War & Coolness: A Between- Shows Skirball Salon

Gob Squad’s War and Peace and Teatro La Re-Sentida’s La Dictadura de lo Cool have their New York premieres at NYU Skirball on consecutive weekends, for a mini-festival of international contemporary theatre. Join us for an informal discussion of both shows: their approaches to translation and adaptation; multimedia and the importance of being spectacular; and more. Consider it a digestif for Gob Squad (performances March 29-31) and an apéritif for Teatro La Re-Sentida (April 6-7).

You don’t have to see the shows to be part of the conversation… but it will probably be more fun if you do.

Sebastián Calderón Bentin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Drama at New York University. His research interests include performance theory, mass media, and Latin American cultural studies. His writings have appeared in Theater Survey, TDR, Identities, and Istmo as well as the book anthologies Neoliberalism and Global Theaters (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Support Networks(University of Chicago Press, 2015). His current book project, States of Illusion, develops a theory of illusion in contemporary politics by looking at performances of deception and disclosure produced through video and television. He performs frequently with the Chicago-based theater group Every House Has a Door and is founding member of the performance duo Donovan & Calderon.

Caridad Svich received a 2012 OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement in the theatre, a 2012 Edgerton Foundation New Play Award and NNPN rolling world premiere for Guapa, and the 2011 American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize for her play The House of the Spirits, based Isabel Allende’s novel. She has won the National Latino Playwriting Award (sponsored by Arizona Theatre Company) twice, including in the year 2013 for her play Spark. She has been short-listed for the PEN Award in Drama four times, including in the year 2012 for her play Magnificent Waste. Her works in English and Spanish have been seen at venues across the US and abroad, among them Arena Stage’s Kogod Cradle Series, Denver Center Theatre, 59E59, The Women’s Project, Woodshed Collective @ McCarren Park Pool, Repertorio Espanol, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Lighthouse Poole UK, Teatro Mori (Chile), Artheater-Cologne (Germany), Ilkhom Theater (Uzbekistan), Teatro Espressivo (Costa Rica), Welsh Fargo Stage (Wales), Homotopia Festival UK, SummerWorks festival in Toronto, and Edinburgh Fringe Festival/UK… As founder of theatre alliance & press NoPassport (www.nopassport.org) her work has intersected with communities of multiple diversities with works responding to the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the US Gulf region, veterans and their families, survivors of trauma and those committed to artistic expression of precarity, advocacy for US Latin@ writing voices, and engagement with representations of the “fragile shores” in our lives. She is co-organizer and curator of After Orlando theatre action in response to the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting with Missing Bolts Productions at DR2 Theatre in New York City, Finborough Theatre in London, Chaskis Theatre in London in association with Theatre Royal Stratford East and The Vaults and over sixty venues across the US; and Climate Change Theatre Action with The Arctic Cycle and Theatre Without Borders. She has also published over twenty titles with NoPassport Press by authors as diverse as Todd London, John Jesurun, David Greenspan, Carson Kreitzer, Rinde Eckert, Lenora Champagne and Octavio Solis. She is currently editing a book on playwriting for Methuen UK. She serves as associate editor at Taylor & Francis’ Contemporary Theatre Review, where she also edits their Backpages section. She sustains a parallel career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca as well as works by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar, Victor Rascon Banda, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba and Spain. She is alumna playwright of New Dramatists. She has received fellowships from Harvard/Radcliffe, NEA/TCG, PEW Charitable Trust, and California Arts Council. She holds an MFA in Theatre-Playwriting from UCSD, and she also trained for four consecutive years with Maria Irene Fornes in INTAR’s legendary HPRL Lab. She teaches creative writing and playwriting at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and Primary Stages’ Einhorn School of Performing Arts. She has taught playwriting at Bard, Barnard, Bennington, Denison, Ohio State, ScriptWorks, UCSD, and Yale School of Drama. Brandon Woolf is a theater maker and director of the Program in Dramatic Literature here at NYU. Both his scholarship and performance practice work to facilitate connections and collaborations between artists, academics, arts (and other) administrators, and activists. To this end, he has published articles in academic journals like Theatre Journal, Performance Research, and TDR, Theatre Survey, as well as in more popular outlets. Brandon is currently at work on two book projects: the first, Stages of Disavowal, is a monograph about the intersections of cultural policy and contemporary performance in Berlin after the end of the Cold War; the second is a co-edited collection, titled Postdramatic Theatre and Form, which examines the stakes of continuing to use “postdramatic” as a lens for studying contemporary performance (forthcoming from Bloomsbury in 2018). Brandon is also the co-founder of two public performance ensembles – Shakespeare im Park Berlin [2010-14] and the UC Movement for Efficient Privatization (UCMeP) [2009-11] – both of which were committed, in different ways, to performance as a social practice. These groups have been featured in scholarly forums like Theatre Survey, South Atlantic Quarterly, and L.M Bogad’s Tactical Performance, as well as in popular outlets like the London Guardian, Berliner Zeitung, San Francisco Chronicle, and Robert Reich’s film Inequality for All. Brandon’s work has been supported by the Fulbright Foundation, New York Drama League, DAAD, Berlin Program for Advanced Studies, American Society for Theater Research, and the Program for Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. In 2018, he is an artist-in-residence at LABA: Laboratory for Jewish Culture at the 14th Street Y and at the Performance Project at University Settlement. He received his Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley.

Alisa Zhulina is an Assistant Professor Faculty Fellow in the Department of Drama and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and her research interests include the intersections between theatre studies and economic theory, modern drama, and new media. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey, and Modern Drama. Her current book project, Theatre of Capital: Staging the Economy from Henrik Ibsen to Lin-Manuel Miranda, looks at how theatre thinks through economic issues and makes sense of capitalism. In addition to her scholarly work, she is a resident playwright with Exquisite Corpse Company and the founder of Cacolet Collective, a performance group dedicated to exploring alternative economies through performance and public art. Her plays have been produced at Dixon Place, the Downtown Urban Arts Festival, the Festival de Teatro Alternativo in Bogotá, Colombia, and elsewhere.