Dr Rosa Andújar

Rosa is a lecturer at King’s College London, where she teaches in the Liberal Arts and Classics Departments. She has acted as an advisor for various productions of Greek drama and epic, including Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare’s An Iliad (McCarter Theatre, Princeton, NJ, 2010) and the annual UCL Classical Play at the Bloomsbury Theatre (Euripides’ Trojan Women, 2013; Aristophanes’ Clouds, 2014; Euripides’ Bacchae, 2015; Menander’s Dyskolos, 2016). She is pleased to be working as dramaturg for Medea.

Why Khameleon? 

As one of the few Classicists of colour in the UK, I am deeply committed to expanding access to texts which historically have been the preserve of a small elite. I am incredibly excited to be part of a team that seeks to foreground diverse voices through a new adaptation of a seminal ancient Greek play. Khameleon’s work is, in my view, both necessary and relevant, given current debates regarding the future of Classics in the 21st century.

Why Medea?

Euripides’s Medea is perhaps the ancient play which has inspired the widest range of adaptations in the modern age. As a foreign and powerful heroine on the Greek stage, Medea has attracted artists who are interested in exploring critical issues related to gender and race. Medea has, for example, been upheld as a symbol for women’s second-class status, and has thus been refashioned as a feminist and even as a suffragette. Since the mid-20th century her foreignness has become a symbol for the racially oppressed, with various productions and adaptations featuring Black or mixed-race Medeas. I am intrigued by this most recent turn in Medea’s long history, and have elsewhere in my work discussed adaptations which explore contemporary and historic racial inequities, such as José Triana’s Medea en el Espejo (‘Medea in the Mirror’: Cuba, 1960), Agostinho Olavo’s Alem do Rio (‘Beyond the River’: Brazil, 1961) and Luis Alfaro’s Mojada (USA, 2013). I am delighted to be able to share my expertise in both Greek drama as well as in its rich and complex reception history with the Khameleon team.

More about Rosa

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/rosa-andujar
https://www.rosaandujar.com