NEW YORK.- Since she arrived in the United States in 2016, Catherine Núñez feels that she is always learning, because she believes that “the more you evolve as a human being, the greater your growth as an artist.”
When she left Cuba, this self-taught actress had already made ‘José Martí: The Canary’s Eye’ (2010) and ‘The Immobile Traveler’ (2008); and she had joined the companies Mefisto Teatro and Jazz Vilá Projects.
He decided to continue his career in the United States, where “the pace is very fast, because you work a lot and creating emotional ties is complicated,” after presenting in Key West, Florida, ‘Eclipse’, a play by his friend, the actor, playwright and director Jazz Vilá.
In seven years, the artist from Alamar, Havana, has lived in Utah, Texas, Washington, Virginia, Maryland and New York. She, who has trained herself since her mother took her to an acting workshop so she could lose her shyness, has not given up working as an actress, although she has not lacked challenges and obstacles.
Where she first felt “covered” was in Utah, because her family was there. She spent a time when she knew huge mountains and snow. She remembers that she would see the mailboxes and say: “Just like in the movies.” She thus began to adjust “to a completely different system,” where she didn’t even know how the cards or the cart worked.
Focused on “what I could do to get to what I wanted later,” she began studying English and in 2017 she spent time doing ‘Farándula’, the best-known Jazz performance, in El Paso, Texas.
Perhaps because “things sometimes appear because of the energy and desire that one puts into them,” he was able to get to the Gala Hispanic Theater in Washington when he found out that there was a casting for ‘In the Time of the Butterflies’, a story about the Mirabal sisters, who opposed the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.
‘In the Time of the Butterflies’ was the first play she did in professional theater in the United States and she had the joy of performing it for two months alongside fellow Cuban actresses Alina Robert and Brosealianda Hernández.
Shortly thereafter, “without income” and “taken in by friends,” Catherine moved to Washington to look for a permanent position at the Gala, which has been producing Latin theater for many years and is one of the few that does shows in Spanish and has a certain renown.
However, since the Gala Theater had the entire season covered, she began working there as a stage manager, a kind of assistant. After a year, she became a member of the company as an actress.
Although he started with ‘Life is a Dream’, he has done many more works with one of the greatest references of Hispanic theater in the United States, despite the fact that its market is much smaller than that of Broadway or theater in English. Even now, that he resides in New York, he travels to Washington to work with Gala.
But Catherine, who has taught classes to share her talent with young students, is not seen as the typical Latina actress. With reddish hair and green eyes, she passes for more of an American, Russian or European. In any case, “I can look like them, but when I open my mouth they tell me ‘you’re not from here’.”
“Unfortunately because of the clichés that exist, no one says that I am Cuban. “I look like something else and that forces me to neutralize the Cuban accent to do the works of the Golden Age in front of other Spanish speakers, who don’t understand us because we speak very fast,” he tells Cuballama News.
In the theater, where “casting can be a little more open and with less typecasting,” although he has had to “shape his Cubanness a little to communicate with a more general audience,” he has been able to work a lot.
In addition, the young woman dedicates herself to recording audiobooks in Spanish, which has helped her a lot to “achieve the most neutral diction and accent.”
At the same time, he has set out to perfect his English accent, even with the help of a coachin order to “fit in a little better in the cinema, where that counts for much more because it is a “very naturalistic” cinema and “whenever there is a character who sings a lot it has to be the emigrant.”
In any case, he does not see his accent as a limitation, but has spent this summer studying acting at a prestigious school to perfect his English, and doing ‘Farándula’ again with Jazz, which “is a kind of bridge, which keeps me connected and is always by my side,” but this time in New York. She does not forget that Jazz was a teacher who opened the doors to the theaters on Línea Street, in Havana’s Vedado, he knew how to shelter her and gave her wings.
Likewise, during her confinement in the pandemic, Catherine, who loves the language of poetry and imperfect things, was able to return to audiovisuals (which is what she did, when she was barely 10 years old, in ‘The Immobile Traveler’), making a multi-award-winning short, which was later followed by others.
Meanwhile, Cuba is always in her. “Through art, I take her with me wherever she wants me to go. She is very linked to my family, to my friends, to who I am, to my values, to my culture. She is my essence.”
2023-10-04 12:20:44
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