De palabra(s). A conversation with director and playwright Pablo Messiez
As part of the Argentinian Culture Forum of Oxford, the renowned playwright and director Pablo Messiez will be interviewed by specialists in dramaturgy Dr María Bastianes (University of Leeds) and Alma Prelec (University of Leeds). The event is carried out in collaboration with the University of Leeds and with the support of the Sub-Faculty of Spanish of the University of Oxford, the Argentinian Embassy in the United Kingdom, and the Instituto Cervantes in Manchester and Leeds.
Pablo Messiez (Buenos Aires, 1974) trained in acting in Argentina with teachers such as Juan Carlos Gené, Ricardo Bartís, Rubén Szuchmacher and Cristina Banegas. After several years of working as an actor -among others, in the show Un hombre que se ahoga (A Man Who is Drowning) by Daniel Veronese- in 2007 he began his career as a director and playwright with Antes (Before), a free version of Frankie and the Wedding, by Carson McCullers . Life takes him to Spain in 2009, where he currently lives. Since then he has premiered more than twenty productions, including pieces by classic and contemporary authors and his own creations. Among the former, it is worth mentioning his stage version for the San Martin Theatre in Buenos Aires of Cae la noche tropical (Tropical Night Falling, 2018) by Manuel Puig, La Verbena de la Paloma (2019) at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid, or his recent staging on stage from Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (2020) at the National Dramatic Center of Spain. His work with La pieda oscura (The Dark Stone, 2015) by Alberto Conejero earned him the Max Award for the best direction and best show, and his staging of He nacido para verte sonreír (I Was Born to See you Smile, 2017) by Santiago Loza was nominated in 2018 for the Valle Inclán Awards; Nor should we forget La distancia (The Distance, 2016), the stage version of the novel Fiver Dream by Samanta Schweblin. Some of his works with works of his own authorship have been Muda (Silent, 2010), Los ojos (The Eyes. 2011) or Todo el tiempo del mundo (All the Time in the World, 2016). In 2018 he also wrote and directed for the Kompanyia Lliure El temps que estiguem junts (Premi de la Crítica Jove - Jurat Nova Veu 2018 a l ’Espectacle). His latest creation, the acclaimed Las canciones (The Songs, 2020), is still on tour. In addition to many of his works, he has published El texto infiniro and Assymetrical-Motion. Notas sobre pedagogía y movimiento in Continta Me Tienes press. Notes on pedagogy and movement, the latter co-written with Lucas Condró.
María Bastianes is Specialist in Theatre Studies and Theatre History and a PhD from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a Marie Curie researcher at the University of Leeds (United Kingdom), where she develops the 'EStages.UK project. Spanish Theater' in United Kingdom (grant agreement number 797942). As part of the project, she is currently preparing, along with Alma Prelec, an English translation of Los ojos by Pablo Messiez for the MHRA publishing house.
Alma Prelec is an actress and researcher. She is a PhD candidate at the Royal Central School of Speech of Drama (University of London) and a BA / MA in Spanish and Portuguese Philology from the University of Oxford. Her doctoral thesis, Traveling Players, Traveling Civil Wars: Spain and Yugoslavia on the Transnational Stage, is funded by the research project Staging Difficult Pasts (Grant ID: AH / R006849 / 1) and supervised by María Delgado and Duska Radosavljevic. She is a co-founder of the theater company Multistory Productions.
