Amy Draper, 14 January 2017

This was a very niche session in that I'm making a piece of theatre about corruption in

Mexico and am on the hunt for Mexican voices to join that conversation. Therefore I

was keen to know whether anyone was or knew of any Mexican artists.

The answer at first seemed to be no and the circle was a little lonely but then a few

generous people came over and passed on some names. I shared that we'd had

trouble finding Mexican actors based in the UK to take part in a previous R&D. I'm still

not that hopeful that we'll be able to cast entirely Mexican performers, but I'm sure that

we can bring more Mexican voices into the rehearsal room.

Any leads let me know! [email protected]

As a slightly separate conversation, I had been interested in the resistance of Mexican

students we'd previously worked with towards casting Latin American or Spanish

performers. At that stage we had realised that finding Mexican actors who were

available etc would be tricky and so considered widening the net in order to have

native Spanish speakers involved. They considered that this would have been

insulting ie “oh he's Peruvian, he'll do” and not respectful of the differences in the

cultures. So we ended up with 1 Mexican actress and the rest British. Is that better?! It

also called to mind the time that I directed a stage adaptation of a comic book set in

Japan. We cast East Asian actors in all the roles but a small part of me still questions

why it is not considered ignorant to cast someone, say, Chinese as a Japanese

character, conscious casting aside.