz was released and presented in a special ceremony at the XXII FIT de Cádiz on October 24, 2007. The volume includes works by theater researchers from across the Americas.Although most of the contributors have published monographs, journals, and anthologies of Latin American theater, Panorama de las artes escénicas is the first book of its kind to address and recognize an active and meaningful theatrical inter-exchange between the Iberian Peninsula and the American continent. The State of Iberoamerican Studies Series has since been commissioned by the International Hispanic Theatre Festival of Miami, through support by the National Endowment for the Arts, to prepare a volume in honor of its 25 years of contributions to the U.S. Latino and Latin American theaters.
02/11/09
