Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1965 Lajas, Puerto Rico |
| Occupation | Short story writer, playwright |
| Nationality | Puerto Rican |
| Notable works | La mano Las facultades |
| Notable awards | Pregones Asunción Playwrights Award |
| Website | |
| www | |
Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya (born 1965) is a Puerto Rican writer, performer, and theater director. [1] [2] He is the founding artistic director of Casa Cruz de la Luna, an experimental theater company and cultural center established in 1998 that was based in a former residence and commercial space in the historical district of San Germán, Puerto Rico until 2022. [3] Through Casa Cruz de la Luna, he has directed innovative productions of works by Federico García Lorca, Miguel de Cervantes, and Puerto Rican writer Pepe Liboy.
Adyanthaya is known for his unique approach called "escritura acto" or "writing act," which transforms the stage into a space for live, on-stage computerized writing, creating a convergence of written and spoken words before the audience. As a writer of fiction, his works Lajas and La Mano have garnered literary recognition, including awards from the PEN Club of Puerto Rico and the Ateneo Puertorriqueño literary competition.
Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya's father, B. Aravind Adyanthaya, was an orthopedic surgeon born in Mangalore, India; he died in 1971. [4] His mother, Dr. Angela A. Ramírez-Irizarry, was born in the town of Lajas, Puerto Rico, and was a plastic surgeon in the southwest of the island until her death in 2021. [5]
Adyanthaya received his MD at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota in 1992. That same year he traveled to the southwest of India, where he did a rotation at St. John's Hospital in Bangalore. Soon after, he began graduate studies in theater at the University of Minnesota, leading to the doctor's degree in theater historiography. He wrote a dissertation on 18th century French public spectacles. [6]
Adyanthaya founded Casa Cruz de la Luna in Puerto Rico in 1998. This cultural center is located in an old building in the historic district of San Germán. Working with the Casa Cruz de la Luna Theater Company, Adyanthaya has done experimental staging of several plays by Federico García Lorca, of one of Miguel de Cervantes's exemplary novels, and of several stories by the Puerto Rican author Pepe Liboy. Adyanthaya has also written about San Germán. [7]
Adyanthaya's theories and practices of escritura acto (writing act) propose a way of conceiving the stage as a ground of multiple lines of communication and miscommunication in which the live production and reception of mediated written and spoken words converge. [8] Adyanthaya began to develop this new poetics based on live, on-stage computerized writing in 2002. It is implemented through a series of one-man shows in which the author writes the text in front of the audience on a computer that is projected on a screen. Prometheus Bound , his best-known piece, approaches the tragedy of Aeschylus. In another piece, The Library, based on the story "The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis Borges, Adyanthaya makes use of the Santa María Magdalena de Pazzis Cemetery in Old San Juan to explore the notion of deposits. In 2009, he expanded the techniques of writing act in creating The Marquis de Sade Is Afraid of the Sea.
As a writer of fiction, Adyanthaya's first book of stories, Lajas (2002), took well-known stories of his family as a starting point. The result was a kaleidoscopic, fantastic, bizarre, vision of his hometown. Lajas won the first prize of the PEN Club of Puerto Rico and the Ateneo Puertorriqueño literary competition. In his second book of fiction The Hand (2010), Adyanthaya explores medical, mystical, everyday, and unintelligible events.
Adyanthaya has been awarded a Jerome Playwriting Fellowship and a McKnight Advancement Grant, both from the Playwrights' Center; a Jerome Performance Art Fellowship by Intermedia Arts and an Artist of Color Directing Fellow at New York Theatre Workshop. For his play The Faculties, he received the Pregones Theater's Asunción Prize and First Prize in Theatre at Casa de Teatro in the Dominican Republic.
The following is an alphabetical list of articles related to the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.
The Nuyorican movement is a cultural and intellectual movement involving poets, writers, musicians and artists who are Puerto Rican or of Puerto Rican descent, who live in or near New York City, and either call themselves or are known as Nuyoricans. It originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s in neighborhoods such as Loisaida, East Harlem, Williamsburg, and the South Bronx as a means to validate Puerto Rican experience in the United States, particularly for poor and working-class people who suffered from marginalization, ostracism, and discrimination.
Antonio Paoli was a Puerto Rican tenor. At the height of his fame, he was known as "The King of Tenors and The Tenor of Kings." He is considered to be the first Puerto Rican to reach international fame in the musical arts. Paoli has been recognized as "one of the most outstanding opera singers of all time," and as one who had "one of the most lyric and powerful voices...superior even to his contemporary rival, Enrico Caruso."
Rosario Ferré Ramírez de Arellano was a Puerto Rican writer, poet, and essayist. Her father, Luis A. Ferré, was the third elected Governor of Puerto Rico and the founding father of the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico. When her mother, Lorenza Ramírez de Arellano, died in 1970 during her father's term as governor, Rosario fulfilled the duties of First Lady until 1972.
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The Ateneo Puertorriqueño is a cultural institution in Puerto Rico. Founded on April 30, 1876, it has been called Puerto Rico's oldest cultural institution, however, it is actually its third oldest overall and second culturally, after the Bar Association of Puerto Rico and the Casino of Mayagüez.
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María Arrillaga is a Puerto Rican poet who has been a professor at the University of Puerto Rico. She taught in the Spanish Department on the Rio Piedras campus. She is a member of PEN American Center as well as PEN Club de Puerto Rico. She was a member of the Women's Writing Committee of PEN International, served as its secretary and organizer for Latin America. Arrillaga was president of PEN Club de Puerto Rico during 1989–1991.
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The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico.
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