DE COLORES FESTIVAL. Presented by Alameda Theatre at the Wychwood Theatre (601 Christie). October 23-24 at 7:30 pm. $13-$15, festival pass $25. 416-504-7529, alamedatheatre.com.
Adios, Alameda Theatre.
The company, which has made a major contribution to Latin-Canadian theatre over the past eight years, is closing down.
Artistic director Marilo Nuñez, the driving force behind the company, cites a number of reasons for her decision, including a lack of funding for culturally specific troupes, the growth of the indie theatre community and grants that haven’t matched that growth, the amount of energy involved in running Alameda and a desire to devote more time to her family.
“But we’ve accomplished much during those eight years. The company has developed over 30 plays, largely through the annual De Colores Festival, which grew every year,” says Nuñez. “This is where the Latino community has really seen changes, in being able to take part in a forum for Latin American writers, actors and stories. There’s been nothing like it before in Toronto.”
Among the shows groomed in De Colores are Carmen Aguirre’s Blue Box, which is now touring across Canada Victor Gomez’s Lizard Boy, which went on to win the NOW Audience Choice Award at SummerWorks Amaranta Leyva’s The Intruder and works by Juan Carlos Velis, Martha Chaves and Rosa Labordé.
“Many of the writers were new to theatre but had something to say,” recalls Nuñez. “I saw them begin as shy but excited and passionate creators who were transformed by the experience of doing a year’s worth of hard writing. After the public readings, they all came to me and said their lives had been changed by being given the support to say what they wanted.
“That, for me, was worth everything. There was a real pride in all of us coming together as Latino artists and making something together.”
The company’s final De Colores runs Thursday and Friday (October 23 and 24), featuring Isaac Luy’s Exit, which explores current Venezuelan politics Martha Batiz’s Last Stop, in which two people on the TTC discuss the problems and necessities of riding the streetcar and Amanda Parris’s 32C, which uses the mythology of Tituba, the black servant in The Crucible, to examine what it means being a black woman in Canada.
Also part of the festival is a new work by the Nueva Voz Youth Theatre Program.
A farewell party with DJ, cash bar and dancing ends the festival after the reading on Friday.
But Nuñez isn’t finished with theatre. She’ll go back to developing on her own script, Sangre: Redux, which she began in De Colores, and continue championing Latino-Canadian works, though she sees an ongoing financial struggle between smaller culturally diverse companies and larger established ones.
“It’s still a personal and political issue for me. I want to change things through my work.”
