Lighting and sound technicians adjusted their ?equipment.
Spanish music played through the speakers of a room housing a small stage as a crowd filed in.
An audience of about 100 students and community members gathered at the Bloomington Playwrights Project to enjoy a suite of four short plays performed entirely in Spanish. IU’s Spanish Theater Group, VIDA, presented its ninth-annual show at 7:30 p.m., with shows Thursday through Saturday.
The performance was sponsored by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, La Casa Latino Cultural Center, IU’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Multicultural Affairs and the IU Student Association.
VIDA stands for vision, identity, drama and art. It was founded in 2006 by Marda Rose, who at the time was a graduate student on campus. She said she had the goal to add Spanish language and culture to Bloomington’s theater scene. Rose was VIDA’s president from 2006 to 2011, and she is currently an ?assistant professor in Spanish at IU-Purdue University ?Indianapolis.
This year, the group’s performance was called “Encerrados,” which means “close encounters” in Spanish and Portuguese. “Encerrados” consisted of four short plays that “examine enclosed spaces as parodies of and allegories for power dynamics in families and governments,” Israel Herrera-Ca rdenas, VIDA’s faculty adviser, said.
“All the plays have a relationship with the word ‘e ncerrados ,’ and we tried to relate all the plays to this meaning,” Herrera-Ca rdenas said. “Even the Portuguese play has a relationship with the word.”
This is the first year VIDA has incorporated a Portuguese play into its performance. Vania Castro, senior lecturer in the Spanish and Portuguese department, had the opportunity to be involved with VIDA for the first time.
“I’ve known about VIDA and always admired their work,” Castro said. “They were very accepting of having a Portuguese play this year, and we were very happy about it.”
Spanish is not the native language of the majority of the students who participate in the plays, and some of them have never had any previous acting experience.
“I’ve never done theater, and I like Spanish,” said Maria Scott, an actress in the play. “So I thought it was a good way to kind of branch out and do something I’ve never done before, make friends and also learn.” Scott played the lawyer in “El Presidente,” one of the plays performed in the suite.
“El Presidente,” originally by playwright Enrique Buenaventura, took place in a prison cell and was about the corruption of the 20th-century Columbian government.
VIDA is a way for some students to practice their Spanish outside of a classroom setting. Amelia Berry played Jesusita in the first play, “Un Hogar Sólido” by Elena Garro, which was about a group of cadavers reunited in the afterlife and interacting in a mausoleum.
“I wanted to get back into theater, and I thought it would be a great way to simultaneously get better at speaking Spanish and reading ?Spanish,” Berry said.
VIDA’s current president is Hanna Agauas, an IU graduate student studying literature in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.
“It ended up being one of the more fun things that I did at IU,” Agauas said, “I think that VIDA offers a creative outlet for people that is much needed.”
