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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-