Event Info
Play Reading - The Trial of Tina Modotti:
March 18 at 7 pm
THE TRIAL OF TINA MODOTTI
by Carmen Aguirre
The Trial of T...
7:00pm
Free
Event Description
March 18 at 7 pm
THE TRIAL OF TINA MODOTTI
by Carmen Aguirre
The Trial of Tina Modotti is a one-woman show exploring the life of famed 1920s photographer and activist, Tina Modotti. Born in Italy in 1896 to an impoverished working class family, she moved to San Francisco in her teens, and then later lived in Mexico, Germany, the former Soviet Union, and Spain, where she ran a hospital for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Renowned and remembered for her photography as much as for her activism, she died in 1942 of a heart attack in Mexico City. The play examines themes around art as a tool for change, the personal and artistic cost of absolute commitment to a political cause, and ultimately asks the question: what is the purpose of art in the face of human suffering?
Carmen Aguirre is a Vancouver-based theatre artist who has written and co-written twenty plays, including Chile Con Carne, The Trigger and The Refugee Hotel. She has over sixty film, television and stage acting credits. Carmen is also a theatre director, acting teacher and a Theatre of the Oppressed workshop facilitator, working with communities around British Columbia.
Carmen started writing plays while still in theatre school. Her first play, In A Land Called I Don’t Remember, was political in a highly personal way, and almost all of the plays she’s written since have drawn on her experiences as an exile and activist.
Although Carmen found her calling as an actor and storyteller at the age of three, when her parents took her to the circus in the south of Chile she decided to dedicate her youth to the Chilean revolutionary movement, running a safe house for underground resistance members seeking refuge in Argentina, and doing routine border runs into Pinochet’s Chile. She decided to go to theatre school and dedicate her life to her artistic calling after Pinochet fell, when she was twenty-two years old.
Something Fierce: Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter, winner of Canada Reads 2012, was her first book. It is a book she wrote in her head for twenty years, but only found the courage to write on paper in the last few.
Carmen is a recipient of the Playwrights’ Theatre Centre Best New Play Award (for The Refugee Hotel), and has been nominated for the Jessie Richardson Theatre Award, the Dora Mavor Moore Award and the prestigious Siminovitch Prize. She is a graduate of Studio 58.
Mon. March 18th 2013
Belfry Theatre (Lobby)
In-Person Event
