Title

Hamlet Machine: Via Crucis with Passersby - Mexico

Author

Heiner Müller.  “Reality really does not interest me if it’s not elaborated.  I’m interested in the elaboration of reality, not in reality itself.”

One aspect of Müller’s work that has not varied over time is his rejection of naturalism, doubtlessly his inheritance from Brecht, together with another concept taken from the German dramatist: distancing or strangification.  Heiner Müller practices a theatre of transgression.  Work, revolution, sexuality and death are perhaps the great themes of Müller’s dramatic poetry.  In societies given over to a market hedonism somewhere between senile and pathetically puerile, without losing sight of the economic outlook for the next six months (after that comes the void at the end of the world which we don’t dare face), his dramas are necessarily subversive.

Company

Artillería: “For us theatre is presence.  We don’t seek to represent but rather to present.  We’re searching for a way of being in the world, of making contact with what’s present and what’s absent.  A device for making present the essentially human.”

Actors

Diana Fidelia and Rodolfo Blanco

Description

Duration

Author/Performer

Guillermo Gómez-Peña.  Performance artist/writer Guillermo Gómez-Peña lives in San Francisco where he is artistic director of La Pocha Nostra.  Born in 1955 and raised in Mexico City, he came to the US in 1978.  His pioneering work in performance, video, radio, installation, poetry, journalism and cultural theory, explores cross-cultural issues, immigration, the politics of language, “extreme culture” and new technologies.  He is a MacArthur fellow and an American Book Award recipient.  He is a regular contributor to National Public Radio, a writer for newspapers and magazines in the US and Mexico, and contributing editor to The Drama Review.  He is the author of several books, including Warrior for Gringostroika (1993),  The New World Border (1996), Temple of Confessions (1997) and Dangerous Border Crossers (2000

Company

La Pocha Nostra (U.S./Mexico).  The company was founded in 1993 in Los Angeles by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Roberto Sifuentes and Nola Mariano.  Its main purpose was to formally conceptualize Gómez-Peña’s collaborations with performance artists such as Sifuentes, James Luna and Sara Shelton Mann.  In 1995 La Pocha Nostra moved to San Francisco’s Mission District, where is has been based for the last eight years.  In late 2001 La Pocha completed the process of incorporation and became a non-profit organization.  Its projects range from performance solos to large-scale performance installations, including video, DVD photography, audio and cyber-art.

Title

Mexótica 2005

Description

This performance event takes the form of one revolving living diorama, on which the artists alternately construct ever-changing multi-layered personas, display themselves as highly stylized “artificial primitives,” and interact with the audience.  In the last hour of the performance, the performers finally reverse the gaze and step out of the dioramas.  They then create tableaux vivants with the most participative and audacious audience members, manipulating symbolically their body positions and adding or subtracting costumes and props to their impromptu personae.  The distance between performer and audience is completely erased.  Mexótica 2005 deals with the global media’s current fascination with racialized hybridity, “extreme interactivity” and role playing.  The fueling questions behind this project is why certain “Others” and subcultures get demonized, while others are romanticized and even eroticized.

Duration

1-4 hours

Title

Mexterminator vs. Global Predator

Description

Duration

Title

My Name Is… - Argentina

Author

Anabella Valencia.  She is the author of the plays My Names Is… and Versolari, as well as an accomplished actress.  Versolari was nominated for the 2001 Estrella de Mar prize for best comic performance.  My Name Is…  was among 12 works selected to participate in the 2004-2005 “Teatro por la identidad” cycle.  Valencia has performed in works staged throughout Argentina, and at the Cuarto Festival Internacional de Monólogos de Puerto Rico in 2001.  She holds a degree in Dramatic Arts, and is currently professor of theatre for children and adolescents at the Centro Cultural Alfonsina Storni in Buenos Aires.

Actor

Augustina Cerviño.  She has performed in numerous Buenos Aires theatre productions, including Luis Agustoni’s Mal Mal, where she appeared along with Anabella Valencia.  She holds a degree in Special Education of motor-impaired students, and a certificate in Sign Language Interpretation.  In addition to her theatre work, Cerviño has appeared in short films and advertising spots.

Description

My Name Is… was one of 12 works selected from a total of 120 entrants in the 2004 “Teatro por la identidad”contest.  In it, the actress represents what appear to be two different characters, who in the course of the performance the audience recognize as two contrasting personalities of a child of disappeared parents.  One, raised by her grandparents, knows the truth about her parents’ disappearance.  The other, taken from her parents at the time of their arrest, was illegally “adopted” by a military family who conceal the child’s true identity.  The two characters take turns speaking about their lives, which coincide and diverge in ways both big and small.  It is left to the audience to decide whether the two personalities belong to two different people, or if instead they represent two possible versions of one life story.  The work rais these possibility that members of the Argentine public carry within themselves another potential self, suppressed by the government’s policy of secrecy and forgetting.

Duration

Title

Pirín Pin Pin and his Stories – Peru

Author/Actor

Company

Description

This work of puppet theatre tell the story of the clown Pirín Pin Pin and his friend Bailarina, who have managed to escape from the Old Puppeteer, who mistreated them and forced them to work without attending to their needs.  They decide to travel through the towns of Peru and America telling their story.  In the epilogue, Blackie the Shepherdess appears and introduces the puppeteer, the puppets are displayed, questions are answered, creating a space where audience interaction is of primary importance.

Duration

Title

Prometheus Bound - Puerto Rico

Author/

Performer

Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya is a recipient of a Jerome National Playwriting Fellowship and a McKnight Advancement Grant from the Playwrights´ Center.  In the U.S. his plays have been presented by:  Intermedia Arts, Red Eye Collaboration, Teatro del Pueblo, the Guthrie Theatre, Pregones and The Public Theater (reading series).  His play Jukebox Icons, part of a long-term exploration of notions of sainthood in daily life, won first prize at the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture's playwriting contest 2004 and was produced last May as part of the Puerto Rico Theatre Festival.  His collection of short stories, Lajas, a kaleidoscopic portrait of his hometown, was recently awarded the PEN Club of Puerto Rico prize.

Company

Casa Cruz de la Luna.  Based in an old house in the historical district of San Germán, Puerto Rico, the experimental theatre of Casa Cruz de la Luna proposes a continuous questioning of the boundaries of representation.  Past productions include:  Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya's Hagiographies (1998-2000), Mayra Santos Febres' Matropofagia (2000), Cervantes' El Licenciado Vidriera (2001), Marisa Riviere's One, Two, Tres, Cuatro (2002), Prometheus Bound (2001-2003), and Adyanthaya's Jukebox Icons (2004).

Description

Scripture performance is a form of theatrical poetics that explores the staging of the act of writing.  A scripting of Aeschylus’ tragedy, "Prometheus Bound" takes the metaphor of the human bound to the machine to examine relationships between the writer and the written, the medium and the message, the audience/spectators and oral and inscribed perceptions.  What begins as a re-writing of the tragedy turns into a multivocal conflict with history, conventions, culture, conterculture, salsa, monsters, dioses and things un- and in- translatable:  an invitación to a revolú (tion). 

Duration

Title

Tactile Liquid - Brazil

Author

Daniel Veronese started his career as an actor and mime.  In 1985 he became involved in theatre of objects, a discipline which led him to create the group “El Periférico de Objetos” in 1989.  His aesthetic, both as a director and as an author, makes his a unique vision on the Argentine theatre scene.  He is the author of over twenty titles and has directed more than a dozen works.  Based on synthesis, theatrical self-reference and the sinister, his work maintains an uneasy relationship with the formal models of classical theatre.   He has published two books that together contain his entire oeuvre: Cuerpo de Prueba, published by the C.B.C. of the University of Buenos Aires (currently out of print), and La Deriva, published by Adriana Hidalgo Editores.  He has also published in French journals.  His works have been translated into Italian, German, French and Portuguese.  He has received numerous prizes, among them the Second National Prize and the First Municipal Prize of Argentina, both for his work as a playwright.

Company

(E)xperiência subterrânea

Actors

Heloise Baurich Vidor, André Silveira and Olivia Camboim

Description

Duration

Title

The Shoes - Argentina

Author

Cristina Merelli is a director, writer and actress.  She is the author of numerous plays, as well as books of poetry and short stories.  Over twenty of her works for theatre have been staged in Argentina and at festivals in Venezuela, Puerto Rico and Spain.  The Shoes is her most recent work to participate in the annual “Teatro por la identidad” theatre cycle; others include Teléfono (2001), Vengo por el aviso (2002) and Humo de leña verde (2002).  Merelli has received many literary prizes, most recently with her work La gota que horada la piedra at the 2001 National Comic Theatre Contest (Neuquen, Argentina). 

Actor

Cristina Merelli

Description

In The Shoes, Alberto struggles with postmodern fashion trends and the global economy in his efforts to bring the family’s Buenos Aires shoe store into the 21st century.  The business’s traditional values of craftsmanship and customer service, along with its reliance on leather derived from Argentina’s famous cattle industry, are no longer profitable in the era of globalization.  Alberto finds himself under attack from all directions: from his mother, who insists that the business’s decline is due to Alberto’s stubborn refusal to learn English; from his clients, whose fickle taste require constant changes to the store’s facilities and services; and from his own children, who criticize his backwardness in a “postmodern” Spanish full of words borrowed from English and references to North American popular culture.  Alberto’s crisis, personal and professional, approaches the absurd and reflects the crisis suffered by Argentina’s national identity, from the Dirty War to the years of economic depression at the end of the 20th century.

Duration

Title

Arquearse - Puerto Rico

Author

Deborah Hunt.  Born in New Zealand, Deborah Hunt has lived in Puerto Rico since 1990.  For 35 years she has been presenting original works using masks, puppets and Chinese shadows all around the world.  She is the founder and artistic director of Maskhunt.  Her productions have received support from the New Zealand Arts Council, the NEA and the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture.  Her work Despertando a Osiris received the 2002 Creativity Prize awarded by the Circle of Theatre Critics (Puerto Rico). 

Company

Maskhunt. 

Actors

Deborah Hunt and Guie Beeu Guerrero

Description

Duration

Title

Mondongo Scam – Dominican Republic/U.S.

Author/Actor

Claudio Mir.  He is an actor, writer, director and musician. He graduated from "Escuela Nacional de Arte Escénico" in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. He also holds a BFA in Visual Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. In 1985 he was awarded el Dorado to the best Dominican Actor. Mr. Mir has written and produced plays for children, teenagers and the general audience. He is also the Director-adapter for performance of Josefina Baez's Dominicanish. Claudio Mir has participated in many international theater workshops, among them, the 7th workshop of the "Escuela International de Teatro Latinoamericano y del Caribe” (EITALC) in Bologna, Italy, directed by Osvaldo Dragun, where he studied with Miguel Rubio and Teresa Rally from Yuyachkani; the 10th workshop of EITALC in Machurrucutu, Cuba, where he studied with Guillermo Angelelli; the Odin Week in Denmark, March 2001; and the International School of Theatre Anthropology (ISTA) directed by Eugenio Barba, in Seville 2004.

Description

Duration