The Cambridge arts scene has been experiencing an invigorating injection of cultural diversity over this week, with Cambridge University African Caribbean Society’s (CUACS) annual Culture Fest on tonight, and Shoot Coward!, a trio of Latin American plays on at the Corpus Playroom.

These two events combine colourful, original new material and artists from varying cultures and countries. This is the first time that the plays comprising Shoot Coward! – Secret Obscenities, Bony and Kin, and Looking Into the Stands – will be performed in English, in the United Kingdom.

Shoot Coward! presents three plays by dramatists from Venezuela, Chile and Puerto Rico, spanning from the 1980s to the 2000s. The plays cover a vast geographical range, offering an extensive survey of Latin American theatre.

Executive Director Fergus Blair initiated the project as he was interested in Latin American literature and had realised the work had received virtually no exposure outside South America.

It is difficult, for non-MML students at least, to think of a single key figure in Latin American dramatic and literary culture off the top of their head, although most should have heard of Gabriel García Marquéz, Isabel Allende or Roberto Bolaño. Latin America, indeed, offers a vast range of literature and theatre that is often overlooked. That said, Blair tells me that he has been in contact with a prolific American translator of Latin American theatre, Dr Charles Philip Thomas, whose translations are beginning to trickle into the US and UK.

The experimentalism and originality of the three Latin American plays means that Shoot Coward! could be spearheading movements towards other cultures in order to unearth dramatic treasures to perform. Indeed, we could see more culturally diverse plays being introduced to the Cambridge scene.

Someone who is certainly keen to encourage more cultural diversity in Cambridge theatre is Rhianna Ilube, publicity officer for CUACS. She describes the beauty and originality of For Coloured Girls, which was performed at the ADC last year, highlighting the significance of the all-black cast.

The director of the play, Justina Kehinde, will be performing at CUACS’s Culture Fest tonight, an annual repertoire that brings together young and up-and-coming artists from Cambridge University and beyond. This will be a rare opportunity to see various performances with a distinctive African-Caribbean stamp in Cambridge.

So, is the aim of these artistic events to teach us about cultures and countries we have little contact with? Culture Fest is primarily a celebration of, not a lesson in, African-Caribbean arts. Similiarly, Blair, Maddie Skipsey and Madeleine Heyes (the directors of two of the plays), stress that Shoot Coward! is a discursive rather than a didactic experience, spanning political, social and metaphysical commentaries.

However, attempts to regard the plays in a detached manner are often impossible as the explosive nature of Latin American social and political history shines through, making contextualisation inevitable. These plays are distinctly Latin American and provoke a different form of discussion to that of British or European arts. Skipsey describes how, unlike the UK, in Latin American countries “they don’t know how long the government and state apparatus is going to exist” – everything is in constant flux.

The distinctive cultural stamps and origins of the two shows do not mean that they can or should be pigeonholed into the categories of ‘Latin American theatre’ or ‘African-Caribbean arts’. Ilube says that CUACS is open to all: everyone has the right to be interested in other cultures. With Culture Fest and Shoot Coward!, the emphasis is on fun and excitement, and their aim to entertain gives them a universal appeal.

Paying too much attention to cultural contextualisation and symbolism in the arts often ends up as reductive; instead, we should embrace the diversity on offer in Cambridge – art, after all, is the property of no one nation.

Culture Fest will be at the West Road Concert Hall tonight at 7.45pm.
Shoot Coward! runs at the Corpus Playroom until 2nd November

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