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GALA (Grupo de Artistas Latinoamericanos) Hispanic Theatre is a National Center for Latino Performing Arts in the USA. For 34 years, GALA has been promoting and sharing the Latino arts and cultures with a diverse audience, creating work that speaks to communities today, and preserving the rich Hispanic heritage.
By developing and producing works that explore the Latino performing arts, GALA provides opportunities for the Latino artist, educates youth, and engages the entire community in an exchange of ideas and perspectives.
GALA has staged over 165 productions, ranging from classical Spanish theatre to contemporary Latin American plays, original musicals, and works by local Latino youth; toured elementary schools with bilingual children's programs; and participated in national and international theatre festivals.
GALA partners regularly with other local arts groups, including the In Series, Young Playwrights' Theater, and Washington Performing Arts Society, with whom it co-presents the annual ArteAmericA series. Over the years, ArteAmericA has introduced Washington D.C. audiences to over 100 established and cutting-edge performing artists, including Tito Puente, Guillermo Gómez Peña, Lila Downs, and Gilberto Gil, and provided hundreds of local school children the opportunity to participate in workshops with these talents.
In 2005 GALA moved into the Tivoli and became a permanent national Hispanic theatre. 2006 marks GALA’s 30th year in existence as it celebrates its transition from Act One, as a groundbreaking yet somewhat nomadic theatre, to Act Two, as a national centre for Latino performing arts.
In its nearly three decades, GALA has become what many consider the USA's leading Spanish-language theater, winning a loyal following and scores of awards, had produced nearly 150 plays in Spanish and English and provided a diverse program of theater (from classical to contemporary), poetry, music, and dance to a wide audience.
GALA has cultivated relationships with actors in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Spain, Argentina, Cuba, Peru, Venezuela, and a number of other Latin American countries while providing a cultural focal point for the growing Hispanic community in Washington. The founders Hugo and Rebecca Medrano have been the driving forces all along, he as producing artistic director, she as managing director. Early 1970s: Argentine-born Hugo Medrano, who came to Washington after spending five years directing and acting in Spain, was working for Teatro Doble, a bilingual children’s theatre. Performing out of Back Alley, a theatre serving primarily African- American audiences and artists, Teatro Doble was Washington’s only theatre catering to a Spanish-speaking audience. There was no other Latin American theatre program in the city except for the occasional church-group performance or special one-time event. Hugo saw a great need for a legitimate Spanish-speaking theatre to fill this cultural void.
It wasn’t long before Hugo and his friends at Teatro Doble – including Rebecca Read, who came to Washington from New York City where she had been a dancer—began talking about starting a theatre of their own. Operating out of a townhouse in Adams Morgan, which had a bohemian, artist’s colony atmosphere at the time, it all came together in 1976. GALA – the acronym for Grupo de Artistas Latino Americanos – was born as a consortium of visual artists, writers, dancers, singers, musicians, and actors.
From the beginning, GALA had two goals: to bring Spanish and Latin American plays to the attention of the Spanish-speaking people in Washington; and to make the English-speaking public aware of the richness and variety of Hispanic theatre.
With their very first play, La Fiaca by Argentine Ricardo Talesnik, Hugo and company confirmed what they already suspected: Washington was ripe and ready for a Hispanic theatre.
'There was nothing like it, that’s why it fulfilled such an incredible need,' Rebecca recalls. 'But the extent of it really surprised us. We founded this group, did the first show, then woke up the next day to a six-column headline in the Washington Post about our new troupe – without us even calling the press. It was a huge surprise to people that a Spanish language group all of a sudden did this great show, and they wondered what was going to happen next. There was a real buzz, and people just flocked to us. It was an exciting, spirited time.”
“It was obvious there was a need,” Hugo adds. “But there were also not as many theatres around. There were about eight groups then; now there are over eighty.”
'The Latinos who came to Washington at that time were often professionals fleeing dictatorships and oppression. They came here for human rights reasons,' Rebecca explains. 'There were painters, artists, poets, writers who needed a place to express themselves. It was very rich for Hugo to be able to work around those people, to get feedback from them.'
Hugo agrees, 'It gave us the reason to work in theatre because we had a very specific audience. We knew what they wanted. One of our themes in an early brochure was ‘You know who we are, we know what you want.’ We managed to capture their tastes, their needs. We could create a season that was immediately embraced by our audience.'
Unlike many areas in the United States, Washington has never been representative of one Hispanic culture. GALA’s principal audience, as well as its actors, have been Argentines, Mexicans, Spaniards, Chileans, Uruguayans, Paraguayans, Peruvians, etc. As a result, GALA has had to respond to issues and concerns of the Latino.
Selecting their plays has always been a challenge. Classics and musicals tend to draw a larger audience than contemporary plays by unknown writers. But they have always tried to present a variety of genres, theatrical styles, and themes while providing a comprehensive view of Hispanic theatre.
From the beginning, GALA’s approach has been bilingual. For several years, most of the plays were presented in Spanish and English, sometimes back-to-back, sometimes on alternate days. As Rebecca recounts, 'Many of the actors were bilingual, but it got confusing sometimes about which version we were doing. Occasionally an actor would come out and speak the wrong language. Or the audience would come to the wrong performance.'
They eventually abandoned the alternating-language idea and had almost exclusively presented plays in Spanish, providing headphones with English translations.
While GALA began as a group of artists of various media, over time, it narrowed its focus. Rather than trying to include all of the arts within its limited means, the group reorganised and developed into GALA Hispanic Theatre. The core group remained the same with Hugo and Rebecca at the centre. In 1980 and 1988, two new members joined, both of whom were crucial to GALA’s evolution: Abel Lopez and Sonia Castel.
GALA Hispanic Theatre
3333 14th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20010
Phone (202) 234-7174
Fax (202) 332-1247
info@galatheatre.org
http://www.galatheatre.org/english.php
Here are few videos reflect some of their work.