Students adapted 17th century Spanish plays with their own voice
The 5-year-old twins were in bed all night, asleep and unaware of what was going on outside their home.
His mother, Kathleen Berger, wore black pants and a white shirt. I looked at her text, enclosed in a white envelope, and began to sing.
“Love, show me the way out of this maze of confusion before I lose my mind,” she sang in her operatic voice throughout the Litchfield Park neighborhood.
It was early April and Berger, who had recently graduated online from Arizona State University, was finalizing her entry to the 2022 New Gold Digital Theater Festival.
For two minutes and 40 seconds, she took the Spanish play “El Muerto Disimulado” by the Portuguese author Ángela de Azevedo and made it her king. Her notes and voice range convey the story of a woman who breaks with the traditional passive female role and takes the control of their own narrative.
When his performance ended, Berger bowed slightly, as if singing in front of an audience.
Six weeks later, he got the news: his performance received an honorable mention at the festival.
This is the end of the story.
It begins with the COVID-19 pandemic and an online Arizona State University professor’s desire to create community in a closed world.
The New Gold Festival kicked off in 2021 and featured a group of Wesleyan students from Ohio who wanted to explore new ways of understanding and adapting classic Spanish theater. The 2022 festival focused on works that addressed current social issues such as gender, racial and social inequality, systemic oppression, cultural identity, and the environment.
When she heard about the festival, María Domínguez, a teacher at Arizona State University’s School of International Arts and Cultures, knew immediately that she wanted her students to be a part of it.
“I taught Spanish for many years at Arizona State University, but my background is in theater,” Dominguez said. “So when the theater collapsed because of COVID and people couldn’t go to any of the places they used to gather, and all these companies were like, ‘How do we express ourselves? I added one and one and said, “Okay, that will be great for my students.”
Dominguez responded to a Zoom call with students from several of her classes to explain how they could take the written assignments they need to do for class and turn them into video entries for the festival.
The only rule: digital tickets can’t be longer than five minutes. Other than that, the students were free to explore their creativity on how to adapt the works in Spanish.
nekidra nesbit
Nequedra Nisbet, an elderly woman who has studied Domínguez’s Spanish Sustainability Course, chose “El Viejo Celoso (The Jealous Old Man)” by Miguel de Cervantes, which tells the story of infidelity.
In which video Nisbett, who lives in the Caribbean, laments how foolish she can be to fall for Canizaris’s lies. She plays three different characters in the video: Dona Lorenza, Hortigosa, and Christina.
“I found it very interesting, not necessarily because it’s related to me, but because it’s an issue that women face where they are sometimes abused by men,” Nesbitt said.
Six entries from Arizona State University have been selected to participate in the festival, which welcomes entries from students and recent graduates from across the country. Nesbitt was selected as a finalist, as was Ashley Arrien, who presented a new version of “La dama duende (The Phantom Lady) by Pedro Calderón”, in which a man falls in love with a woman who is hidden, veiled or by chance. in the dark.
In which AdaptationAryn lies on her couch and laments being “invisible” because she doesn’t have internet and can’t post on social media.
“I’m literally going to die,” he shouts at the suffering of millennials.
“We have all these great playwrights, and then you combine them with hashtags, with influencers, using TikTok — the theme remains the same, the sentiments are the same, the meaning is the same, but the language is different,” Dominguez said. . “It’s an innovative way to explore this business.”
Berger, who began her education at Arizona State University in 1989 majoring in vocal performance, received her BA in Spanish in 2020 and was a student in Dominguez’s Foundational Texts for Spain class. When she was given the assignment to rewrite a play in Spanish and then record herself speaking it, she asked Domínguez if it would be appropriate to sing the assignment.
“She said yes,” recalls Berger. “She was very excited.”
In addition to capitalizing on her more than 35 years as an actress and opera singer, Berger’s timing was perfect for her. While taking her class, the young composer and actor Joshua Verne lived with her and her husband and helped with the children.
“So I asked him, ‘Is there a way I can do a short monologue in Spanish and you can write the music for me in four days?'” Berger said. «
Verne got the job done, and four nights later, Berger was singing outside his house.
“Which would have been, not a waste, but a relatively easy task because doing a monologue is something that I’ve experienced for over 35 years, and it turns out to be a very, very cool project,” Berger said.
It turns out that online education at ASU isn’t limited to a laptop and a Zoom call. A mother could give birth to 5-year-old twins and a shy Caribbean woman in 17th-century Spain and at a festival that celebrated her talent and creativity.
“That’s really how it brings people together,” Nesbitt said. “I have had the opportunity to meet and interact with people in places I have never seen before. It really is a community.”
Pictured above: Kathleen Berger records her operatic version of “The Disguised Dead” at the 2022 New Gold Digital Theater Festival. Berger received an honorable mention at the festival. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Berger
