When he was 11, Gabriel Scampini began accompanying his mother and sister from their hometown of Lechería, Venezuela — named for its goat farms — to the nearby city of Puerto La Cruz. They were taking dance lessons in a Cuban salsa style called casino.
“They missed one or two classes and were trying to go over the steps at home, thinking they were going to be behind,” Scampini recalls in an interview over Zoom. “I said, ‘No, it’s like this and this and this.’ And they were like, ‘How do you know? You were just sitting on the floor watching us.’ ” Soon he joined the classes himself.
Jump ahead almost two decades, and the now 30-year-old is building a career in Dallas in both dance and theater, passions he has moved back and forth between since moving to Caracas to study sociology at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. His latest venture is directing Caridad Svitch’s “Eva Luna,” a co-production by Teatro Dallas and Echo Theatre.
Behind ‘Eva Luna’
Based on the 1987 novel by Isabel Allende, cousin of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was deposed in a military coup in 1973, the book and play are about an impoverished orphan in an unnamed South American country who becomes a writer with a gift for moving readers.
Likely drawing on Allende’s own experiences, including her 13 years as an exile in Venezuela where she wrote her first novel, “The House of the Spirits,” “Eva Luna” utilizes magical realism to tell both the title character’s story and a parallel tale about an Eastern European man suffering similar circumstances. The two eventually meet.
Fatima Reyes and Joshua Hires play characters on parallel tracks who eventually meet in Caridad Svitch’s adaptation of Isabel Allende’s 1987 novel “Eva Luna” in a co-production by Teatro Dallas and Echo Theatre. (Heather Sansanelli)
“She has a knack for telling stories. Through them, she makes sense of her life and everything that happens around her,” Scampini says of Eva. “There are specific characters she comes across who help her realize what she’s doing is an art and a craft that’s powerful and can change people.”
Like Chile, Venezuela and other Latin American countries following World War II, the backdrop to Eva’s life is filled with political strongmen, corruption and repression of ordinary people. For similar reasons, Scampini and his mother fled Venezuela for Dallas in 2016 while he was still in college. She had relatives here who’d immigrated earlier.
“It’s not explicit in ‘Eva Luna,’ but we know that it’s happening in the background,” he says. “There is a character, Huberto, who joins a guerrilla movement and can be looked at as a savior. He’s against the government and wants to free the country, but fast forward to the reality of Venezuela today, and we see a lot of people who supported that guerrilla movement are in power, resulting in the exodus of millions of Venezuelans. One of the pillars we’re using are the narratives that we tell people and the narratives that we tell ourselves to survive.”
The play employs chronological storytelling, symbolism, movement and poetry, according to Scampini. His background in dance, ritual and anthropological theater have been a help, he says.
“Our first language, before we spoke, was movement. We communicate through the body,” he says. “When someone walks into a room, we can tell how they’re feeling.”
In college, he focused on theater, appearing in plays by Caracas companies while attending school. For instance, he was the lead in Grupo Fábula’s production of the musical “Peter Pan.”
Even before those first dance lessons he took as a child, he’d been interested in the arts. His father played guitar and sang. Scampini would perform karaoke at family gatherings and write scripts for young relatives he filmed with a camcorder.
“Art is one of the most human things we can do,” he says. “It’s a form of joy and joy is also a form of resistance.”
A snowballing career
Scampini’s relationship with Teatro Dallas got off to a rocky start. Not long after arriving in the city, he drove through a storm in his cousin’s car for an audition at the Latino Cultural Center. It had been canceled without notice.
“I broke up with theater,” he says, focusing instead on dancing and teaching movement classes until the pandemic shut everything down.
Portrait of “Eva Luna” director Gabriel Scampini. (Frederick Ezeala)
When Gustavo Ott was named artistic director of Teatro Dallas in 2023 — Scampini had seen the work of the legendary Venezuelan playwright back home — he auditioned for Ott’s first production, “The 22+ Weddings of Hugo Multiple.” He didn’t get the part, but Ott invited Scampini to shadow him during rehearsals.
He started working behind the scenes on other shows, eventually meeting Mac Welch when Welch took over for Ott, who had decided to return to Washington, D.C., to run Gala Hispanic Theatre.
Through Welch, Scampini got the opportunity in 2025 to participate in a new festival, Nuevo Mundo, that paired young directors with established ones. In a full-circle moment, he made his professional theater-directing debut with Teatro Dallas, choosing the Spanish version of “Like Water for Chocolate.”
Later that year, he assistant directed the company’s production of “El Otro,” a surreal, harrowing border story written by El Paso native Octavio Solis about a 13-year-old girl forced to choose between her two fathers. Like Scampini, Solis got his big break at Teatro Dallas.
Even before that, Scampini’s career had started to snowball. In 2024, he choreographed and directed a short piece for Agora Artists’ annual “Seeds,” a showcase for up-and-coming dancers and dance-makers. The next year, he won a residency at Arts Mission Oak Cliff, where he wrote, directed and starred in a play called “Nudos y Raíces” (“Knots and Roots”).
Earlier this year, Teatro Dallas revived “Like Water for Chocolate.” Scampini also recently appeared in Bombshell Dance Project’s original site-specific work “West,” staged as a piece of immersive movement theater at Sons of Hermann Hall. It called on his skills as both an actor and dancer.
Besides directing “Eva Luna,” Scampini is studying corporeal mime with Mai Rojas of Madrid’s Los Escultores del Aire and dreams of bringing translations of contemporary American plays to Spanish-speaking audiences in Dallas.
“I’ve always been a very adaptable person,” he says. “I don’t know if I can speak for all Venezuelans, but I feel like with everything that has happened there — all of the ups and downs and all of the crazy stuff we’ve gone through — it teaches us to find a way.”
Details
“Eva Luna” runs Nov. 6-22 at the Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak St. $25. Opening night, $40. teatrodallas.org, echotheatre.org.
Subscribe
This article originally published at He fled Venezuela for Dallas. Now ‘Eva Luna’ echoes his own story.