New Professional Association: Círculo de Estudios de la Literatura Picaresca y Celestinesca (CELPYC)

Researchers of picaresque and celestinesque literature are welcoming a new professional association these days: the Círculo de Estudios de la Literatura Picaresca y Celestinesca (CELPYC).

Primarily aimed at organising an international congress every three years, its first congress is scheduled for the 3rd, 4th and 5th of June of 2020 at The City College University of New York (CUNY).

Following the official announcement of the congress, the CELPYC has started its on-line presence with a Twitter profile and, more significantly, a Facebook group open to researchers and people with interest in celestinesque and picaresque literature. Its aim is to function as a meeting point for sharing, discussing and disseminating informations of celestinesque and picaresque interest, but also as an informal professional and personal network.

There is a traditional official website as well. Besides information on the congress, the most interesting bit probably is its on-line resources section. Not just because this blog is listed among the resources of celestinesque interest –thanks a lot!–, but because there is a will to gather together all the picaresque and celestinesque on-line resources relevant to a professional and a non-professional audience. And we are really eager to see how many they can get together.

In this blog, it is always good news that something is being done to encourage the study of Celestina, so that we can only wish the CELPYC a sucessful first congress and a good start.

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Radio drama in Romanian: Celestina de Fernando de Rojas

Recording of celestinesque interest:

Recording: José Luis Canet on “¿Existió realmente Fernando de Rojas, autor de La Celestina?” (06/02/2019)

Paper given at the Cicle Escola de Pensament Europeu Lluís Vives (6th of February of 2019):

Recent stagings of Celestina I feel curious about

Since 2018 Bambalina Teatre Practicable is touring with their two-performers and several puppets staging of La Celestina. An adaptation by Jaime Policarpo, an actor and an actress impersonate all characters and interact with them on stage, their presence being represented by personalised puppets of their heads. The art of the figurines (character design) is quite interesting, with a dark air and hyperexpressive eyes, which seem to have been transferred to the puppets as well. I wonder if the staging and the text also share such an atmosphere. Unfortunately, I will have to keep wondering as there is no performance planned in my vicinity.

This is not the first staging of Celestina with puppets. The adaptation of Darío Galo for Carolina Calema, which I neither could see but has been reviewed in Celestinesca and can be watched for educational purposes –and with a horrible sound and image quality– in Youtube, has been touring Spain and Latin America from 2016 to 2018. In it, Carolina Calema played both the role of Celestina and of the puppeteer and storyteller, which conveyed a quite obvious symbolism: Celestina as the person behind the plot and directing the fates of all characters. In the case of the staging by Bambalina Teatre, it seems that the actors impersonate Calisto and Melibea, so that they are the only alive, human characters in a world of puppets controlled by someone else, with no will of their own, as well as the central point of the plot, unlike most modern stagings, in which Celestina tends to be the central character. However, nothing is explicitly said about this symbolism in the correspoding dossiers of Bambalina Teatre or Calema Producciones.

Very different is my interest in the musical adaptation by Jesús García-Consuegra (music) and Marcos Fernández-Espartero (staging) for Molto Vivace, a chorus and occasional theatre company of the Spanish town of Daimiel (Ciudad Real). It consists of 17 songs that are conceived as a compromise between the 16 and the 21 acts of, respectively, the Comedia and the Tragicomedia, but which in reality correspond to each act of the 21-act version, with some adaptations. Considering that this musical adaptation is made for a chorus and a few solists, I am really curious about how the choir and the solists interact, how solists interact among them, and which characters they represent: Do solists impersonate more than one character or is it always the same? In that case, which are the individualised characters that solists impersonate? Moreover, how the text has been adapted to fit just 17 songs intrigues me: Which are the acts ommitted or merged? Does it follow the same principles as the opera adaptations of Celestina or does the chorus format require a different kind of adaptations? I have my suspicions but…

Therefore, I would be very grateful if someone could provide me with the text (I cannot start anything with music) and/or a recording of the above mentioned shows (and, in general, of any performance related to Celestina like, for example, this one or this another) with research purposes. Invitations would be most welcomed but, unfortunately, I am not very mobile and I am really busy at the time (if I were not, you can bet I would already have attended Celestina, puta vieja, the adaptation by Doriam Sojo for El burdel a escena).

CFP: Seis personajes [clásicos] en busca de aCtor

The Universidad Carlos III and the Centro de Documentación Teatral will be organising the I Jornadas de Investigación Teatral “Seis personajes [clásicos] en busca de aCtor” (28th-29th March, Centro de Documentación Teatral, Madrid).

This event is open to specialists in Golden Age drama and performing arts specialists that would like to read a 20-minute paper on any of the following characters: Celestina, don Quijote, don Juan, Segismundo, Laurencia y Pedro Crespo. Celestina being one of them, we thaought this call for papers might be of interest for our fellow celestinistas.

More information at the official call for papers.

My resources: Revised catalogue of the editions of the Italian translation of Celestina

Following an interesting Twitter discussion started by our fellow medievalist Clara Jáuregui (whose blog can be read here), I decided to heed the advice given there and upload my revision of the catalogue of the editions of the Italian translation of Celestina by Emma Scoles to CORE, the digital repository of Humanities Commons.

In it, celestinesque scholars will find information on the known editions of the Italian translation of Celestina by Alphonso Hordognez, with or without known surviving copies, and on their current location. This catalogue identifies ghost editions and potentially lost editions, and provides extensive bibliographical information on the editorial history of Celestina in Italian as well.

This research dates from 2012 and my ideas on the topic might have changed since then, but it should still be up-to-date regarding the number of known copies and their location, although some of the links might be outdated. I aim to complete this catalogue some time with a preliminary study on the editorial history of Celestina in Italy and more detailed informations on the particular editions, however, I felt that it was a shame to keep this useful research tool to myself for so long. Luckily, CORE offers the opportunity to share unpublished work in a quotable way. So, please, take this as a late-Christmas present and feel free to use my catalogue for your research.

Merry celestinesque Christmas!

Or, if you have Adobe Flash Player installed, see the original (and much better animated) version here.