Join us in Dallas for a conversation with Lourdes Molina, translator of Freeway: La Movie, who will discuss new imaginings of civic life in The Dallas Institute’s panel, “Imagining the New City from Athens to Dystopian Havana”.
What Makes a City? The Dallas Institute has been asking this question for decades... and now that we're at SMU, we have invited colleagues from campus and beyond to consider anew how we imagine civic life. This symposium focuses on the dramatic forms of tragedy and comedy and how they might RENEW a city and its citizenry. Conceived in ancient Athens, these dramatic forms continue to provide a lens for us to understand our own contemporary imaginings of the city: the city we want, the city we lament, and the city we actually have.
This work evolves out of an ongoing conversation within the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture's (DIHC) Center for Civic Leadership and its Sue Rose Summer Institute (SRSI), a summer program for Dallas-area teachers. The symposium extends this discussion into the civic realm, exploring the ancient connection between theatre and politics. Scholars from several different disciplines will examine tragedy and comedy as a foundation for serious and healthy political discourse within the contemporary city. the symposium, beginning with a film screening of Chaplin's City Lights on Friday night, extends into two sets of panels on the ancient and modern city on Saturday. The symposium concludes with selections from Shakespeare's Macbeth and As You Like It, imagining the interplay between theatre and the city, as well as the tragic and comic worlds. Collectively, we ask: What is the role of drama in understanding a city - whether the city is ancient or new? What might we envision for a "new city" - a new polis, a new politics? Beyond theatre, can other imaginative civic and urban forms express tragedy and comedy? The symposium is open to all.
Schedule
9:30-10:00 am: Coffee reception
10:00-11:15 am: Panel I: Reimagining the Ancient City (and its Relevance Today)
11:30-1:00 pm: Panel II: Imagining the New City - from Theseus' Athens to Dystopian Havana
1:00-2:00 pm: Lunch (Dallas Hall 120)
2:00-4:00 pm: Scenes from Shakespeare's Macbeth and As You Like It performed by Fair Assembly (Greer Garson Theater, Owen Arts Center)
4:00-6:00 pm: Closing reception (Greer Garson Theater, Owen Arts Center)
About Freeway: La Movie
A novel-in-stories set in mid-twenty-first century dystopian Havana, Freeway narrates the adventure of two misfits wandering the construction site of a colossal freeway-to-be — a mysterious feat of engineering that slices through Havana, designed to connect the US and Cuba. The two embark on a futile journey, overlaid with the elusive filming of a documentary about the freeway construction. Both film quality and interior monologues drift aimlessly, haunted by Cuban history and US pop culture.
Freeway: La Movie is a satirical novel that attempts to reconcile what might be hopelessly irreconcilable: the body and the machine; analog and digital; post-industrial overdevelopment and post-socialist underdevelopment; Cuba and the US; reality and fiction; the plasticity of personal identity and rigid categories such as gender, class, and nationality. Through the clash of utopian promises and dystopian realities, Freeway reveals the unease of contemporary culture from the US to Cuba.
Lourdes Molina teaches Spanish language and Spanish and Spanish American literature at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in 20th-century Latin American literature and history, focusing on Cuban studies and literary translation.