The comedia of the Spanish Golden Age does not live in libraries alone. It is rehearsed, staged, translated, catalogd and taught. This section gathers the work being done around that repertoire today, inside and outside the academy.
Comedia Projects
Editing a text, staging a scene, digitising an archive, taking a puppet show into a classroom. The projects gathered here are of very different kinds, from research and performance to digital humanities and teaching, but they all have the same effect: they take the plays off the shelf and put them back into circulation. It is that continuous work that keeps a four-hundred-year-old repertoire something to be read, studied and performed, rather than a footnote.
Companies
The companies staging the comedia today are the heirs of those cómicos who traveled from one corral to the next. The costumes change, the language changes, the continent changes; the craft does not, which is to speak a verse so that it is understood and enjoyed. Because of them the texts are still alive, not as documents but as performances, before audiences in very different places and in very different languages.
Festivals
A festival concentrates into a few days what would otherwise take years to see: different productions of different plays, companies that meet nowhere else, and an audience to talk it over with on the way out. They are the best way to steep yourself in Golden Age theater, to enjoy it, and to end up, almost without noticing, knowing something about it.
Know of a company or festival that is missing? Write to us at secretary@comedias.org and we will add it.
