Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2012 - 13

El Teatro
Campesino,
tucked away
in San Benito
county,
is the most
important
and longest
running
Chicano
theatre in the
United States.

Luis's numerous feature film and television credits include, among others, the box-office hit La Bamba, starring Lou
Diamond Philips, Cisco Kid, starring Jimmy Smits and Cheech Marin, and Corridos: Tales of Passion and Revolution, starring Linda Ronstadt.
Luis has never strayed far from his own farmworker roots. His company, El Teatro Campesino, is located sixty miles
south of San Jose in the rural community of San Juan Bautista, California, population of 2,000. This theatre, tucked away in
San Benito county, is the most important and longest running Chicano theatre in the United States.
Luis's hard work and long creative career have won him countless awards, including numerous Los Angeles Drama
Critics Circle Awards, Drama-Logue Awards, Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards, the prestigious George Foster Peabody
Award for excellence in television, the National Medal of the Arts, the California Governor's Medal of the Arts, and Mexico's
prestigious Order of the Eagle, given to individuals whose work promotes cultural excellence and exchange between the
United States and Mexico.
Mr. Valdez has written numerous plays and authored numerous articles and books. His latest anthology, Mummified
Deer and Other Plays, was recently published by Arte Publico Press. As an educator, he has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, at UC Santa Cruz, and Fresno State University and was one of the founding professors at California State
University, Monterey Bay. He is the recipient of honorary doctorates from, among others, the University of Rhode Island, the
University of South Florida, Cal Arts, the University of Santa Clara, and his alma mater, San Jose State University. In April of
2007, the latest honor to be bestowed on Mr. Valdez occurred in Washington, DC, where he was inducted into the College
of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He has also collaborated with Monterey
County Office of Education through his Vibrant Being Workshop, working primarily with the children of farmworkers to
create bilingual learning plays in the school.
-Introduction of Luis Valdez by USITT President Joe Aldridge

hank you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. President, for
such a wonderful reception. It is a real pleasure for me to be
here with you. You're the other half, you know, of what goes on
in the theatre, and I love to be able to bridge both hemispheres. I think we
need the left brain as well as the right brain to do theatre, so it is with a
great deal of holistic satisfaction that I am able to address some comments
to you this morning at your annual conference. What an honor.
I am going to start with an image. What is the stage, what is the theatre? And this image is an ancient one in the Americas and the world, but
it stands for what I call theatre of the sphere. It is a distillation of all the
aesthetic work that I have done with my company, El Teatro Campesino,

in the last forty-seven years. We are about to complete our forty-seventh
year of existence, operating constantly without stop and continuing to evolve
our work. What has evolved out of all of this activity, literally in the fields as
well as all over the world, is an image, the image of a circle circumscribing
a square. That to me is the most abstract way to represent what we in the
theatre and perhaps on the Planet Earth do with our lives. The square is the
stage, if you will. The square is just about anything, rationality, masculinity, and what have you. The circle is the holistic envelope that wraps and
contains it. To begin with, it is feminine, it is female, it is holistic, and it is
unending because it is a circle. And that circle is the circle that envelops and
embraces the actors as much as it embraces the audience.

summer 2012

theatre design

& technology

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2012