Explore the best and latest of Latinx art, performance, culture, music and film when CASA Festival returns to venues across London for its 11th edition.
Founded as a theatre festival in 2007, CASA expanded its remit to include multiple art forms, as well as becoming a commissioning body and a production house.
Today, CASA is an internationally regarded showcase for some of the beautiful, challenging and unique work being made both in Latin America and by the UK’s Latinx artists community. To date the festival has created and commissioned over 100 pieces of new work.
At a time when travelling internationally is challenging, CASA facilitates artistic and cultural exchanges between Latin America and the UK, bringing to London all the innovation, passion, artistry and diversity that these artists have to offer.
“After a Covid-required hiatus in 2020, I’m thrilled that CASA Festival is returning for the whole month of September 2021,” says artistic director Cordelia Grierson. “Despite Covid, our activity is all about connecting: connecting UK artists with global artists to create and enhance their practice, and connecting audiences with each other. With CASA 2021 we will reopen creative borders and encourage genuine inter-cultural exchange.”
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Live performances at Monochrome Studios include Where to Belong (Sept 3). Presented by Jewish-Lebanese Latinx queer theatre maker Victor Esses and CASA, in partnership with Counterpoint Arts, it’s the tender, moving autobiographical story of Victor’s journeys – an exploration of how to find your place in a complex world of identities.
London-based Peruvian actor and theatre maker Pepa Duarte brings her latest show Señorita Rita to CASA (Sept 10) – through comedy, music, dance, macrame, tinder memoirs, and pachamama-yoga, this Latina drag performance challenges what being a Latina migrant is all about.
Following the cancellation of the 2020 festival, CASA was awarded emergency funding from the Arts Council to commission four new works. Created especially for CASA, these works will premiere on Sept 4. Co-presented with the Chilean Department of Culture, moving image installation They Gave Me A Map (and I drew them a line) by UK-based Chilean/Indian artist Shalini Adnani combines satellite images from Google Earth with images of mourning women to explore land, loss and displacement.
With verbatim dialogue Work, Workers, Working by UK-based Brazilian Joana Nastari sees actors portray how workers across the adult industry have adapted under lockdown. In high art film mocumentary Isla/Island, UK-based Venezuelan Andrea Spisto explores topics including loneliness and her ever-evolving relationship with having ‘Latinex roots’. Unlike the mermaids who roam the seas in classical mythology, in Las Sirenas by Argentinian writer and theatre director Laura Sbdar and actor, filmmaker, dancer and musician Nicolas Goldschmidt, these suicidal characters breathe and drown in an open-air rubbish dump.
Championing all things new, CASA New Ideas (Sept 11) is an artistic open mic: a space for artists who want to try out new work and receive live feedback from the audience – particularly pertinent considering it’s been a hard year in isolation for all of us. Featuring a selection of UK-based Latinx artists: Joana Nastari (Brazil), Andrea Ling (Bolivia), Lucila Greco (Argentina), Carlos Fernandez (Paraguay).
