Chamamé
Water People Theater
The second prize of Mujeres Creando was awarded to the play Chamamé, which tells the story of Clara, an elderly woman who spends the hours of an endless afternoon nap in her coastal home. Amid the hum of the fan, the mosquitoes, the sweet potatoes in the oven, and the chamamé drifting in and out on the radio, Clara converses with an off-stage figure, Laura, who accompanies her in silence, in memory, and in the gradually tiring body.
Chamamé was written by Argentine playwright, director, and actress Celeste Veleda, who trained in the Acting and Directing program at the Centro de Investigación Cinematográfica (CIC) and, in 2015, received a fellowship from the Directing Laboratory at Lincoln Center in New York.
Celeste is part of the International Theatre Company P.L.U.T.O, a collective led by stage directors from various countries —Brazil, Uruguay, France, India, Germany, and Argentina— and participates in the Black Box project, developed during the artistic residency at the Watermill Center of Robert Wilson in New York since 2016.
The staged reading of Chamamé is directed by Miranda González (co-director and adapter / artistic director of UrbanTheater Company, UTC), who was also a founding member of Chicago’s only entirely Latino theater group, Teatro Luna, and has been creating and developing works since 2000.
