Acceso usuarios
Esther Fernández Rodríguez
In December of 2005—and through 2007—the Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico staged the world’s first theatrical adaptation of Cervantes’s poem Viaje del Parnaso. The play was a great success and toured the best classical theater festivals and main cities of Spain, as well as Guanajuato, Mexico and Bogotá, Colombia. Among the original staging decisions made by Eduardo Vasco, director of the adaptation, was the incorporation of performance techniques belonging to Medieval, Early Modern, and Baroque folk traditions, such as the use of wooden puppets, shadow puppetry, and oral storytelling. The objective of this article is to analyze the impact of this theatrical adaptation as a “research project” in cultural, literary, and performative studies of Cervantes. In other words, the goal is to understand how a dense satirical poem can successfully reach a broader national and international audience and to consider the consequences of this alternative staging experiment in the way we interpret the poetic text.
