Puerto Rican dramatist and actress Rosa Luisa Márquez and the troupe Sudakaribe are in Cuba for the staging of Arístides Vargas’ play La razón blindada. She had previously visited Cuba as a member of the Literary Prize jury for Casa de las Amércias, and to teach a workshop at EITALC (Escuela Internacional de Teatro de América Latina y el Caribe) [International School of Theatre of Latin America and the Caribbean], which for many years was directed by Osvaldo Dragún.
Directed by Márquez, Sudakaribe’s La razón blindada is a re-writing of the Argentine-Ecuadorian reality presented in Vargas’ work. When they saw the original, the troupe found many resonances and details that coincided with Puerto Rican life. Two of the university workshop participants, professional actor Ariel Cuevas and student Kairiana Núñez were interested in launching the reworking the script. They worked closely with Márquez and Vargas as they reconfigured the play. Márquez explains, “We kept the essence of Kafka and the idea of a Sancho Panza that invents El Quixote in order to survive. We had conversations with our former political prisoners to find the space of play and imagination in their respective experiences of confinement. Our approach to ‘the Island’ was a minimalist one, with concrete borders that contain it. We transformed a chess game into a small theatre within the theatre in order to tell a story; we reappropriated the text to make it ours. We were daring and we took the play to Malayerba [troupe that performs the original play] so they could see it, critique it, and help us.”
The Puerto Rican version of La razón blindada premiered in San Juan in 2006. Since then, the troupe has performed it numerous times, in Puerto Rico, Ecuador, and Peru. Now it will be presented to the Cuban audience.
Actress and director, dramatist, radio and TV producer and announcer, Rosa Luisa Márquez (Puerto Rico, 1947) holds an MA from New York University and a PhD from Michigan State University. She is a professor of drama and theater arts at the University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras. Trained in street theater, founder of Anamú Theater Collective, constant apprentice to Peter Schumann of the Bread and Puppet Theater and Augusto Boal of the Theater of the Oppressed, of Grupo Yuyachkani of Peru, and Grupo Malayerba from Ecuador, she has developed her own theatrical language in collaboration with Puerto Rican graphic artist Antonio Martorell. They both conceived and directed the Teatreros Ambulantes, a student theater project that performed in communities, schools and alternate spaces from 1986-1990. Márquez published Brincos y saltos: el juego como disciplina teatral [Leaps and Bounds: Games as Theatrical Discipline], a book on her own methodology and teaching experience, and Historias para ser contadas: el montaje, a model book of her staging of Osvaldo Dragun’s Latin American plays. Her projects have traveled extensively through North and South America and the Caribbean.
For full article (in Spanish), see http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5456
For photo and more on Márquez’s work, see http://enciclopediapr.org/esp/article.cfm?ref=06100219
For biography, see http://hemisphericinstitute.org/artistprofiles/rlmarquez/marquez_LongBio_ENG.pdf
