ECD Travel Grant Recipients Responses from #LMDA2020

by Manuela Sosa

My first LMDA conference was unlike any other in history. After kicking myself for not making the trip to Chicago last year, there’s no way I was going to miss the first one held in Latin America, in one of the most amazing cities in the world.Although the virtual conference had way fewer tequila-fueled dramaturgical debates than I expected, it did ignite my passions in other ways. I was unprepared for the joy I’d feel simply from hearing others discuss theatre in my mother tongue. Having grown up in the US and Canada, the vocabulary lesson alone was impactful. I had no idea what to call a dramaturg in Spanish! This has already sparked many thoughts in my trilingual brain around the effect of language on how we view and express our artistic identities.

I would prefer to have had these realizations in person, while on the hunt for tacos at three in the morning, but this year’s virtual gathering had its own unique highlights for me. I randomly reunited with friends from my theatre community in New York and watched my dear friend and “pioneer dramaturg” prove herself wrong. I also enjoyed watching theatre artists who are used to liveness, to hearing people laugh and cry in the flesh now grappling with new tech challenges and doing so with grace. “Can you guys hear me?” I heard a lot of you, and it was a pleasure to listen, not only to your stories but to the birds of Mexico City, and the sounds of Norwegian book titles. I will paraphrase Rocío Galicia who put it beautifully in her talk “Dramaturgismo en el contexto de lo hiper”: we are not physically together, yet we are opening the door to our intimate spaces, to our different worlds, to our corazones.

Until next year—nos vemos en el bar!

Originally published in the June 2020 Newsletter