The Comedia Unbound

Abstract

While the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic was disastrous for theater companies everywhere, the comedia was arguably energized by its constraints. The En compañía de los clásicos initiative in Spain, the theatrical presentations at the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater (AHCT) virtual conference in July 2020, and the reimagined virtual LA Escena Festival of Hispanic Classical Theater suggest that 2020 may have been a banner year for comedia. The engagement with the classics by cutting-edge companies producing durational, site-specific, participatory, and immersive theater revealed novel artistic possibilities and engaged new audiences, radically transforming the sense of what is possible when staging the corpus. At the same time, and even as individual companies grappled with the impact of the pandemic, the larger institutional landscape of theater in Spain continued to promote a transatlantic narrative of comedia that argues for its relevance beyond Spain itself. The comedia thus appears doubly unbound: newly freed from formal constraints, and promoted in and to a broader geography.

Keywords:

• Comedia studies
• virtual performances
• COVID-19 pandemic
• LA Escena Festival
• innovation
• theater companies

Notes

1 The YouTube page for the piece explains: “El cineasta experimental austríaco Martin Arnold (Viena, 1959) hace reflexionar al espectador a través de efectos visuales vanguardistas que tienen como finalidad desestabilizar al espectador con su ‘singular deconstrucción.’ Reapropiándose de clásicos, Arnold utiliza como materia prima películas bien reconocibles, buscando desvelar patrones escondidos a través de una manipulación provoca resultados casi sobrenaturales en su extrañeza, y que revelan los sueños, esperanzas y tabúes de la época y de la sociedad que las creó.”

2 For a discussion on how debates about liveness were transformed by the pandemic, see my Theater of Lockdown.

3 Luna, Álvaro, audio message to author, 14 Oct. 2020. For a fuller discussion of the technical challenges, see my Theater of Lockdown.

4 For more information on LA Escena, see http://diversifyingtheclassics.humanities.ucla.edu/initiatives/performance-landing-page/la-escena/ and https://www.anoisewithin.org/la-escena-2020/.

5 All cited text is taken from the production.

6 See also Fuchs, “Entrevista a Ignacio García.”

7 Bruce Burningham and Robert Bayliss have raised these points at recent conferences, “Resituating the Comedia” (Clark Library/UCLA Center for 17th-and 18th-Century Studies, 12–13 Nov. 2020) and “Recasting the Comedia: Confronting the Challenges of the 21st Century” (AHCT/Almagro Festival, 5–11 July 2021), respectively. DTC also participated in a workshop at the Stratford Lab (part of the Stratford Theater Festival in Canada) where some participants resisted the idea of the comedia as a transatlantic production.

8 Golden Tongues pairs Los Angeles writers with Hispanic classical texts. The resulting adaptations are presented in staged readings. The initiative has produced 15 new plays since 2014, with three more planned for 2022. See http://diversifyingtheclassics.humanities.ucla.edu/golden-tongues-page/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Fuchs

Barbara Fuchs is Professor of Spanish and English at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her most recent book is Theater of Lockdown: Digital and Distanced Performance in a Time of Pandemic (Methuen Drama, 2021). In 2021, she served as President of the Modern Language Association and was also awarded the inaugural “Premio Ñ” from the Instituto Cervantes, for the promotion of Spanish language and culture.