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About Just out. (Portland, OR) 1983-2013 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 7, 2011)
18 WWW JUSTOUT COM JANUARY 7 2011 STATE OF THE ARTS State of the Arts The new /ear gears up with must-see visual and performing arts Rory Stitt plays Federico Garcia Lorca in the world premiere of Teatro Milagro s original, bilingual touring production D uende de Lorca It’s January— the holiday whir has passed, some o f the most memorable, provocative im visitors departed, decorations taken down, ages from the latter half o f the 20th century and beyond? leftovers inhaled. Now what to do? From the looks o f things, we haven’t a mo Yeah, we’ve got that. ment to rest, as Portland’s ever bustling arts Portland is, indeed, fertile ground for all community rolls out one event after another manner o f visual and performing arts. Read this first month o f 2011. How about a festival on for more about January’s must-see events— devoted to new works in the arts, from staged all the motivation you need to suit up and, readings to fully-staged productions, ensemble well, weather the yucky weather. And visit and collaborative-driven efforts that span blogout.justout.com for more cultural offer dance, comedy, visual art and film? ings. In the meantime, see you at at the theater, Or a world-premiere play about an iconic and gallery, and museum, and dance studio... writer o f the early 1900s? Or a special talk by a revered queer photographer responsible for —Amanda Schurr Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man World premiere of Duende de Lorca brings life of Federico Garcia Lorca to life BY RYAN J. PRADO The life o f Federico García Lorca was a turbulent study o f acceptance into a new class o f Spanish surrealist artists, poets and play wrights during the fertile modernism o f the “Generation o f ’27.” He, along with luminar ies such as Salvador Dali, paved a new road for dramatic theater and the expansion o f the mind with such famous plays as Mariana Pineda and his poetry collection Gypsy Ballads. His premature death at age 38— suspected to have been at the hands of anti-communist death squads during the Spanish Civil War— cemented Lorca’s legacy as an enigmatic artist even before a ban on his work was lifted in 1953. But it is not the later years o f success and controversy that Danel Malan— artistic direc tor o f Teatro Milagro— chose to spotlight when penning a stage play based on Lorca’s life. Instead, Malan opted to focus on Lorca as a 27-year-old struggling artist who still lived with his parents, and whose plays were criti cized heavily by Spain’s literati. Duende de Lorca , a bilingual play written by Malan, will run two weekends only. The world premiere, on Friday, January 14 atTeatro M il agro, will be followed by a tour o f Oregon col leges at the end o f February and will hopefully expand to other parts o f the country in the fall. Malan’s vision for a stage play about Lorca sprung from the creative process employed during last year’s successful American Sueno production. That play was written based on Malan’s desire to portray LGBTQjidentified Latinos, and she conducted interviews with the LGBTQ_Latino community to help with materializing the struggles associated within that minority. “This year I read every book I could find about Lorca and his close friends, such as Dali,” says Malan. “It was a more intimate process— reading letters he had written to his closest friends, exposing his fears and tri-
