Blood Wedding by Federico García Lorca translation by Caridad Svich
March 27 - April 5, 2014 at 7:30 pm Matinee April 3, at 12:30 pm TIMMS CENTRE for the ARTS University of Alberta Tickets $11 – $22 available at and TIX on the Square www.studiotheatre.ca
Blood Wedding Cast – In alphabetical order Bride Moon, Woodcutter 1 Leonardo Neighbour Mother-in-law, Beggar Woodcutter 2 Mother Woodcutter 3 Father Maid Leonardo’s Wife Groom Creative Team Director Set, Costume and Lighting Designer Composer and Sound Designer Assistant Director Assistant Set Designer Assistant Costume Designer Assistant to the Costume Designer Assistant to the Lighting Designer Dramaturgical Team Voice/Speech/Text Coach
by Federico García Lorca translation by Caridad Svich Merran Carr-Wiggin Oscar Derkx Braydon Dowler-Coltman Zoe Glassman Georgia Irwin Adam Klassen Mariann Kirby Neil Kuefler Graham Mothersill Cristina Patalas Andrea Rankin Kristian Stec
Kathleen Weiss Sean McMullen Matt Skopyk Lucy Collingwood Josee Chartrand Travis Metzger Stephanie Bahniuk Alison Yanota Stefano Muneroni Sophie Garreau-Brennan Elissa Weinzimmer
Movement sequences created by the director and the company with Lin Snelling Stage Management Stage Manager Assistant Stage Managers Stage Management Advisor
Joan Wyatt Lore Green, Andrea Murphy John Raymond
Contents • 3 Production Team • 4 Director’s Notes • 5, 6, 7, Dramaturgical Notes • 8 Mandate • 12 Photos • 14 Staff / Front of House • 15 Donors
Production Team Production Manager: Technical Director: Assistant Production Manager: Assistant Technical Director: Production Administrative Assistant: Wardrobe Manager: Cutter: Stitcher: Practicum Students:
Head Scenic/Stage Carpenter Scenic Capenter: Head of Soft Goods Construction Soft Goods Painting Soft Goods Construction
Head Scenic Painter: Scenic Painters:
Properties Master: Lighting Supervisor: Head of Lighting: Lighting Technicians:
Sound Supervisor: Head of Sound: Running Crew: Lighting Operator: Sound Operator: Stage Carpenter:
Gerry van Hezewyk Larry Clark Erin Valentine Catherine Vielguth Jonathan Durynek Joanna Johnston Ann Salmonson Karen Kucher Josee Chartrand Megan Koshka Laurel Thiessan Darrell Cooksey Barbara Hagensen Kiidra Duhault Jane Kline JosÊe Chartrand Chris Chelich Catherine Vielguth Laura Campbell Maria Burkinshaw Chris Chelich Kim Creller Megan Koshka Rhys Martin Jane Kline Mel Geary Kim Creller Matt Koyata Josee Chartrand Megan Koshka Charlie Lynn Rhys Martin Travis Metzger Je Osterlin Matthew Skopyk Mattia Poulin Kim Creller Mattia Poulin Chris Chelich
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Director’s Notes There are many resonances of the image of blood in Blood Wedding. There is a literal meaning- a wedding where blood is shed but on a deeper level, the “blood wedding” occurs in the fiery attraction of the blood that streams between Leonardo and the Bride, binding them in a true marriage. Blood also resonates through the play as it refers to families united by blood ties and blood feuds between families, ancient and current. Ultimately, the blood that spills is not a result of the fire of passion but of unrelenting adherence to outmoded ideas about honor and repressive roles for men and women in a world such as this one. It is a tragedy of an entire community, trapped in cycles of violence that occur and reoccur but it is the women who are left to endure to mourn their dead. Blood Wedding is a play I have always loved and wanted to direct for years. The play with its searingly beautiful poetry and imagery gives me an excellent canvas for my own unique tools as a director. My background in the theatre is in Grotowski influenced physical training which focuses on extended imagery and physicality. A play like this, embedded in the realm of mythology and imagination lends itself beautifully to this work. The fact that I have been able to bring it to fruition at this point is mainly due to the extraordinary collaborators I have for this production. The acting company - the graduating BFA class of 2014 - is not only a talented and well trained ensemble, but have proved their unfailing generosity and absolute fearlessness in this non-traditional rehearsal process. The world of the play was created with contributions from Matthew Skopyk and his evocative composition, Lin Snelling with her insight into the most daring and effective physical choices, and Sean McMullen surrounding us with a simple but powerful production design. Elissa Weinzimmer has worked tirelessly as a vocal coach on the beautiful but difficult poetic text and our Stage Management team, Joan, Lore and Andrea have supported us in every conceivable way. The Timms Centre is the best of laboratories for a director and I received great support from the skilled and dedicated staff and group of technical students who contribute to a big show like this one.
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Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding 2014: Dramaturgical Notes “Without a tragic sense there is no theater.” lose themselves or something essential about themselves, then Lorca creates Federico García Lorca quintessentially tragic characters who make the only decision possible to them and, as a The staging of Blood Wedding in 1933 consequence, experience total loss. While it launched Federico García Lorca as one is Lorca’s female characters such as Yerma, of the most successful playwrights of his Bride, Angustias, Adela and others who generation. The plays he had written up tend to elicit the most sympathy, his male until that point had garnered him good reviews and the honour of being considered characters also suffer from the same social oppression. The persecutors, regardless of a modernist innovator of Spanish drama, their gender, are also the victims in a world but public success had eluded him. Blood Wedding, which was inspired by a true story that continuously engenders scenarios of about a bride who had disappeared with her violence and self-destruction. lover, her own cousin, on her wedding day, Lorca illuminates his own understanding was the play that made Lorca a household of the tragic sense in an interesting essay name and afforded him a career in theatre, entitled “Theory and Play of the Duende,” both in Spain and abroad. Blood Wedding is usually linked with Yerma, written like Blood Wedding in 1933, in Lorca’s play about a woman whose desire for which he elucidates his aesthetic theories a child leads her to murder her husband, and of both poetry and drama. He argues that while Italian artists have the angel as a The House of Bernarda Alba, which deals source of inspiration, and the French have with five sisters living through frustrated the muse, the Spaniards have the duende, desires and societal oppression. All three plays, alternatively referred to as ‘Andalusian a dark energy that comes from the ground up and seizes the body of an artist, forcing tragedies’ or ‘rural tragedies’, share the him to create. He qualifies the duende same socio-cultural landscape, where “as a power, not a work” and as “a true, characters face an environment that forces living style, of blood, of the most ancient them to sacrifice themselves to binding social expectations. Lorca’s characters ghost culture, of spontaneous creation” (263). each other and haunt the audience with the What distinguishes the duende from both the angel and the muse is that “The muse impossibility of their choices, while family and neighbours scrutinize their every action, and angel come from without […] but one must awaken the duende in the remotest making honourable behaviour the only currency for social acceptance. Since morals mansions of the blood” (263). Lorca explains that the duende is immediately are inscribed within traditional codes and visible in accomplished flamenco dancers are reinforced by the watchful community, where the expression of energy manifests the characters’ tragic choices often lead to public rejection and total isolation. They can itself in a sense of total embodiment and transcendence that leads to what appears either break free of these constrictions and to be a state of trance. The duende, in pay the consequences, as happens in Blood Wedding and The House of Bernarda Alba, or Lorca’s words, “does not come at all unless internalize them to the point of hysteria and he sees that death is possible … [he] takes it upon himself to make us suffer by means psychosis, as happens in Yerma. of a drama of living forms, and clears the stairways for an evasion of the surrounding In both cases the results are framed by the reality” (264). Lorca paints the duende as tragic genre. If, as many theatre scholars an inspirational source that brings about argue, tragic characters are ones who must a sense of loss, and this is what makes it make a decision that leads them to either 5
Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding 2014: Dramaturgical Notes continued answers to the dramaturgical question “why this play now?” I argue, however, that the reason to stage Blood Wedding today lies also in the fact that while the play is indeed totally removed from us both temporally and The question one might ask then is how to translate for the stage the rich socio-cultural spatially, it has the capacity to submerge us into the magic of its world and afford us the background of this play while attending to ability to look at the story and its characters the expectations of an audience that might from a distance. The play’s memorable be unfamiliar with it? Why do we stage Blood Wedding today, and not just in Canada story and larger than life characters evoke a tragic world that is not dissimilar from that but all over the world? Can duende make of Greek tragedy, and just as life-affirming its way to the Canadian stage? Finally, what values can we still access in Lorca that justify and destructive. As a tragedy, in the the staging of his plays? The major argument quintessential meaning of the term, Blood would be that Lorca gave us primal, universal Wedding ponders notions of life and death, the earth-shattering impact of conflicting characters that in spite of being grounded desires, and what binds individuals to their in Andalusian Spain, with its gypsy culture, local and global communities. This happens flamenco, and folklore, can easily cross both through its proximity and distance from over geographical and historical boundaries our world. due to the universal emotions they evoke. This motivation and the exquisite poetry of The translation by Caridad Svich that Lorca’s language are commonly the main Kathleen Weiss chose for the Studio Theatre production of Blood Wedding brings to life this transcultural appeal and avoids what Svich herself calls “the unfortunate patina of folklorism or exoticism” that colors many North American translations of Lorca (378). Ms. Weiss decided to set her mise en scène in a neutral space, one firmly grounded in Fall Hours: Lorca’s poetic and tragic world, but that Mon - Fri: 7 PM - 12:30 AM Sundays: 7 PM - 11 PM exists outside of literal and conventional interpretations of Spain. Weiss and her creative team have crafted an imaginative 780-4-WALK-ME canvas rooted in a vibrant physical language su.ualberta.ca/safewalk that affords Lorca’s text the possibility to be read and contextualized as both far and close, as well as foreign and domestic. We hope you enjoy the show and that in the end you are confident in saying “Tiene duende,” It has duende! tragic. It is embodied and transformative energy that changes the reality of the artist as well as that of the spectator.
WE’LL WALK YOU HOME. 6
Bibliography Svich, Caridad. “Some Thoughts on García Lorca and the Arts of Translations.” Theatre Journal. Vol. 59, 3 (October 2007) 377-379. García Lorca, Federico. “Theory and Play of the Duende.” In Richard Drain (ed.)
Twentieth-Century Theatre: A Sourcebook. London & New York: Routledge, 1995.
A Timeline of Lorca’s Life 1898 Federico Garcia Lorca is born in Fuente Vaqueros, near Granada. Lorca studied philosophy and law at the University of Granada, but he abandoned those disciplines for literature, art, and the theatre. 1919 Transferred to the University of Madrid where he frequented a group of artists who would become known as Generación del 27. The group included the painter Salvador Dalí and the filmmaker Luis Buñuel. 1920 The Butterfly’s Evil Spell opened in Madrid. 1927 He published The Gypsy Ballads, his first book of poems. 1929 Studied English at Columbia University, where he wrote Poet in New York, which was published after his death. The same year he achieved his first theatrical
success with Mariana Pineda with a set designed by Salvador Dalí. 1930 The Prodigious Cobbler’s Wife 1931 Founded “La Barraca” a theatre company that toured Spain extensively with Golden Age and Spanish classical dramas. 1933 The Love of Don Perlimplín with Belisa in Her Garden. Blood Wedding was based on a newspaper account of a bride who ran off with her lover on her wedding night. 1934 Yerma. 1936 Lorca was one of the first artists to fall victim to the Spanish Civil War. On August 19, he was taken to a field near Granada, shot, and buried in a mass grave. His body was never found. He had only completed the first draft of The House of Bernarda Alba. The play was staged posthumously.
Stefano Muneroni, Dramaturg
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Life and Death in Lorca’s Poetry and Theatre Lecture and Q&A with Dr. Odile Cisneros Timms Centre main stage Immediately following the matinee showing of Blood Wedding on April 3, 2014
U of A Studio Theatre Mandate By MIkE BaRTLETT
May 2 - 10, 2014 Preview may 1
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To provide sterling training and educational opportunities for BFA acting, technical theatre and stage management students, and MFA design, directing and MA dramaturgy students To provide research / creative activity opportunities for the Department of Drama’s faculty directors and designers To provide opportunities for connections with departments across campus through the choice of plays which have cultural, literary and historical significance To provide opportunities for the community at large to engage with the Department of Drama through guest artist collaboration and attendance as audience members Kathleen Weiss, Artistic Director, U of A Studio Theatre and Chair, Department of Drama
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Administrative Staff Kathleen Weiss: Chair, Department of Drama Julie Brown: Assistant Chair Administration David Prestley: Theatre Administrator / Events Coordinator Jonathan Durynek: Box Office Coordinator / Events Assistant Ruth Vander Woude: Graduate Advisor / Chair’s EA Connie Golden: Undergraduate Advisor Helen Baggaley: Administrative Assistant / Office Coordinator With assistance from Faculty of Arts staff: Salena Kitteringham: Fine Arts Communications Lead Terah Jans: Fine Arts Marketing Specialist Joanna Manchur: Fine Arts Recruitment Coordinator
Production Staff Gerry van Hezewyk: Production Manager / Administrative Professional Officer Larry Clark: Technical Director, Timms Centre for the Arts Darrell Cooksey: Head Carpenter Jonathan Durynek: Production Administrative Assistant Mel Geary: Lighting Supervisor Joanna Johnston: Costume Manager Jane Kline: Property Master Karen Kucher: Costumer, Fine Arts Building Don MacKenzie: Technical Director, Fine Arts Building Ann Salmonson: Cutter Matthew Skopyk: Second Playing Space Coordinator / Sound Supervisor
Front of House Staff: Bonita Akai, Danielle Dugan, Al Gadowsky, Becky Gormley, Caitlin Gormley, Tasreen Hudson, Marie-Andrée Lachapelle, Laura Norton, Faye Stollery, Cheryl Vandergraaf, Catherine Vielguth Volunteers: Jessy Ardern, Debbie Beaver, Oleg Bogatryrevich, Susan Box, Franco Correa, Sarah Culkin, Joan Damkjar, Alana De Melo, Jonathan Durynek, Mary and Gene Ewanyshyn, Terri Gingras, Ron Gleason, Darcy Hoover-Correa, Marie-Andrée Lachapelle, Don Lavigne, Sareeta Lopez, Bronwyn Lucenko, Tom and Gillian McGovern, Marlene Marlj, Conner Meeker, Jennifer Morely, Joe Perry, Alice Petruk, David Prestley, Leila Raye-Crofton, Jane Voloboeva 14
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This list includes those who donated to various Drama funds from October 2012 - January 2014. List compiled January 15, 2014. Apologies for inadvertent omissions or errors. Contact 780-492-2271 for corrections.
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