 Hello, everyone, and welcome. My name is Henry Godinez, and I am here to serve as your emcee this evening to celebrate this book launch, Shakespeare in Latinidad by Dr. Carla de la Gata. And this presentation is being recorded for Hala Round Television by the Latino Theater Commons. Just wanted you to know that. I am coming to you from Evanston, Illinois, the unceded lands of the Council of the Three Fires here in Illinois. And it's my pleasure to be your emcee this evening. We are having the great service of two wonderful ASL interpreters, Tanya and Natanyal, who will be taking turns interpreting for us this evening. Right now, I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to Jacqueline Flores, who is a producer with the Latino Theater Commons. Jacqueline? Thanks, Henry. Hi, everyone. My name is Jacqueline Flores. My pronouns are shi, her, ella, and I am swimming in from the ancestor homeland of the nicota tank, whose descendants belong to the Piscataway people, colonial-y known as Washington DC. Adrienne Wong of Spiderweb Show has created a digital land acknowledgement that I'd like to share with all of you. Since our discussion today is shared digitally to the internet, let's also take a moment to consider the legacy of colonization embedded within the technologies, structures, and ways of thinking we use every day. We are using equipment and high-speed internet, not available in many indigenous communities. Even the technologies that are central to much of the art we make leave significant carbon footprints contributing to changing climates that disproportionately affect indigenous peoples worldwide. I invite you to join me in acknowledging the truth of violence perpetrated in the name of this country, as well as our shared responsibility to uncovering that truth through dialogue, partnerships, and learning. Thank you. I'm the producer of the Latinx Theater Commons. The LTC is a national movement that uses a commons-based approach to transform the narrative of the American theater to amplify the visibility of Latinx performance making into champion equity through advocacy or making, convening, and scholarship. We are very proud to be hosting the book launch a steering committee member, Carla de la Gacha's new book, Latinx Shakespeare Staging U.S. Intercultural Theater and Latinx Shakespeare.org, an online living theater archive of Latinx adaptation. I had the opportunity to meet Carla in person during a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC, and I'm thrilled to see this work come to life. Carla, thank you so much for your contributions to the field. I'm excited for tonight's conversation. I think we can hear you if you want to unmute yourself. Goodness, yes, thank you. You'd think after two and a half years, nearly three years of this, we would be better at it, but clearly not. Sorry about that, everybody. Once again, my name is Henry Godinas, and I have the pleasure of being your emcee. Just briefly, I will let you know that I am a professor and the current chair of the Department of Theater here at Northwestern University. I'm also the resident artistic associate at the Goodman Theater, where I had the pleasure of being the director of the Latino Theater Festival and co-founder and former artistic director of Teatro Vista here in Chicago. But my real pleasure is getting to introduce a couple of amazing artists' scholars this evening. I'm going to begin by introducing you to Dr. Chantal Rodriguez, who is the associate dean of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University. From 2009 until 2016, she was the programming director and literary manager of the Latino Theater Commons, forgive me, the Latino Theater Company, operators of the Los Angeles Theater Center, the LATC. At LATC, she helped produce many seasons of culturally diverse work, including the historic Encuentro of 2014. Chantal is the co-editor of Seeking Common Ground, Latinx and Latin American Theater and Performance, What's Next for Latinx of Yale Theater's magazine, and many other publications. Let's see. Um, she is a member of the Latinx Theater Commons Advisory Committee and the National Advisory Board for the 50 Playwrights Project. It is my huge pleasure to introduce Dr. Chantal Rodriguez. Thank you so much, Henry. It's a pleasure to be introduced by you. So hi, everybody. I'm Chantal Rodriguez. My pronouns are she, her, ella. I'm so honored to be here this evening to celebrate the work of my colleague and friend, Dr. Carla de la Gada. It's my role tonight to help introduce the book. So I just want to say that this project is so, it makes such a huge contribution to our field, right? Latinx Shakespeare investigates not only the history, but the dramaturgy and language of the more than 140 Latinx-themed Shakespearean productions in the United States since the 1960s. This is the first ever book of Latinx representation in the canon of Shakespeare. And it offers a new methodology for reading ethnic theater and actually looks beyond the visual to prioritize oral signifiers such as music, accent, and the Spanish language. The book's focus is on textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespearean plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx through stage techniques, aesthetics, processes for art making, which include casting, and modes of storytelling. There are case studies which range from performances at large repertory theaters to small community theaters and from established directors to emerging playwrights. To analyze these productions, Dr. de la Gada draws on interviews with practitioners, script analysis, firsthand practitioner insight, and interdisciplinary theoretical lenses largely contributed by scholars of color. I've been perusing this book and starting to devour it. And I just want to read the list of chapters which I think tell a beautiful story on their own. So the first chapter is called Division, the West Side Story Effect. Chapter two is called Orality, Hearing, Ethnicity. Chapter three is Identity, Remapping Latinidades. Chapter four is Decoloniality, Theatrical by Languaging, El Público, Healing and Spectatorship, and finally Futures, Shakespearean Critical History. This book really moves towards healing by reclaiming Shakespeare as himself a borrower, adapter, and creator of language whose work has often too often been mobilized in the service of a very culturally specific English language whiteness that cannot extricate itself from its origins in European or British colonialism and imperialism. As an educator, I'm already preaching the gospel of this book to my students. In particular, my Latinx and Latinx students are thrilled to be able to more deeply find themselves in this work. And to say this book is a gift to the field is an understatement. But it's also a literal fact because the book is open access and free to download from all major booksellers. This is a real literal gift to all of us. And I encourage you, as an educator, if you're working or studying at an educational institution, please ask your libraries to order this book so it can be available to students for generations to come. So I'm so glad to be here tonight and it's now my honor and pleasure to offer my hearty congratulations to Dr. Carla de la Gata and welcome her to the Zoom so we can begin to chat about it. So congratulations, Dr. de la Gata and welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much to all of you to HowlRound for putting this on HowlRound TV, to Jacqueline and the LTC for hosting this virtual book launch and to Chantal and Henry and to Tanya and our interpreters who are here. So thank you. I sincerely appreciate it. And can I ask that you enable my ability to screen share? I have a few slides that I'd like to do that with. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give an overview of the book and then I'm going to delve into one chapter to give you an example of, let's see, to give you an example of what the book is kind of like. And then from there, I'm going to end with an introduction to the archive. So I'll be speaking for about 30 minutes and the archive will be about the last 10 of them. And I promise I am not lecturing. I just wanted to give some visuals. So Latinx Shakespeare, let's see, are productions, are textual adaptations, or performances in which Shakespeare plays, stories, or characters are made Latinx. Before I actually continue from there, I know we're talking to multiple audiences here tonight. And so I just wanted to make clear. I'm using the Latinx, which I know can be a contested term. And there are many other ways that we describe the group of peoples who are Latinx, Latina, Hispanic, more antiquated Latino. I am Latina as well. And so whichever term you'd like to use, I use Latinx in order to push against the challenges that it embraces. And Shakespeare's is plural. The S in Shakespeare signifies a cultural studies approach so that it's pluralized to demonstrate interdisciplinary approach, such as ethnic studies, African-American studies, Latinx studies, against the singularity of older disciplines, such as history, English, literature. So as I mentioned, Latinx Shakespeare's are textual adaptations or performances in which Shakespeare plays, or stories, or characters are made Latinx. And that can be done through dramaturgy, integrating context into performance, aesthetics, including concept settings, and processes for art making, including casting or modes of storytelling. There's not one unifying purpose or experience of Latinx Shakespeare's. The central concern of the book is the question of how and why artists make theater, not just an analysis of the theater created. The book comprises thematic chapters, each with case studies, and Latinx Shakespearean dramaturgies. Together, they form one large case study of intercultural theater in which some are ethnic theater that may have applications to other groups in different locales. Through Latinx Shakespeare's, I examine the intervention of a Latinidad that at minimum brings constrained forms of American whiteness into sharper view, and in their most fully realized forms, gestures towards possibilities for cultural healing and transformative futures. As more and more Latinx plays, Latinx theater today includes substantially more English than Spanish, Latinx Shakespeare's do not follow that same trend. Rather, they often have tended to integrate more and more Spanish into Shakespeare's plays as their genealogy progresses. Latinx Shakespeare's were initially premised on division, but they have extended to dramaturgies that include Latinx history, Latinx and indigenous rituals and ceremonies, issues of colorism and anti-blackness within Latinx communities, and Latinx theatrical traditions. In the book, I reconfigure the history of American Shakespeare's by revealing and realigning the triangulated power relationships, linguistic, theatrical, aesthetic, and cultural political of Latinx and the dominant culture in the United States. I argue that the two key components of intracultural, meaning within one culture, meaning US American theater, are the historical premise of divisiveness and the remapping of what is needed for creating community through the process of theater making. My various thematic investigations are connected by two overarching themes, division and intraculturalism and as well as orality. These themes intersect as intraculturalism constantly presses towards a division, often most clearly manifest through a broad and excessive oral soundscape that includes sound effects, languages, accents, silences, noises, and so forth. While each chapter focuses on a particular critical concept, the case studies intersect across thematic concerns and practices. I'll begin here. Chapter one is, as Chantal mentioned, division, the West Side Story effect. I address the enduring legacy of West Side Story as part of, as it changed Shakespearean storytelling. Within West Side Story itself, I address how the character of Chino affected remappings of the character Paris back onto productions of Romeo and Juliet. It is the premise of West Side Story rather than the Shakespearean play itself, Romeo and Juliet, that informs the dramaturgy of so many subsequent performances and films. West Side Story does not have the same resonance in Latinx theater, and I do not consider it to be Latinx theater at all. Latinx theater engages in Latinx experiences and identity, but West Side Story offers representation and a faulty one at that. What I term the West Side Story effect is a through line for Latinx Shakespeare's because of the distance, not divide, between Shakespeare and Latinx cultures and characters. The division and its lasting legacy are made possible due to the oral excess that is definitive of musical theater, intermixing with orally that, or what I term the oral excess that is key to theatrical depictions of Latinx. Applying a Latinx concept setting or integrating Latinidad into a Shakespearean character requires oral embellishment in ways that make identity legible that cannot be achieved through skin color without resorting to brown face. West Side Story's formation within the genre of musical theater, the use of Spanish even minimally in its original production, and its progression to bilingual and semi bilingual theater, invoke an emphasis on orality as a strategy for division and as a necessity for Latinx Shakespeare's. Because of West Side Story's influence, what is other in early Latinx Shakespeare productions is in fact not Latinx culture or any other non-white group, but the type of storytelling that does not include cultural or linguistic division. Chapter two is entitled Orality, Hearing Ethnicity. And in this chapter, I looked to two productions from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that were staged back to back a little more than a decade ago. Here I attend to the complexity and consequences of oral strategies used in Latinx Shakespeare's to create an effective soundscape that is the performance of orally that. I'm aware that orally that is not a word in Spanish and my use of a direct translation that does not exist is purposeful. I use it to signal the constant tension of understanding and misunderstanding of the active translation that is always imperfect and often beautiful because it demands an alteration of terms and form. And as a constant reminder that in the theater that is Latinx Shakespeare's and my book of the same name, we read and hear between languages to create new meaning. Beyond the strategies to make the soundscape a signifier for Latinidad, I argue on the book that in using the oral to theatrically depict Latinx, this theatrical work engages the audience in a differently sensorial world. Engagement in this sensorial supersedes merely registering the problematic visual difference created by brown face in the past as the de-familiarizing effect of Latinidad permits a meaningful attunement to a different perspective. This perspective shares sociocultural sensibilities with liminal and border experiences of between both end and minoritized or marginalized points of view that might not otherwise be visible to the still mostly white upper middle class audiences of prominent regional and repertory theaters. For decades, the sound of Spanish and the Latinx body were perceived as disjunctive for Shakespearean language and stories. Any notions of a fixed Latinx identity to represent through Shakespeare or through language from different time periods confounds the possibilities of mimetic representation. It is through this linguistic impossibility of mimesis and Latinx Shakespeare's that both productions engage the soundscape to make Latinx recognizable for all audiences. Oral excess and Latinx ecustomology for Shakespeare make evident that the soundscape is cross-temporal and therefore Latinidad is too. The back-to-back productions at OSF demonstrate how Shakespeare can be interpreted with not simply for Latinx culture. They illustrate Latinidad as a method of interpretation. In chapter three, identity remapping Latinidad is, it's actually also the California chapter. And I look at multiple productions that are set in and were originally staged in, a state that is over 40% Latinx, in order to expand the parameters of Latinidad. Latinx theater scholars, theater and performance scholars theorized Latinidad as a network of relationships grounded in a heritage and an aesthetic rooted in certain creative practices, modes of engagement and perspectives rather than a fixed identity to be represented through such signifiers as the Spanish language, life on the border and assimilation motifs. I argue in this chapter for remapping the very definition of Latinidad as a network or community of a shared feeling rather than identity that can be mimetically represented on stage. Embracing theoretical approaches that emphasize process, aesthetics and affect, the productions challenge the productivity and means of expression of identity as a category. These two productions and the third one that I used to introduce and foray into the chapter all challenge the productivity and are set as I said in First Station, California and they argue for an expanded idea of brownness. I take this term from Jose Esteban Lumios in his posthumous book, A Sense of Brown in which he designates a difference between feeling brown and a sense of brown, a manera de ser, a way of living and a shared feeling of communality. I argue that a sense of brown extends to various ethnicities who experience immigration, migration and linguistic isolation and that Shakespeare provides a porous site for absorbing these commonalities. In chapter four, Decoloniality, Theatrical by Languaging, I build on Walter Mignolo's term of by-languaging which is different than bilingualism. Bilingualism is a matter of speaking two languages. Mignolo defines by-languaging as a life living in between languages. I expand this and apply it to theater and what I term theatrical by-languaging offers a liberation from discrete styles of theatrical storytelling. I extend this concept of theatrical by-languaging to the experience of Latinx actors in the rehearsal room of predominantly white theaters versus Latinx theaters. Drawing a distinction between anti-colonial, post-colonial and decolonial strategies in three Hamlet adaptations, I argue that the crisis of the self is linguistic on stage and off. These Latinx Shakespeare's reveal that characters and actors are not merely bilingual or multilingual, they live between languages. To explore life between languages, I draw on Mignolo's distinction and he writes that by-languaging is the way of life between languages, a dialogic ethic, aesthetic and the political process of social transformation. In the two examples that you see here in Hamlet, Prince of Cuba, the same cast performed the show Hamlet entirely in English for over a month and then they performed it in Spanish for about 10 days. So the actors at one point were performing productions at the same time, one in English and one in Spanish. In Hamlet, El Principe de Danmarc and Teletusa by Tara Moses, she integrated day of the dead cosmologies and ceremonies into the theater itself. So it is a mixture of ceremony, ritual and theater, all encompassed in one production. In chapter five, El Público, I will go more in-depth about this chapter following the introduction that I'm giving right now. But chapter five begins with two theater projects that cross the literal national border and perform Shakespeare jointly with Mexican actors in Mexico to reposition Latinx representation. In this way, the show's bridged audience reticence about bilingual theater. Here I'm offering examples of Tietrocea in New York, which largely does children's theater and they did a production of an adaptation of the Midsummer Night's Dream, again with the cast performing alternately on different nights, some in English and some in Spanish. They're known for the great use of puppetry, as well as La Comedia of Errors at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The division that marked early Latinx Shakespeare's is reframed in these more current works as a mode of discovery. Long-term strategies for world-making can result in ethnic theater, both at predominantly white institutions, PWIs, and at theaters of color. This only becomes possible through the acknowledgement of an audience's heterogeneity and deliberately cultivating a public for bilingual and semi-bilingual theater. In the chapter, I argue that creating an audience for bilingual and ethnic theater is an act of world-making and it is possible both at white theaters and theaters of color. In the final chapter, chapter six, future Shakespearean Critical History, I attend to only one production, Herbert Seguenza's El Henry, which is an adaptation of Henry IV, part one. It involves the negotiation of Shakespearean history plays and the histories that his plays invoke. This is the post-apocalyptic version of Henry IV, part one that resets the action in the year 2045. Although Seguenza has adapted other Western classics for Latinx culture to tell contemporary history, here he adapts a history play to Latinx aesthetics to speculate forward. I argue that Seguenza's El Henry models a form of critical analysis for Shakespearean history play by overlapping British history with speculative Chicanx futures, thereby forcing new questions about historicity, temporality, and identity. I demonstrate that through the creative work of playwriting, Seguenza generates a mode of historical criticism that is not dependent on Western dualisms, ethnic and racial binaries, cultural division, or even linear time. Seguenza's play models how the creative work of Latinx Shakespeare's can function simultaneously as a form of critical history and a speculative fiction. So now I'm actually going to delve into a little bit of chapter five in the book. And so here I want to kind of take you into a deep dive of the chapter that I mentioned of público, healing, and spectatorship. At the center of one of the powerful projects contained in Latinx Shakespeare's is this fundamental consideration of reparation. Can engaging in a site through which so much colonial violence that of Shakespeare can be and has been enacted, one that insists on the real possibility of our Shakespeare lead to healing. The adaptations discussed across the book signal different stages on a path towards transformation that results in new publics generated for and because of the intersection of Shakespeare and Latinidad, a space that offers keen potential for healing and world-making. This intersection generates new possibilities by productively bringing together two modes of thinking too often conceptually and politically separated. If, as John Rossini notes, thinking of the border as a theater provides, quote, thinking of the border as a theater provides a site-specific frame for understanding theatricality as spatial practice, end quote, then the continuous creations of real and metaphorical borders that emerge in the movement of Shakespeare's into new spaces and voices to craft new audience communities is an ideal form of world-making. Latinx Shakespeare's can, at their best, force a reconsideration of exactly how we are situating Latinidad within the United States, fundamentally recognizing it as part of the U.S., the larger U.S. theater scene and not something apart from U.S. theater. Durin Kondo's model of reparative creativity provides a language to think through and with the theater of artists working in community to create new articulations. World-making conceives of art-making is something that both represents and generates ideas about ethnicity and culture and the possibilities generated by Latinx Shakespeare's create new connections within arts and audiences. All Latinx Shakespeare's are intercultural theater and some, in fact, are ethnic theater, theater by and for a specific community. The case studies I'm going to mention here push on that definition. They are a collaboration between theater companies and communities that together advance both the dramaturgy and politics of performance and reception and outside the scope of theater challenge strongly held notions of American identity as well. The two productions I attend to here both engage a borderlands epistemology but do not cross a physical geographic border. They are invested in world-making, the result of years of public engagement work by the respective theater companies both of which have a mission to create art for their communities and create new publics for the arts. Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2019 La Cromedia of Errors, a bilingual adaptation was performed in one of its primary theaters as part of the regular season and it was also performed elsewhere on the OSF campus and toured throughout the region through a partnership with 12 Latinx community dramaturgs. Teatro Cejas 2015, Sueño, a Latino take on Shakespeare's in mid-summer night's dream was performed entirely with puppets and first staged in an outdoor parking lot in New York before traveling to Puerto Rico, Washington DC and back home to New York. In 2007, Bill Rausch became artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, beginning a trajectory that would change the face of American theater, including Latinx Shakespeare's. Every season under Rausch's tenure from 2008 to 2019 included a Latinx or Latinx theme production with these offerings beginning to feature Latinx Shakespeare starting in 2011. In fact, in the last several years of his time at OSF, Rausch hired Latinx directors to direct non-Latinx theme Shakespearean productions, marking Latinx integration into the pool of Shakespearean directors that did not require them to represent or be representative of their cultural backgrounds. For Rausch's last season at OSF, the main stage season featured three shows that embraced and reflected Latinx aesthetics, culture and dramaturgy. A new play from Octavio Solis, Mother Road, a Latinx directed but not Latinx themed Macbeth, director Jose Luis Valenzuela and the bilingual La Comedie of Errors. For the first time in OSF's history, it staged both a Latinx authored play and a Latinx Shakespearean play in a single season. From its text to its staging to its pre and post-show framing to its touring plan, OSF's production of La Comedie of Errors was focused on fostering new audiences and building community. Rausch partnered with OSF dramaturg Lydia G. Garcia to adapt Shakespeare's play into the fully bilingual show. Characters shifted between languages and responded in one dialogue to each other in the other. La Comedie from pre to post-show ran counter to previous Shakespearean productions within OSF and within most PWIs. Just as OSF's programming strategies over the last decade slowly built to this fully bilingual production, its theatrical strategies for La Comedie ease the audience into a bilingual show through direct civic engagement at the outset, physical theater at the start of the play and community building through shared experiences at the end. The post-show experience of the touring production include a shared meal and conversation between actors and audience members in their local venues. Teatro Seja's mission in New York to educate and entertain children and their efforts to do so through puppetry displace ideas about ethnic theater that position actors' bodies as central to the audience performer connection. The Society of Educational Arts, Teatro Seja which was established in 1985 by Dr. Manuel Moran as the New York based theater company quote dedicated to theater for children, youth, family, Latino and bilingual audiences, end quote. It has a history of producing Latinx versions of a number of classics. Whereas Roush used pantomime and physical theater to work alongside or rally that, Moran's use of puppetry provided the visual access for monolingual Spanish, monolingual English and mixed bilingual theater, all of which Seja produces. Moran notes that what European classics and Disney stories are often performed in Latin America and that he wanted quote to educated group that didn't have the resources to bring their kids to theater, end quote. In 2015, Teatro Seja turned his attention to Shakespeare for the first time. Moran directed and produced the show which was performed at La Plaza, the parking lot of the Clemente with performances alternately entirely in English and entirely in Spanish. Tickets were free with an option to donate facilitating attendance for young people and families. For the production, the actions transposed to an Afro-Cuban style carnival and the play text was written in prose. Two actors narrated the story standing on stage with exaggerated large folios in their hands, one of the two on stilts. The remaining actors were dancers and puppeteers and a live band performed below in front of the stage. It was a spectacle even by the standards of a night on the Lower East Side with bright lights, warm blankets and the hope that a summer rainstorm would pass. Post-show, many of the actors and the orchestra came into the audience to greet their friends and members of the community. Moran served multiple audiences within the community with this production, including monolingual English speakers, monolingual Spanish speakers, children, adults, puppet enthusiasts and those who wish to see Afro-Cuban culture, Afro-Caribbean culture and music celebrated. With both OSF and SEA achieve was the integration of a movement towards linguistic, cultural and theatrical diversity into the theaters. Social scientist Hildi Gottlieb offers clear definitions of movements versus organizations. She writes, quote, in movements, accountability is to a cause greater than any one individual. When it comes to making tough decisions, the cause is the top priority. In organizations, accountability is first to the organization when leaders face tough decisions, their top priority is organizational stability. Both Raush and Moran were accountable to the cause. Raush stepped in an already-established repertory theater and integrated a movement toward diversity and community theater into the organization. And Moran was tasked as founder and artistic director of Teatro SEA to, quote, expose a community, an immigrant community to expose kids and families to these works, end quote, and create a theater going public. Each theater was also met with its challenges to its movements, for sure. But both La Comedia and Sueño enact such reparative critique through culturally specific forms, the telenovela form for La Comedia and carnival aesthetics for Sueño, and the liberal humanist subject transforms to physical comedy for La Comedia and puppetry for Sueño. They each other result of extensive cross-cultural collaboration and they integrate storytelling modes and specific Latinx communities beyond a superficial concept setting. The differences, the different forms of bilingual theater that plays exemplify showcase linguistic dynamics and possibilities for their communities specific, yet heterogeneous audiences. This type of collaboration extends beyond longstanding theater such as OSF and Teatro SEA, suggesting that communities on stage, off stage, and in the audience exemplified can last beyond the event. Through collaborative processes, diverse cast and artistic teams, these productions force a reconsideration of how public situate Latinx in the United States. Collaborative reparative work can transform the division of West Side Story and the West Side Story effect into a bridge. So I will now actually turn to introducing the archive. And I will do this right here. All right. And you can see my screen right there. So this is the archive of Latinx Shakespeare's. I thought I would write a dissertation when I started graduate school on US Shakespeare festivals and how they shape, represent, and push against racial and ethnic categories and tropes. When I could not find any scholarship on Latinx peoples in Shakespeare, I was asked several times, do Latinos do Shakespeare? I was surprised and offended by this question on every level, and I responded with a defiant yes. But then I had to prove it. When I began my research, I had tracked seven Latinx Shakespearean productions. I reached out to artists, contacted theaters, visited archives all over the country, and when I finished my PhD, that number had risen to over 40. I thought that I could select some productions as case studies and give a shout out to all of the others in the book. But the myriad intersections of Latinx artists and cultures extend beyond just the Latinx-themed Shakespeare productions. In 2021, Dr. Trevor Bafoni and I published a book called Shakespeare and Latinidad, which I will scroll down to and show you down here. And it's a collection of essays and interviews from 25 playwrights, actors, scholars, dramaturgs, and directors who work at the intersection of Shakespeare and Latinx theatrical production. It's the first book of its kind and it continues to serve as a resource for artists, teachers, and scholars. And both Henry Godinas, our emcee, and Dr. Chantal Rodriguez, sorry, Henry contributed to this book and I am grateful for Chantal's support. After more than a decade, I have assembled this archive that at its launch last month or just a few weeks ago includes more than 150 Latinx Shakespeare's another 30 plus bilingual Latinx author, but not necessarily Latinx-themed Shakespearean adaptations and nearly 100 Latinx-themed adaptations of other Western literature. So I'm actually going to scroll through and show you a little bit of how the archive functions. Here's our the opening page. The first, the home page will always include current and upcoming shows. There are buttons in order to purchase tickets and that will come up and link to sites that are for shows that are forthcoming. If you know of shows that are coming up, please do let me know. There is a contact form in the back of the archive. Please feel free to send me a message and let me know about your show. Mojara is Luis Alfaro's cultural adaptation of Medea. El Otro Az is a TYA Theater for Young Adults show that is inspired by The Wizard of Oz. Santiago is a bilingual adaptation of Othello. Holler River is an adaptation or is inspired by Henry IV, part one written by Caridad Spitch and it takes this inspiration but it's set in a modern day small town. El Orocan by Cherise Castro-Smith is a reimagining of the Tempest and Life as a Dream is an adaptation of Calderón's play by Medea Rinfones and it's being staged at Baltimore Center Stage. You can see Carlos Morton's The Meiser of Mexico. This play was first performed in 1989 and it continues to be performed today. It's a reimagining of Moller's The Meiser and then also coming up we have Death of the Salesman with an all Latinx cast at the Latinx Theater Caso 101, Josefina Lopez's Theater in Los Angeles in California. You can see the myriad different types of adaptations and dramaturgies and stagings and all of them are included in this archive. On the About page, I answer 10, I thought key questions for the archive including why we have one and the terminology that I went over previously. What I wish to point to right in here is what is included in the archive and what is not. This will expand as time goes forward. Over 20 people gave their time to write reviews and essays for the archive. I reached out to hundreds of theaters and artists to ask if I could have permission to include images and ephemera. Of the Shakespeare plays and productions over 60% have at least one image and of the non Shakespeare ones over 40% do. In the coming months, I will continue to expand the non Shakespearean productions and plays. You can see here what is included. In the next phase, and I'm hoping over the next 90 days, I will include two more types of theater. The first is a list of Latinx author translations of Western classics. While all translations are adaptations and adaptations are included, I did not include these in phase one. Include the shows that also list the original playwright as co-author. This was to limit the scope for phase one. Now I will expand in part because the distinction isn't always that need, but also to add another category to the archive. The second is an expansion to include adaptations of indigenous and colonial myth, including plays that take up La Ligadona, La Maniche and others. Latinx playwrights have always adapted myth from a wide range of sources. If you would like to contribute and are people who wish to contribute, please contact me and let me know. If you have been involved in a production, there is no conflict of interest. I will not accept any disparaging or defamatory essays, but critique, of course, is welcome. It is organized by different types of Shakespeare productions and here Romeo and Juliet gets its own page because of over 25% of Latinx Shakespearean adaptations and productions are based on Romeo and Juliet. The other classics include a whole bunch of different types of classics as well. And you can see, for example, as we go to Romeo and Juliet, each production or play, a play if it is listed by its first production, might have some ephemera and if so, you can make it larger and look at it here. In some places, you can download the book. All items are listed courtesy of whoever granted permission to do so. There may be images. There might be other types of ephemera. This one's coming up a little slowly. And these come from different sources and I am incredibly grateful to everyone who gave their time and donated. In some cases, there are programs for productions. I am limiting to four images from a production. Some have a few more, but going forward, and that's what I'll do. I also have links to be able to watch the full show if that's available and in some cases, interviews as well. So they vary, like any archive, what's included and what's not. Some of it simply is what available. The archive is nonprofit. I built it to illustrate very clearly that there is a lengthy history of Latinx theater makers intersecting with adaptation. What I mean by a nonprofit archive is it means I will not sell it and nobody is making money for it. Everyone who donated their ephemera to the archive donated it and I paid to build it myself. I turned down some funds that were offered to me because I am concerned about intellectual property and the vagaries in certain grants and awards leave open possibilities that could prove problematic. I received the Susan Snyder Foundation, our fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library to work on the archive last summer and I'm grateful to the Folger for supporting my time and this project. So again, there is a resources page in which you will see a number of resources, including a list of all the productions that have video and audio and they are divided up here. Several resources for Latinx theater, this is not exhaustive, although that may be something that I develop or that we develop as the site goes forward bilingual theater and translation. And if you're looking for resources for Shakespeare, we are all indebted to Dr. Clair Bourne for creating the most thorough list of resources and the link to that is right here, which is something that is incredibly helpful. So the launch of the archive is only the first step in answering a larger question. Can we archive theater history in this way? Can it be publicly accessible and run like a curated wiki? I have been to archives all over the world with impressive buildings, sometimes incredibly strange protocols for looking at the items that they have there, freezing temperatures for those of you who have visited archives, you are accustomed to being cold in the archive because we must protect the items rather than the people who are trying to look at them. And to smaller archives, individual theater archives and to people's personal archives. What I've been proposing with building this is that we make our own and build outwards. So this is phase one of a test of can we archive theater history and run it from a more democratic, anyone can contribute and make this something that is accessible to everyone. It is designed for artists and scholars and students to use. The search function is still a little fuzzy, but it will likely return more results rather than less. And I would love to know how it is helpful to you in your dramaturgy and research. And if you want to submit, please do let me know anything from 250 words to 1500 words, it's wide open. And I am hoping that the creativity and diversity of the entries is a hallmark of the archive. So that is my hope for it. And I hope that it is helpful to all of you. So I am going to stop there and return to Henry. And for those of you who may have any questions, we can go from there. Wonderful. Thank you, Carla. Thank you so much. I do want to add a little bit more to Dr. Delagata's, the articulation of her career thus far, which is really only beginning. And it's unbelievable when you think of this work that she has already done and just the possibilities of what's ahead. The archive alone is just, it really transforms the field for all of us that have lived in the wild west of being Latinx and loving Shakespeare in the American theater. What Dr. Delagata has done is vindicate us, codify our efforts in a way that is just uplifting and remarkable. So I just want to tell you that beyond these wonderful publications that Carla and Professor Trevor Bofone have done, Shakespeare in Latinidad, and then this monograph Latinx Shakespeare's staging US intercultural theater, that she is also a scholar, practitioner and has worked as an advisor, a script consultant and dramaturg. I had the benefit of working with Dr. Delagata as my dramaturg here at Northwestern on a production of Peribanes by Lopez de Vega. And was honored to have Carla write about a production of Measure for Measure, which I directed this fall at Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Besides Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Carla has also worked for the Public, Victory Gardens Theater, Shakespeare Center Los Angeles, Halcyon Theater and Antioch Theater companies. I am also especially proud because I had the honor of being on Dr. Delagata's dissertation committee here at Northwestern University. So it's really special for me to be here and I'm so proud of this work and so excited for all of the young Latinx and Latin A artists that are coming up in the American theater who now have this remarkable springboard to create even more visibility for the work that we do. Right now, I think I'd like to open it up. I believe we can take some questions in the chat. So I would like to turn it over to Trevor and I'm gonna see, Trevor's gonna help me. Professor Bafoni is gonna help me to see if there are any questions coming up, comments. Trevor? Yes, thank you, Henry. And thank you, Carla, that was illuminating. And I must say I didn't know if I was gonna be on screen but I have both books in hand and they are beautiful books and super affordable. And of course, Latinx Shakespeare is free if you don't want to, if you wanna assign it for your students so on and so forth. So in the chat, you can drop some questions or if you have any questions you're curious about with Carla's research or the archive, the books, we're more than happy to discuss. Also, as Carla mentioned, Henry is a practitioner who has done some of this work. So if you're interested in those perspectives, I'm sure we could twist Henry's arm to speak on that. Happy to. So while, yes, yes. No, I just also wanna take a moment to lift up our two wonderful pro bono ASL interpreters, Nataniel, who is helping us out interpreting right now and Tanya as well. So thank you both so much for your time. So while our participants gain the courage to ask a question, I will ask a question. So Carla, honestly, I've read all your work. I worked with you, we edited it and I feel like I know so much, but there's so much more to learn from you. So could you possibly share how this work has been received by your students, right? Especially maybe non-Latinx students, like how you're teaching this at the university? Yes, I taught an upper division undergraduate Shakespeare course last semester that didn't have any particular theme to it. And actually I only taught comedies and romances because I thought we've had enough tragedy. So with that, when we got to the winter's tale or actually throughout, I would introduce cultural adaptations and offer to students the idea of like, this is how Latinx playwrights, young Latinx playwrights have reinterpreted. And so they were able to watch kind of productions that were done at the globe, at, I don't know, the national and so forth. And then when I presented them with video clips and images and kind of walked through and made a presentation of how these were culturally adapted, the students absolutely loved it because they, in their initial readings were, they didn't have, they couldn't imagine that, that was something kind of outside the scope. They had the option for a final paper to do a creative critical paper and to adapt one of the plays to a different context and culture. And some of them range from adapting the winter's tale to gossip girl, to that culture, which I'm not as familiar, to Cuban culture, to staging division in different ways and creating division in plays that don't necessarily have it. And so I think it helped prompt their own creativity but it also made them feel like there are productions that might interest them more than I think how some people were originally introduced to Shakespeare. So it's always part of the curriculum and it comes in different ways. I'm currently teaching in an English department. So my courses are a bit different than when I was in the theater department for what the students are looking for and the types of assignments. But they have the option to create an adaptation or a portion of the adaptation based on the types of conversations we've had in class. Excellent, I see we have a question from Teddy. Is there any connection between how Latinx artists in the US are playing with Shakespeare compared to say in Latin America? That is a great question and a big question. And in the many countries of Latin America we have a number of different theatrical traditions. What I found is that it depends on the country in Latin America, but in the United States a lot of the productions and adaptations for four Latinx cultures have a lot to do with what I call ensemble shows, which is one of the reasons why Romeo and Juliet is so popular, along with the West Side story influence. Even when Pablo Neruda was asked to translate a Shakespeare play, he originally wanted to translate a fellow, but then he didn't feel that there was a Chilean actor to play the role. So instead translated Romeo and Juliet. When I first posted the archive my first email that I received was is there really no Latino King Lear? And I'm like, wow. And then I got two more of those within the first 48 hours. And you can also, when you look at the archive see the absolute paucity of history plays that have been transposed. And so I think casting, staging, like those issues come up. And so what I found several Latin American touring shows to the United States are one-man shows of King Lear, Richard the Third and so forth. So there was a cultural question of how do history plays relate to Latinx cultures and Latin American cultures? But I think much of it too also has to do with translations. And certain plays weren't translated in certain countries for a long period of time or translated more recently, but it also has to do with actors in the pipeline. And we're all aware that there has been a historical lack of acceptance and that that is changing as well as directors too. You know, if you don't mind, I'm gonna jump in real quick because you made me think of a Mexican production adaptation, I guess you would say, of that Scottish play that we presented at the Goodman Theater about four years ago. It came from Mexico City, a company called Los Colochos and the piece was called Mendoza and it was their adaptation of Macbeth. And it was interesting because it was set like in a small cantina in a little rural town and all of the chairs and the tables were all la corona, you know, like corona beer was prominent and it was just really beautiful and violent and just remarkable to see a Shakespeare adaptation within a specific Latin American culture. And it was in Spanish of course, that's always an interesting thing, right? Also think of the Teatro Wendy of Cuba's adaptation of the tempest called La Autra Tempestad which played the globe in London in 1999 for a month in which all a variety of different Shakespeare characters arrived. So there's almost an irreverence that in my experience that Latin Americans like to embrace when it comes to adapting Shakespeare and playing Shakespeare. Absolutely. Just to real quick, we have a few minutes left, right? We finished the top of the hour. Does someone confirm? Okay, so we have time for one quick question and one quick answer. So Jennifer asks, I'm curious to get a better perspective on the relation to Latinx theater and perspectives and that of indigenous peoples, right? Is there any intersection here with, yes? The production of Hamlet at Teletulsa, Hamlet El Principia de Anmar. Teletulsa is actually the like indigenous theater and Tarr Moses who adapted and directed it is indigenous. And so she really integrated day of the dead cosmologies and ceremonies and so forth and set it in colonial Mexico. And so more and more really in the last decade but there are some precursors to that. In Gigeneri comes into these productions largely through ceremony and ritual whether it's through the apothecary in Romeo and Juliet or kind of is presented that way. Even when directors and actors are bilingual they often haven't been trained to perform and act and direct in the second language. So some of it has to do with a language question and what people are able to perform on stage. In Vierno by Jose Cruz Gonzalez I showed a picture of that is one of the case studies. He actually integrated Chumash which is the language of the Somali people spoken in nearby what is now Santa Maria, California where the production was originally staged and where and staged a whole version of the winter's tale during Rancheta life in California and the California's and so forth which very much takes into consideration in Gigeneri as well as black indigenous cultures. So more and more in the last 15 years we're seeing a wonderful integration and that's coming from all different places. So there definitely is a relationship. Well, thank you Carla. I think that concludes the Q&A portion of the evening and my work is done. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Trevor. Thank you Dr. Delegata. Thank you Dr. Rodriguez. Thank you Nataniel and Tanya and Jaclyn. Thank you all for listening and joining us tonight. I hope that you take advantage of this incredible, incredible archive and we just thank you so much for joining us. Have a wonderful rest of your evening. Good night.