Thursday, April 24, 2025, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 p.m. at the Observatorio Cervantes at Harvard (2 Arrow St, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA)
This event will be held in person and conducted in Spanish. Click here to RSVP.
What is the point of making theater in a world where the boundary between reality and fiction has become blurred? This question will serve as the starting point for a talk exploring how fiction creates symbolic spaces of resistance in the face of hegemonic narratives of reality. Just as Cervantes once proposed resisting a world governed by instrumental reason through the power of active imagination, theatrical fiction today embodies a form of dissent—an aesthetic and political insubordination—through the physical presence of the body on stage.
During this event, Lola Blasco will read selected excerpts from her work that offer insight into the central ideas of her aesthetic vision. In celebration of World Book Day and Spanish Language Day at the United Nations, we will be giving away copies of Siglo mío, bestia mía, the play awarded Spain’s National Prize for Dramatic Literature in 2016.
Lola Blasco is a playwright, stage director, and actress (recipient of the National Prize for Dramatic Literature). She holds a Ph.D. in Humanities from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, where she currently teaches literature.
Her plays often explore political themes such as immigration, social tensions, historical memory, gender identity, and geopolitical conflict. Her most recent works include El teatro de las locas (2024, Centro Dramático Nacional); Yo te querré (2023, Teatro de la Zarzuela); Sobre la vida de los animales (2022, Teatro Español); Música y mal (2021, Teatro Fernán Gómez); Marie (2021, Teatro Real / Teatro de la Abadía); Siglo mío, bestia mía (2020, Centro Dramático Nacional); En palabras de Jo… Mujercitas (2020, Teatro Español); and La pasión de Yerma (2019, Centro Federico García Lorca / Teatros del Canal).
Her plays have been translated into Polish, English, French, German, and Czech. Her work has been featured at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, the Guadalajara International Book Fair, Mexico, and the Comédie-Française in Paris, where in 2018 her play Canicule was chosen as the audience’s coup de cœur.
She is currently researching how to foster dialogue in a society where technology evolves faster than the human beings who create it. Her upcoming play will explore the paradoxes of aging in a highly technologized world.