We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Seres Jaime Magaña. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Seres Jaime below.
Hi Seres Jaime , thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
Every project is a learning experience and all nuances come at the right time. When I start directing a play, I know the project will present new challenges and open my mind to new ideas. In theater you work with a team, and you get to see many minds working on the realization of one story, and that’s what makes every project so rich and fun. One essential skill I’ve learned working in that environment is to keep the creativity flowing. The greatest obstacle on the stage and as a director is freezing, when your mind feels blocked… but the beautiful thing about the stage is that it opens your heart and by giving yourself time suddenly you find what feels right – it happens when you get lost in the story.
Seres Jaime , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I am a theater director and an author. Since 2018 I’ve been at the Pharr Community Theater, staging three plays every year. In community theater we open the stage to anybody who wants to audition with any to no acting experience. As a community theater director my task is often divided between staging a play and training new actors. Sometimes actors will double as part of our production team, working perhaps on design or tech, that’s why it’s a great space for anybody to discover and practice their creative talent while working as an ensemble.
While training new actors my aim is to introduce the basics of theater while keeping the creative window open that will make it easy to get into the shoes of a character and walk through a scene. As a director my aim is steering the team towards the goal of bringing the author’s story to live in a way that the audience is immersed in it.
My work at the Pharr Community Theater started when I was invited by PCT artistic director Pedro Garcia to write The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe, an adaptation set in the Rio Grande Valley of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, which Mr. Garcia directed in 2018. The Tragic Corrido of Romeo and Lupe has made it’s way to academic articles and will soon be published in The Bard in the Borderlands Volume 1 from ACMRS Press.
I’ve always felt that the best thing I can offer the world is my cultura, therefore my culture plays an important role in my writing. Romeo and Lupe carries a discussion about culture in the U.S and Mexican border told trough Shakespeare’s classic tale.
Other of my short stories and poems can be found across different anthologies.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
When I was teenager, there wasn’t many opportunities to practice the craft of directing theater, along with many other artistic crafts. Today, I enjoy seeing young people come to the theater and find a place where they can take part of that world. The less opportunities there is, the more talent that goes unseen, unnourished.
The Rio Grande Valley is a great example of a growing economy with a simultaneously growing culture. That is the importance of funding art institutions and creating opportunities for arts of all forms to thrive – so that as we keep growing our culture doesn’t lag behind.
Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?
That talent is not given, it requires time and effort. Like many other careers, it’s a long road. Sometimes when seeing the ending product a lot of people ignore the hours that are spent and the difficulties that are faced. A creative piece is not a matter of just talent but a matter of discipline. When you applaud at the end of a show, y0u don’t only applaud for a great two hour show. but rather for weeks of rehearsal, hours of practicing, and many times years of training.
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