Barnard’s Elizabeth Hess Expands Cross-Cultural Theater Collaboration in Chile

Elizabeth Hess—a New York-based arts educator, playwright, performer, and director, as well as the Shakespeare/Chekhov Laboratory professor in the Theatre Department at Columbia University’s Barnard College—returned to Chile in August to continue building an international performing arts exchange that began in 2018.

Her visit was a follow-up to a session held at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC) in October 2022 as part of the Women Playwrights International (WPI) conference. That session introduced “Embodied Performance,” Hess’s hybrid method that integrates performance and playwriting through a physical, text-driven approach. This year, she was invited back by Alexei Vergara, Director of the UC Theater Department, to lead a more extensive, two-week workshop on the technique.

“The seeds that were planted during the initial visit led to the creation of Chilean stories for my play SPOILED—which is based on global violence against women,” said Hess. The project now includes 22 narrative contributions from Chile, India, Germany, Turkey, and the United States. Once her travel dates were confirmed, Hess began organizing a staged reading in Santiago, focusing on six selected stories from Chile and the U.S.

Carolina Araya, a theater professor at Universidad Finis Terrae, secured a performance space at her institution and joined the reading alongside two other actresses. “The actresses breathed stunning life into the stories—all told from the male point of view yet informed by their impulses and insights as female-identified performers,” said Hess.

Following the reading, a panel discussion was moderated by Allison Ramay, Professor at UC’s Faculty of Letters. Hess described the evening as “a deeply moving experience which further illustrated what we affectionately called an ‘orgánica’ exchange—one in which the female-driven collaboration was inclusive and non-hierarchical, and an important and necessary antidote to patriarchal posturing.”

As a result of this growing international collaboration, Hess has entered into conversations with UC to explore the possibility of inviting select students or faculty to participate in a reciprocal exchange with Barnard College in New York. She is also considering a future full production of SPOILED in Santiago—in Spanish—together with what she called her “invested, inquiring, and astute Chilean team of collaborators.”

In parallel with these developments, UC’s English Studies in Latin America (ESLA) journal published an interview with Hess about her work. Read the full interview here.