NEH SUMMER SEMINARS AND INSTITUTES
FOR COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY TEACHERS
APPLICATION INFORMATION AND INSTRUCTIONS
Please review the eligibility criteria for participation
in Summer Seminars and Institutes at
We will select 16
participants to create a broad spectrum of Latin American countries represented
in our Seminar, whether because of (a) the participants’ national origin, (b)
the countries incorporated into their research projects or (c) the disciplinary
perspectives of their applications. Applicants must be able to fluently speak,
understand and write in Spanish and English.
Please, visit:
http://www.neh.gov/files/divisions/education/eligibility/college_university_eligibility_criteria.pdf
The Application Cover Sheet
SUBMISSION OF APPLICATIONS AND NOTIFICATION PROCEDURE
Completed
applications should be submitted to the project director, not the
NEH, and should be postmarked no later than March
2, 2015.
Gustavo Geirola
Department of Modern Languages and Literataures
Whittier College
13406 E. Philadelphia St.
P.O. Box 634
Whittier, CA 90608
Department of Modern Languages and Literataures
Whittier College
13406 E. Philadelphia St.
P.O. Box 634
Whittier, CA 90608
The Application Essay
The application essay should be no more than four double spaced
pages. This essay should include any relevant personal and academic
information. It should address reasons for applying; the applicant's interest,
both academic and personal, in the subject to be studied; qualifications and
experiences that equip the applicant to do the work of the seminar or institute
and to make a contribution to a learning community; a statement of what the
applicant wants to accomplish by participating; and the relation of the project
to the applicant's professional responsibilities.
·
Regarding our Seminar and on the
Application Essay, participants will have to comment on their previous research
on the topic, whether specific playwrights and/or Latin American regions. This short essay will help in the
selection process that will take into account the connection of their
perspectives and their field of expertise with the Seminar content.
·
To achieve maximum diversity of interest and proficiency, we will
welcome applications from scholars who Ph.D. are teaching at college level, and
also graduate students interested in the Seminar.
·
Applicants to seminars should be sure to discuss any independent
study project that is proposed beyond the common work of the seminar.
·
To achieve maximum diversity of interest and proficiency, we will
welcome applications from scholars with Ph.D. who are teaching at college
level, and also graduate students interested in the Seminar.
·
Participants must be interested in the concepts and methodologies
we are planning to implement, and also to connect the analysis of the dramatic
and spectacular texts to the discussions on aesthetical and socio-political
trends in Latin American theater today. They have to be able to work on their
proposals by implementing concepts and discussions produced during the Seminar,
and by regularly meeting the project directors to progressively adjust their
research.
·
Because a book will be published with what participants have
accomplished during the Seminar, they will be required to submit a final
version of their contributions; December
10, 2015 is the deadline for submission of participants’ this final essays.
The diversity of our participants will open a spectrum of new research issues which will promote and expand in the next future theirs and our investigations.
·
Artists to our Seminar, who have already confirmed their
participation, will give the participants the opportunity to know and talk to
them in a more private setting.
·
Participants will get free copies of our Anthology, Arte
y oficio’s volumes, and other materials mentioned in our Link
Academic Resources.
·
We will also give them free tickets per participant per
week to attend theater productions in Buenos Aires to facilitate
discussion and scholarship in this area.
Our approach to Latin
American Theater in this Seminar will be guided by two basic principles:
1. To provide
participants with our expertise not only in reading dramatic texts, but in
dealing and assuming the director/actor perspective when these artists are
rehearsing and producing a play. We are convinced that theater has to be
thought and taught by focusing on theater praxis, namely, by giving attentive
consideration to the economic, historic, cultural and political environment in
which the production takes place. Multiple new questions emerge when theater is
debated and interpreted from the producers’ perspective. Participants will be
invited
·
to read the play and provide a textual interpretation based on
methods traditionally used to analyze written plays (mostly based on literary
analysis), but
·
they will also be asked to propose a project for staging the play according to budget constraints,
to structures of theatricality (how to distribute audience, what has to be seen
or unseen, why are the political concerns for doing that, and so forth). It
will allow them to contrast both interpretations, one based on reading the
dramatic text and other from the eye of the theater artist.
·
When a play has been taken from the Anthology of Latin
American Theater 1950-2007, they will be able to compare their staging
projects with video clips of other performances we will show during the
Seminar, and debate aesthetical differences with their proposals by focusing on
cultural, aesthetical, and political aspects.
·
They will also ‘demontage’ plays seen in Buenos Aires to discuss
very concrete performing aspects from political and aesthetical perspectives.
Acquiring “inside” knowledge and experiencing the many problems and aspects
that are involved in staging a play, they will be able to widen their
perspective in Latin American Theater teaching, and to give their future
students a better knowledge about writing, staging and performing theater in
Latin America in the context of history, politics, and culture.
2. To train our
participants, whether they come from a Language or a Theater Department, in new
ways of teaching and researching theater in general, and Latin American Theater
in particular. Our experience in teaching theater in our colleges and to
graduate and post-doctoral level at universities in the United States, Latin
America, Europe and Asia, has always linked the teaching to scholarship, but
also has integrated readings of dramatic texts and approaches to production and
performance. During six years we worked together at Pasadena City College
directing plays and training students as actors capable of performing in
Spanish (even if it was not their native language). It was a very successful
program called TROTEATEATRO. Students learned how to examine and adopt
aesthetical trends of Latin American theater for their own proposals. At
Whittier College, Dr. Geirola, who has been directing professional and amateur
productions on Latin American Theater in Argentina, Washington DC, Arizona, and
Whittier, has been teaching since 1996 his Workshop in Latin American
Performance Experience, a creative art and experiential class every Spring
semester at Whittier. As in creación colectiva, students at PCC and
Whittier were required to solve problems related to acting, improvising and
writing; they learned to build scenes, costume and make up; to set designs,
lighting, promotion, and of course to perform in front of an audience.