Great Latin American Quixote

Several years ago a theater man named Rolando Hernandez, friend of AITA/IATA and former representative from Cuba in our Organization, got the idea of creating a huge international network that contains all the community theater of Latin American countries. The first meetings took place en 2005 and then Rolando proposed to make a multicultural and multinational theater performance. It was decided to do it with the play “Quixote”, written by Santiago García, one of the greatest theater men in Latin America today. The play is a theatrical version of the great novel “Don Quixote de La Mancha” by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and it is composed by twelve scenes.
Each country has been proposed to realize one of those scenes. For that, each country called its actors and one director, making the “misce on scene” absolutely independently from the others.
As one can see, it was an almost impossible dream.
Luckily, there it was all the energy that theater can provide to generate utopias.
And so it was.
Since September 14th to October 5th more than one hundred actors coming from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico and Peru lived together in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to work fourteen hours each day in the final assembly and general rehearsals, job leaded by the Colombian director Cesar Badillo. It is worthy to be underlined that all those actors and actresses to whom we must add the musicians, technicians and assistants, could travel from each country of departure and live in Brazil during more than twenty days thanks to the financial effort done by the Ministry of Culture from Brazil.
In October 2nd , within the frame of the Second Iberoamerican Culture Encounter, “Quixote” was opened in the center of Sao Paulo. And in the next day it was performed in the house of the Cultural Institute “Pombas Urbanas”, located in a huge working-class neighborhood outside Sao Paulo, from where at the same moment it has been transmitted via Internet to the entire World. In that same building, a huge shed called “Art under Construction” all that wonderful work on assembling and rehearsing had took place. And “Pombas Urbanas” was the great organizer of this theater mega event that has no precedent in all World theater history.
AITA/IATA last General Assembly this year in Monaco has welcome “Pombas Urbanas”, whose name is a Portuguese phrase that means `pigeons of the city`, as a new AITA/IATA Affiliate Member.

From these lines we send to all its members our very warm congratulations for the incredible work that they have done. We also congratulate all the theater men and women from each participant country. We thank them for all the energy that they put for the sake of Theater and for the sake of Life, showing to the whole World that something very interesting is happening in Latin America.