Mistral, Gabriela - A Rehearsed Reading

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Head for Heights will be continuing their work on their initial week-long workshop in December 2019 and reading with Out of the Wings at King's College London, on Andrés Kalawski's Mistral, Gabriela.

The translation of Andrés Kalawski’s 2019 play Mistral, Gabriela (1945) came about, because it brought together two passions: working on new dramatic writing that poses unexpected questions for our here and now, and the study and translation Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), the first Latin American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1945).

This online reading is the result of a two-day workshop and will also have a Q&A afterwards for 30 minutes approx.

Mistral, Gabriela takes place in Brazil, just as Mistral learns that she has won the Nobel Prize, a fact that she learns from Alicia, the young woman who is leading a feminist activist group that has kidnapped her with the aim of making her their mouthpiece. They want her to defend women’s rights, to be bolder and less ambiguous in some of her political statements and in her acknowledgement of her sexuality and, in doing so, to be an ally of the militant group as they seek to change history.

Head for Heights are excited to continuing working on this play. Our work with the text, unit by unit, action by action, revealed a complex relationship that was both individual and collective, personal and historic. The question that started to emerge was:

What happens when a woman you think can give you so much actually gives you exactly what she can, which just isn’t enough?

CREATIVE TEAM:

Directed by Sue Dunderdale

Translated by Catherine Boyle

Dramaturg: Karen Morash

Produced by Annafrancesca Tonna

CAST:

Pepa Duarte as Alice

Carolyn Pickles as Gabriela

This workshop and reading was generously funded by Arts Council England and supported by King's College London.

You will receive the Zoom link and password the day before the event, only those who RSVP on the Eventbrite will be allowed entry.