The LTC 2025 Carnaval of New Musical Theatre will be an exuberant celebration of Latine music and storytelling. We will bring together Latinx theatremakers and theatre decisionmakers from across the nation to amplify, illuminate, and forward Latinx musical theatre.
The best-known Latine musicals have been helmed by non-Latine directors and music directors. The Carnaval serves as an intervention by uplifting Latinx musical theatre directors, choreographers, and music directors. It will also feature the rich talent of Latine musical theatre performers in the Southern California region, and involve Carnaval participants in rich conversations about Latine music, music theatre, and the future.
The 2025 Carnaval of New Musical Theatre will be hosted by the University of California San Diego Department of Theatre and Dance. It will be championed by Maria Patrice Amon and Lisa Portes.
The LTC 2025 Carnaval of New Musical Theatre will be an exuberant celebration of Latine music and storytelling.
The LTC will produce its first convening in the southwest in Spring 2026 with the Actor Training Laboratorio. This event will bring together fifty Latine participants—selected from an application process—to participate in workshops over the course of three days. The Laboratorio seeks to reimagine and restructure the practice of actor training. It will also offer participants the opportunity to practice in culturally inclusive forms and embodied acting techniques that embrace heritage, identity, and diverse narratives. The purpose of the Laboratorio is to offer empowering tools to succeed in the craft.
The Laboratorio will be hosted by Arizona State University, Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre. It will be championed by Cynthia Santos DeCure and Micha Espinosa.
In 2027, the LTC will return to Washington, DC for the first time since 2012. A Forum on the Future: Language, Technology, and Provocations in Multilingual Theatermaking will gather artists, scholars, and industry professionals in the nation’s capital to discuss the past, present, and future of trans-linguistic theatermaking.
Over four days, participants will engage with bilingual/multilingual works, hear from artists and scholars across all disciplines, network, and wrestle with the possibilities and hurdles of creating bilingual and cross-cultural works. The themes throughout the forum will be Translation, Adaptation, and Design Integration; Audience Development and Multilingual Futures; and Community Building. The Forum will be a hybrid event with panels, gatherings, and readings open to the public. It will be championed by Cristina Fernandez and Eric Swartz.
LTC steering committee member and co-champion of the forum Eric Swartz shares:
We are excited to bring the LTC back to our nation’s capital for the first time since Karen Zacarías and the ‘DC 8’ gathered at Arena Stage in 2012 to discuss the state of Latine/o/a/x theater and theatermakers. Fifteen years after that initial meeting, the Forum on the Future promises to be a landmark gathering of artists, scholars, and administrators to celebrate the bilingual and multilingual works that have come before and dream of the theatrical landscape that can be. DC is an incredibly rich and diverse theater city and home for the arts, and we hope the Forum will involve and inspire stakeholders in other fields and disciplines.
In addition to this programming, the LTC will be supporting the Fornés Playwriting Workshop in Summer 2025. The workshop is intended for educators and to serve as a space for participants to examine their own creative practice while expanding their teaching practice to integrate the Fornés Playwriting Method. The workshop will be hosted by the Goldberg Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. It will be championed by Migdalia Cruz, Juliana Frey-Méndez, and Dr. Anne García-Romero.
The LTC will announce additional partnerships at a later date.
