Blog
Welcoming Catalan-Argentine Dramatist, Victoria Spunzberg
2 day event
Victoria Szpunberg is a playwright and teacher of playwriting at the Institut del Teatre and at the Escola Superior de Coreografia de Barcelona. In 2000, she was invited to take part in the International Summer Residency for Emerging Playwrights at the Royal Court Theatre with her first play. Since then, her works have premiered at a variety of international festivals and theatres. She has collaborated with choreographers on dance performances, produced theatre adaptations, worked as a director and created works for the radio and sound installations. She has also participated in theatre and education projects and is a collaborator of the Patothom school for social theatre. Her plays include: The Shop Window (Teatre Nacional de Catalunya, 2003), Esthetic Paradise (Sala Beckett – Festival Grec, 2004), The Speaking Machine (2007), El meu avi no va anar a Cuba (Festival Grec – Sala Beckett, 2008), La marca preferida de las hermanas Clausman (Teatre Tantarantana, 2010), Boys don’t Cry (Teatre Tantaranta, 2012), l’Onzena Plaga (Teatre Lliure, 2015), Amor mundi (Sala Beckett, 2019), Eva y la conmoción (2020), El peso de un cuerpo (2022), Mal de coraçon (2023). Her trilogy on the Fragility of Memory (2008-2010) is based on detailed archival research on the impact of political violence and exile on generations of displaced Argentines in Europe.
Spunzberg will deliver a lecture in Spanish on 12 October 2023, 4-5.30 pm on “Ficciones de la violencia y el exilio, ficciones de lo indecible” (Fictions of violence and exile, fictions of the unsayable) ORB G.27 (CACSSS Seminar Room)
13 October 2023, 6-7.30pm Staged Reading in English of her 2022 play, The Weight of a Body, translated by Dr Helena Buffery, directed by Roksana Niewadzisz, with Regina Crowley, Dan Fitzgibbon and Michael Ryan (The Shtepps lecture theatre, Hub 1.72) In The Weight of a Body, premiered in Spanish at the Centro Dramático Nacional (Madrid) and in Catalan at the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya (Barcelona), we encounter a woman who is struggling to look after her father after he has suffered a stroke. Once a source of emotional and ideological strength, he is now completely dependent, a paradigm of fragility, whose frequent episodes of hallucinations make it impossible for him to distinguish between past and present, reality and illusion. Their lack of economic resources alongside the precarity of societal networks of care means they are trapped without access to the support they need and soon find they are spiralling into freefall. A play about aging, dependency and care in contemporary society. Please ensure you register for the performance on the 13th to ensure you get a seat: https://bit.ly/3LODxDY.