Join an interdisciplinary team exploring the Siglo de Oro’s instructive teatro breve – one-act plays with potent clues for building better ways to teach, stage, and research the richest script library known to history.

Teatro breve from the Spanish Golden Age (c. 1580-1680) includes satires and saint’s plays, star vehicles and character studies, musicals and thrillers, current-events commentaries and gripping meditations on metatheater, written by big-name playwrights – the cream of Spanish stagecraft, compressed for effective study.

In this working session, you’ll get up close and personal with selected entremeses (comic plays presented between the acts of a comedia), autos sacramentales (multilevel meditations staged for public celebrations of Corpus Christi), and their dramatic ancestors, while making significant contributions toward understanding them.

You’ll develop practical applications for incorporating teatro breve into your current work, you’ll pay particular attention to music and movement as tools for building meaning into performances, and you’ll actively engage in assessing, creating, and premiering performance-friendly translations of historically important, theatrically powerful one-acts.

You’ll join one of three teams:  Team Entremés, Team Auto Sacramental, or Team Translation.  Guided by session leaders (see list below) who bring you seasoned experience in a wide range of modern language and theater researches, you’ll collaborate with team members (dramaturgs, practitioners, teachers, and translators from all sorts of backgrounds) to:

Ø    read three one-act plays from the Spanish Golden age, post initial responses on the session’s wiki, and help your team select one play for detailed study (June-July);

Ø    thoughtfully consider context and criticism materials posted by team leaders (July-August);

Ø    compare translations/editions of plays selected for close study, and pose questions about them from performance, pedagogy, or critical perspectives (August-September);

Ø    write a brief position paper or a draft translation in response to questions posed, post this paper/translation on the wiki, and respond to team members’ postings (September-October);

Ø    synthesize discussion points/translation results into a presentation designed actively to involve others at the conference (October-November), and

Ø    present/perform highlights from your research, hear other teams’ reports, and participate in moderated discussion during ATHE’s conference in Dallas (November 7-10).

To bid for a role in this groundbreaking journey through little-studied territory, write us a short statement (350 words) about the skills, interests, and/or experiences that attract you to our exploration of teatro breve.  Please include a brief bio (50 words).  Send your statement and bio as MS Word attachments to teatrobreve2013@yahoo.com by June 3.

We hope to hear from you.  We assure you that complete newcomers to the field will be warmly welcomed.

Ben Gunter, Florida State University, teatrobreve2013@yahoo.com

Karen Berman, Georgia College, kbermanth@aol.com

Ian Borden, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, iborden2@unl.edu

Nena Couch, Ohio State University, couch.1@osu.edu

David Pasto, Oklahoma City University, dpasto@okcu.edu

Susan Paun de García, Denison University, garcia@denison.edu

Kerry Wilks, Wichita State University, kerry.wilks@wichita.edu

Amy Williamsen, University of North Carolina Greensboro, arwill25@uncg.edu

Jason Yancey, Grand Valley State University, yanceyj@gvsu.edu