News and Events
Visit of playwright Sergio Blanco to Cork
Public Lecture and staged reading
The Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies invites you to the following events:
Public Lecture by playwright Sergio Blanco ‘Frontera entre ficción y realidad’ (The Boundary between Fiction and Reality)
Monday 17th October 6-7.30pm Hub 1.72 Shtepps, UCC
and
A staged reading of Blanco’s 2017 autofiction ‘Cartography of a Disappearance’ (in English)
Co-translated by members of the 2021-2022 MA Translation Studies (Spanish) cohort together with Helena Buffery and Roksana Niewadzsiz
Followed by Colloquium/ Q+A. Wednesday 19th October, 4-6pm Council Room, North Wing
Sergio Blanco is a Franco-Uruguayan playwright, director, and sometime performer of his autofictions, who is currently based in Paris. A classical scholar, with experience of theatre directing at the Comédie Française, he has been writing plays for the past twenty years and is recognized as one of the most exciting and provocative voices on the contemporary international theatre scene. He has given lectures and delivered workshops on performative writing methods, which have culminated in public intervention and performances such as Scenes of Penitence and Autopsires, 10 Playwrights in the Public Square, Louvre/Banlieue, Africa Street, Whisperers and Campo Blanco.
Translated into numerous languages, and performed across the globe, his plays have received numerous awards, including: the Uruguay National Playwriting Award, the Casa de las Américas International Award, the Theatre Award for Best Text in Greece, and the British OFF West End Award and Best Author Award for his contemporary reimaginings of Classical drama in Thebes Land and The Wrath of Narcissus.
Titles include: Slaughter, .45, Kyiv, Barbarie, Kassandra, El salto de Darwin, Thebes Land, Ostia, The Wrath of Narcissus, El bramo de Düsseldorf, The flowers of Evil, Tráfico, Memento Mori, Divine Intervention, Covid-451, a show performed in different cities with the participation of health workers from different hospitals,and most recently Zoo, which he has been working on this month with the Piccolo Theatre in Milan. His autofictional exploration of his relationship to death, When you Walk over my Grave/Cuando pases sobre mi tumba, was recently performed to critical acclaim in the 2022 Edinburgh Festival.*
* '...the outstanding foreign production of the festival and a master-class in autobiographical theatre, or "Autofiction"' (The Morning Star)
'Blanco's work gradually emerges as a fascinating and searching study of mortality, love, desire, and our relationship with the past' (The Scotsman)
'A perversely life affirming piece of meta-theatrical fun' (The Herald Scotland)
'a funny and oddball commentary on our relationship with death' (The Guardian)