DATA OF INTEREST
GUEST:
MARCELA GARCÍA
HOST:
ANAELI IBARRA
Synopsis:
A conversation with Marcela García Olivera about the legacy of Berta Martínez, as part of the last generation of actors to work on Las Leandras and how that experience influenced her later trajectory as an actor in repertory theater.
Bio:
Marcela García Olivera is the lead actress in the Hubert de Blanck theater company and graduated with high honors in acting from the Instituto Superior de Arte. She has worked during 19 years with great directors of the Cuban stage such as Berta Martínez, who was her thesis director. She has played challenging roles, many of them great classics of world literature such as Fuenteovejuna´s El Mengo, Doña Inés in Don Juan Tenorio, and Mary Stuart in the play of the same name, to mention a few of the 25 plays she has appeared in. Since 2010 she is a member of the Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas (UNEAC). In addition to her work as an actor, she was acting professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) and at the Escuela Nacional de Arte for more than 5 consecutive years.
Over the course of her acting career she has received numerous prizes, including the Adolfo Llauradó in the category of lead female roles in 2006. In 2008 she was nominated for the Caricato Awards for her role in Mary Stuart. Her first job as a director was the children's production of The Wizard of Oz in 2007 and in 2010 she directed and acted in Arizona, by the Spanish playwright Juan Carlos Rubio; the play was selected for Havana´s International Theater Festival. Shortly after she received the production of the year award from the Asociación Hermanos Saís (an organization of young artists in Cuba). In 2012 Marcela directs and acts in the comedy Divorciadas Evangélicas y Vegetarianas by the Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott and later that year in another play by the same author, Tu Ternura Molotov. In 2014 she participates in the play Nuestra Señora de las Nubes by the Ecuadorian playwright Arístides Vargas.
This same year she is invited to be on the jury for the Caricato Award for the category of theater acting, but must renounce her duties mid-year to travel to Angola, where she would work during three years as a professor at the Instituto Superior de Arte, the premiere university of its type in Angola. In 2015, she put on Aproximando Antígona with students there, directing and adapting the text from the original by Sophocles. Later she directs and acts in the unipersonal play El Enano en la botella, by the Cuban playwright Abilio Estévez at the Circuito Internacional de Teatro in Luanda, Angola. When she arrived back to Cuba she rejoined the Compañía Hubert de Blanck and reprised the monologue for which she had been awarded the Caricato Award for Female Lead Theater Actors in 2017.
