Fulbright Impact: Elaine Ávila
Social Impact can encompass a wide range of ideas and projects that positively affect the communities we live in.
We are delighted to showcase various Fulbright alumni working with art, music, science,
and public health projects that are contributing to a better world.
A series by Leslie Kutsenkow (Fulbright Intern, Summer 2023)
Fulbright alumna, Elaine Avila, is an American-Canadian playwright, director, and dramaturg. She was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and is of Portuguese descent. Avila has written over 25 plays, including “Burnish,” “Kitimat,” “Lie of the Mind,” and “Happiness(tm).” Her work often explores themes of identity, power dynamics, and cultural heritage – with untold sies of women, workers, the Portuguese, and climate change.
Elaine’s play Fado: The Saddest Music in the World, is a tale of love and ghosts set in the back alleys and brothels of old Lisbon. Part concert, part theatre, the story of a young woman confronting her country’s fascist past and her own identity is interwoven with the heartbreaking national music of Portugal known as fado, which means “fate.”
(Fado: The Saddest Music in the World. Talonbooks.com)
Playing sold-out crowds in Vancouver and Victoria in 2018 and 2019, Fado was honored on the Playwrights Guild of Canada’s Sure Fire List (the Top Twenty-Three Most Producible Plays in Canada by Women) and selected as one of the Top Unproduced Latinx Plays in the U.S. by Fifty Playwrights. Fado won the Award for Favorite Musical in Victoria with B.C.’s own beloved Sara Marreiros playing the ghost of Amália Rodrigues, the Queen of Fado.
Elaine is also a co-founder of Climate Change Theater Action, a worldwide festival of approximately 50 playwrights presenting short plays about the climate crisis for local communities to take action. CCTA was originally conceived by Elaine Ávila, Chantal Bilodeau, Roberta Levitow, and Caridad Svich following a model pioneered by NoPassport Theatre Alliance. It has since evolved into a U.S.-Canada collaboration between the Arts & Climate Initiative and the Centre for Sustainable Practice in the Arts.
(Elaine Avila: Climate Change Theater Action actors with Al Gore.)
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We interviewed Elaine about her Fulbright Scholar experience in the Açores and her continued work of cultural change through the written word in plays.
1. How has the Portuguese culture and your Fulbright fellowship influenced your life?
I am of Azorean Portuguese descent, so Portuguese culture is not only outside of me, it is inside me too. My grandfather left the Azores when he was 18 years old, in search of an education. For me to return to the University of the Azores (founded in 1974, after the dictatorship fell) as a Fulbright Scholar was a full circle honour, across seas and generations.
During my Fulbright in 2019, I was able to participate in folgas, nights in the Azores when the community gets together to dance, read poetry, share a meal, play music. I’d arrive early so I could help de-bone the cod fish, sitting with my friends, in view of the ocean, chatting over shared work, as my ancestors had done for 400-500 years. This awoke a sense of joy and closeness I’ve never known. Some of these folgas were with fellow writers, so we’d share something we wrote that day. The folgas showed me how in America and Canada, and perhaps in modern life in general, we have professionalized and outsourced entertainment. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve dedicated my life to excellence. I love experiencing well-crafted stories, hearing consummate musicians, seeing the work of accomplished painters. But at the folgas, there were professional writers/artists/musicians from London to Porto to France to Holland to the Americas (often due to the work of Terry Costa at Mirateca Arts). The folgas were, also, a place where non-professional community members would stand up and read a beloved poem or dance the chamaritta (my grandfather’s favorite folk dance). The folgas weren’t exclusive; they were inclusive. I don’t usually share my writing until it is polished. It can be so beautiful, personal, and bonding to share work that was made on the day. Upon my return, I’ve made room for folgas in my university classes in creative writing, and they are as transformative as they were in the Azores.
Last April, I realized another impact Fulbright had on me as a writer and a researcher. While at the prestigious Banff National Playwright Lab, I worked with the team there to make a research plan which involved meeting with a geologist, learning how the Canadian Rockies were formed; going out with a Bird Group, and exploring a distinct ecosystem, with a fish and a snail unique in all the world; and meeting with an 80-year-old former Park Warden to collect his oral history about Search and Rescue in the park. The workers at the Banff Centre let me know they deeply appreciated my approach. They were proud of their community. It brought me closer to them. I began to wonder why I was proceeding with such a focus on land, time, and community. I realized I learned this maneira de ser (way of being) during my Fulbright. My Fulbright professor contact at the University of the Azores, Dr. Graça Castanho (recently named one of the top 25 Outstanding Listeners in the World, along with First Lady Jill Biden, and United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed) taught me to design a multi-pronged research plan, reaching into eight areas of her community. One of my Azorean novelist friends, Diana Zimbron, taught me to focus on place and time, pointing out, “It is now that you are here.”
(“Kitimat” by Elaine Avila; directed by Janet Hayatshahi. Photo by Pomona College Theater and Dance.)
2. What challenges in society do you think that North American people face currently and how do your plays represent these struggles and/or people?
The climate crisis is the biggest challenge of our time. I am the co-founder, with New York City based playwrights Caridad Svich and Chantal Bilodeau and Theatre Without Borders founder Roberta Levitow, of the International Climate Change Theatre Action, which now involves 45,000 participants, worldwide, on every continent on earth. It’s free. You’re invited to participate, the next one is in Fall 2023. More here: http://www.climatechangetheatreaction.com
My plays are about stories that are missing from our stages. In North America, this means I focus on the stories of women, workers, Azoreans, the Portuguese, and the climate crisis. My latest play is based on the true story of how a hummingbird stopped a pipeline. My new collection of plays is about to be published by Talonbooks. One play is about how a remote community, which is 40% Portuguese, became the first town in the U.S. or Canada to vote on whether or not they wanted a big oil pipeline to come. The other play is also based on a true story, about how a coal miner managed to halt the international war machine, and how this led to the eight-hour day. Caridad Svich, playwright and Obie Award Recipient for Lifetime Achievement, kindly describes my new book as centering on “on workers’ rights, the conditions and effects of labour on people’s bodies and on the lands they inhabit, and how standing up for rights in the workplace benefit communities at large.” More here: https://talonbooks.com/books/the-ballad-of-ginger-goodwin-and-kitimat
Last year, Talonbooks published my internationally award-winning play, Fado, one of the first plays by a Portuguese descendant to play a major stage in the U.S. or Canada. It’s the story of a young woman learning to sing fado music and confronting her own identity and Portugal’s fascist past. The project I am leading aims to promote scientific literacy and reduce educational inequalities in access to science education by connecting children and scientists from the same hometown and from the same primary school (it translates to Scientists Return to School). Scientists from different scientific expertise and from different communities go back to their hometowns to develop 90-min science workshops with 4th-grade students. The project has been implemented nationwide in schools considered a priority and where access to science and science enrichment opportunities is more difficult or null – this includes schools in rural communities, in Ultraperipheral Regions (Azores and Madeira Islands), schools where the number of students in free school meals in high and/or schools where underachievement is high.”
3. If you could have one impact on society and culture now and/or in the future, what would it be?
«To bring us together to face the climate crisis;
so that we can learn how to take care of water, land and air;
so that we can support each other and dream for
the generations ahead.
As U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in 2019:
“Our warming earth is issuing a chilling cry: Stop.
If we don’t urgently change our ways of life, we jeopardize life itself.
Look around.»
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Elaine Avila was in the class of 1987 at Santa Clara University; she studied theater, acting, and art history. She wrote her first play inspired by a historical event she studied in a theater history course. It was about “a [commedia dell’arte] troupe in the sixteenth-century run by a woman that was captured by terrorists, which led to the overthrow of the French government”. Often feeling like women were underrepresented on the stage, Avila was determined to tell the story of that artist.
After graduating from Santa Clara, Avila received a full scholarship to attend the California Institute of the Arts. There she was mentored by, now, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks. Parks’ work, specifically American Play, had a profound impact on Avila. It inspired to seek out stories that are often not seen on the American stage.
Avila has received numerous awards and accolades for her work, including the Canada Council’s prestigious Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for outstanding achievement in theatre, the Chalmers Canadian Play Award, and the Sydney Risk Award for Outstanding Original Play by an Emerging Playwright. She has also been a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Dora Mavor Moore Award. Favorite Best New Play Awards: Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon, Victoria Critics Circle, Panama City’s Festival de los Cocos. She is distinguished as a descendentes notáveis (Notable Descendant) for her theatre work by the Government of the Azores, Portugal.
In addition to her work as a playwright, Avila is also a professor of theatre and performance at the University of British Columbia. She is a strong advocate for diversity and inclusion in Canadian theatre and has been involved in numerous initiatives to promote underrepresented voices in the arts.
Find out more about Elaine and her profound messaging and storytelling through plays.
Elaine Avila was selected for a Fulbright All Disciplines Award to research in Drama/Theater Arts at Universidade dos Açores during AY2018/2019.
Thank you, Elaine, for the wonderful work you do!
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Since you are here, read “My Fulbright Experience” too, a series focused on the Fulbrighters’ testimonies about their Fulbright programs in the US and in Portugal!