When Maria Gonzalez, board chair of FaithAction International House, attended the 2017 performance of “Nómadas” at UNC Greensboro, she witnessed a dramatic change in the audience from before the opening scene to after the final curtain.
“Some people were like, ‘I don’t speak Spanish. What if I don’t understand what they’re saying?’” she says. “After, everybody was like, ‘This was amazing, and they didn’t even speak!’”
That kind of reaction is why Rachel Briley went to extraordinary lengths to bring “Nómadas” to Greensboro. The associate professor of theatre first saw the play at the 2017 Santiago a Mil International Festival in Chile, which she attended as a delegate of the U.S. Theatre Communications Group.
“I fell madly in love with this play,” says Briley, who is head of UNCG’s MFA program in Theatre for Youth and artistic director of the North Carolina Theatre for Young People.
“Nómadas” is Spanish for “The Nomads,” and the dialogue-free play shows people entering and leaving each others’ lives. It is, by turns, heart-wrenching and funny, Briley says, combining physical movement with fanciful objects and large-scale puppets.
“It’s about exile, loss, love, and relationships,” Briley says. “It’s about what we gain when we go places, what we lose when we leave.”
Convincing the play’s creative team — theater company La Llave Maestra — to bring it to North America for the first time was easy. Getting them here was more difficult.
