José Torres-Tama is an award-wining multidisciplinary artist, and he received a prestigious MAP Fund Grant for his "Taco Truck Theater / Teatro Sin Fronteras" ensemble performance on wheels, which challenges the anti-immigrant hysteria. "This Taco Truck Kills Fascists" is the project’s documentary that won Best Louisiana Feature at the 2018 New Orleans Film Festival. "Aliens, Immigrants, & Other Evildoers” is “a sci-fi Latino noir” solo that exposes the rise in hate crimes against Latin American immigrants in a country that dehumanizes them while exploiting their labor. Northwestern University Press will publish the full “Aliens” script in the anthology titled “Encuentro: Latinx Performances for the New American Theater” due in May 2019. Vanderbilt, Duke, Cornell and others have presented his solos, and international presenters include Roehampton University in London, Bluecoat Arts Centre in Liverpool, and Centre for Performance Research in Wales. From 2006 to 2011, he contributed commentaries to NPR’s Latino USA, and exposed the human rights violations Latin American immigrant workers faced in post-Katrina New Orleans. (Top blog photo from “ALIENS” by Craig Morse, and bottom image by Ben Thompson.) www.torrestama.com

Thursday, March 5, 2009

On the Road with the Tulsa New Genre Festival Project

Amigos in cyberspace,

It has been sometime since I have had an opportunity to post a new blog, but I am on the road again with my peripatetic performance migrations.  I have begun the spring 2009 season with performances of "The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina" at the New Genre Festival here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Produced by Living Arts of Tulsa, the festival featured more than a hundred artists, and it was possible for me to experience only a handful of events as I prepared for my performance.  The opening night included the engaging installation called "Domestic Arsenal" by Eileen Doktorski, which piled an ominous collection of objects used in home violence in the gallery space housing it, and the seductive concerto by Adam Tendler reprising John Cage's complicated score for a prepared piano called "Sonatas & Interludes".

On Sunday, I was able to briefly catch Cindy Zimmerman's "Axis Mundi Archives" which mines a visual collection of artifacts through photographs, drawings, and multimedia collage to explore the oil and mining industries of her native Oklahoma.  The installation chronicles her early beginnings as a working artist in Okmulgee, OK, and covers a 25 year career from San Diego to her current home base in Salinas, Kansas.

I performed two shows of "The Cone" at the Nightingale theater, and the piece was profiled in the "Tulsa World" newspaper (link below).

http://www.tulsaworld.com/spot/article.aspx?subjectID=272&articleID=20090228_272_D3_JoseTo199352

The local NPR station also conducted an extensive interview covering the development of this piece, which was written while in exile from the devastated city of New Orleans in the months after the storm.  The interview was conducted by the insightful Rich Fisher for the "Studio Tulsa" series.  It can be heard on Pubic Radio Tulsa at the link below:

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kwgs/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1475240&sectionID=1

WORKSHOPS OF "HOME & THE AMERICAN DREAM MYTHOLOGY":
Currently, I am engaged in the performance workshop process of my two-week Living Arts residency, developed with support from the National Performance Network, and I have been working with a diverse cast of local Tulsa visual artists, spoken word poets, and performers who are developing a provocative ensemble performance exploring the concept of "home", the physical home, the spiritual home, and the psychic home, in relationship to the "American Dream" mythology.  

The local artists I have been working with have exhibited some strong performance skills, poetic writings, and a willingness to mine the territory of the personal and political, offering some moving pieces that explore domestic abuse, the trauma of the Iraq War, and the reinvention of self when "home" falls apart.  The piece we are developing is a multilayered work with film projections, voiceovers, improvised rituals, conceptual actions, and personal stories.  

"Home & the American Dream Mythology" will debut Saturday, March 7 at the Nightingale Theater @ 8PM.  You can call Living Arts at 918-585-1234 for more information, and visit www.livingarts.org on the web.  Tickets are $10/$7 (students).

Below are some excerpts of the writings from three of the artists involved, September Champagne Boles, Amy Luznicky, and Justin McKean.  The full performance group includes Marjorie Atwood, Tony Brinkley, Chris Jones (Smitty), Bill Zischang, and Steve Liggett with directorial guidance by yours truly. 

If you are in the Tulsa area, hope to see you there!

El JTT
www.torrestama.com

WORKSHOP WRITINGS:

My Jungle—a thick, darkened living jungle. From the jungle grew swirls and curls of crazy vines reaching out of the ground toward the sky. My mother—the only known woman to tame my jungle—referred to it as a “crazy head fulla hair.” Every Sunday night (around eight or nine) my mother gathered her precious tools (one Big comb, one small brush, hair grease and a handful of colorful berets) and summoned me into her bedroom for a ritual hair-combing. Every Sunday evening my mother and her tools delicately opened the two giant cornrows attached to my roots, and within this opening emerged the wilderness of my Black hair.

She tried quickly to comb through my jungle, brush it down to the ground, and lock it tight into the two giant cornrows I’ve known all my life. Being her stubborn daughter, I cried and screamed and jerked my head until my mother gave in and slowed down the combing. So in the end, she combed and brushed her way down every strand of hair—nappy root to curly tip—and all the while mumbling under her warm breath, “I never saw a mo’ tender-headed thing in all my life!”

---excerpt from "My Hair is My Home" by September Champagne Boles


home home
homey home home home
i ain’t got no home no more,
never had one fit for me really
never had no place of my own
that required no sharing
or no bleeding
or no paying with self-inflicted bloodshed or tears sizzling hot
like mom’s bacon
grease frying up the laundry
frying up my emotion for her
frying up all of the everything
of our family our home
 
and my dad in mechanical seat,
he’s now too removed for god to reach
although i see it in his eyes sometimes
that maybe he is god
and that maybe he was always my only ever hope.
 
i trash the seat
i lacerate the seat
i break it in half with the force of my will
i love my father
and he don’t deserve this ill-cast body imposition
he’s been forced in.
his home, my childhood home, it’s all broken and lonely.
the rooms empty of the feelings that once made them homely.

---excerpt from Amy Luznicky's "Home" poem


home
dry twigs snapping
crunchy undergrowth
betrays the presence
of the recon unit
exploring the wood behind the house

home
a bag of cheetos
a comfy chair
a two liter of diet coke
a book with a great story

home
a bible
with my name in it
with my heart in it
with my life in it
with my family in it
its red letters
the life blood of my home

which i called out
for the lie it was

home
i don't think i have that anymore
home
isn't something i believe in
does a gypsy have a home?

---excerpt from Justin McKean's "Home" poem







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