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

https://securegrants.neh.gov/education/participants/

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

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.

Benefits for our Participants

We expect that during the Seminar, the participants will experience a cultural theatrical immersion in Buenos Aires and not only learn from us but also from their attendance at many productions, to appreciate the variety of Latin American theater. 





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.