 Welcome to the performance of a farm from Mimi. I am Priscilla Hale, the executive director of ALGO, a queer people of color organization based in Austin, Texas. Our work consists of social justice, cultural arts, and health and wellness programming. ALGO is thrilled to be working again with Virginia Grace on this moving work about the importance of South Central farming, community, and the ways in which art is so necessary and powerful. We congratulate Vicki on the creation of this outstanding work, as well as all the folks who have made it possible. Thank you to Innovations in Socially Distanced Performance at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts, the City of Austin Economic Development and Cultural Arts Division, the Alice Kleberg Foundation, Caramia Theater, and a TotalDAR Productions. Thank you for joining us and enjoy the show. Buenas tardes. Soy David Lozano, director, artístico y ejecutivo de Teatro Caramia, un teatro latinex en Dallas, Texas. Es un honor para mí presentar a farm for meme escrito por Virginia Grace y dirigida por Elena Araoz. También es un honor colaborar con ALGO, Organización Queer, POC, que cobre todo Texas. Quiero agradecer a nuestros patrocinadores, la fundación de Andrew W. Mellon y HowlRound Theater Commons por apoyar la nueva residencia que la escritora Virginia Grace tendrá con Caramia por los próximos tres años. Estamos muy emocionados de presentar este primer proyecto de Virginia con Caramia, a farm for meme. Y quiero agradecer también a TotalDAR Productions, Innovations and Social Distance Performance at Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts por su colaboración y apoyo. Y reconocer a la comunidad del South Central Farm en Los Ángeles, quienes en 1992 se unieron para crear un campo de siembra urbano. Precisamente después de una rebelión contra la policía, como la que se vive en estos momentos. The farm for meme habla sobre la posibilidad de imaginar un nuevo mundo en el momento contemporáneo. Felicidades, Virginia. Tu visión se hace tangible con este primer proyecto. Gracias por colaborar con nosotros y a todos ustedes. Bienvenidos a un farm for meme. Enjoy the show. Desfruten la obra. Remember that's the walnut tree from the story? Oh yeah. What color do you want to do that? You could. You want? What's walnut's look like? They're kind of like brown, like nuts. Are they like brown? Are they like loopholes? But then you can do the leaves like a different color. Nuts of walnut. Mm-hmm. Nuts of these? Mm-hmm. Then you could always do the leaves like the other part of the tree like green. I live in Los Angeles. They say the highest point in the city is in City Terrace, somewhere near Goyo Shao Kui Square. I look for that place when I'm lost. I live near El Tepellac. They make burritos the size of your head like the avocados y ajitas grow on trees in their front yards. I live in a big blue house behind a bamboo fence falling. Backseat of a truck pulled out, turned lawn chair, chickens roaming a cactus garden with a beautiful woman named Vanessa. We call her B. A DJ spins records and poetry, raising three boys. Four, three, and one on prayers and a whole lot of love. In between gigs, she stays home and teaches them how to read. The oldest, we call him Lil Man. And the youngest, we call him Baby. Baby eats everything. If you're not careful, he will eat the food off of your plate. And the other two boys don't like to eat at the same table as him. They blame him for everything. But it doesn't seem to bother Baby one bit. B. and her three boys used to live on the South Central Farm in an encampment trying to save it from the police and the bulldozers. Emanuel, we call him Mehme, once told me that one day he was going to build a farm and that everyone could come and live on his land with their tents. Mehme told me he doesn't like bulldozers. And even though he's only three, he explained to me in an old man's voice that when you pull something out of the ground, it grows back. Don't worry, we're going to plant more things, he said. The extended family that Vanessa has created of rappers, musicians, poets, and DJs. They take turns taking care of the boys and each other. There is always a party outside my window. Cumbias, rancheras, banda, Johnny Cash. I wake up to the sound of roosters in the morning. It all sounds a little crazy, but whenever it gets to be too much, I just go up the stairs and retreat to my bedroom. White clouds painted on the ceiling blue. Like right now, Hellstorm is in the laundry room finishing her tattoo. Her father's homeboy Lupe has a homemade tattoo gun, made the motor of the machine with a walkman held together with rubber bands to keep the needle from jumping. I am amazed by the detail of the three feathers on her neck. He yells at her, I told you not to move, girl. I hit a bang and me. Hellstorm is getting her feathers before she moves to Seattle, where she will play hip hop for Indigenous elders. Drums play on the radio. Sage burns in a shell, black ink on neck, white candle burning. The feather of a bird. The kitchen where we all gather is the same color as my grandmother's, green. Two men sell tacos al pastor two for two dollars on the corner of Evergreen. They make them straight out of a sartén and a barril At the streets, you can get a carton of oat milk at the Friendly Market on Blades, where the cholos like to pass the time waiting for the girls to pass by. So we sent Foxy to get our food. Nobody messes with Foxy. On special occasions, we like to treat ourselves to Thai food on Cesar Chavez or Rocky Road ice cream from El Superior. On Monday nights, the Black Nationalist bookstore on the corner gives free classes on how to learn Chinese. It's where grown men talk about grown things, how things used to be and how things ain't the same no more. I walk past them, snatching up bits and pieces of their grown men talk. Ideas everywhere spill out my pockets. Let the stories fall to the ground. Use them to fertilize the soil. Plant tomato plants in the potholes. Plant trees on the sidewalks. Let the roots break open concrete. The chickens in our backyard like to lay their eggs behind the lemon tree. V always wakes up early before anybody else. She likes to sit outside, feel the sun on her skin, give thanks for the day, click flowers from the garden. She remembers the farm. Sky blue, day clear, a walnut tree. A woman in the walnut tree turned butterfly. A single butterfly flying towards the sun. Flowers everywhere float in a light that changes from blue to yellow to green. The butterfly has finally found a home on the treetops inside a walnut tree. Don't let them bulldoze the trees. Day fades into darkness, interrupted by bursts of light. The night stars, cars, the streets. The moon, close my eyes and dream. Thank you for the sun, for the rain, for today. Take care of our mountains, our rivers. The butterfly in the walnut tree, take care of her. The butterfly is a messenger. The butterfly is a warrior. The butterfly flies over continents, searching for home. She has not eaten in 17 days. She is hungry, but she is strong. She is hungry, but she is home. Home is a farm in south central Los Angeles. Meme, promise me, you'll always remember the farm. Mash the kernels in a metate. 5,000-year-old Oaxacan blue corn. Walk a circle of protection around the house. Throw away barrels and barrels of broken glass so that we can grow. Green amaranth, yerba-wena, chayote. Eat the fruit, turn the root to tea. Alache and chipilín, purple flowers, rich legumes. We didn't learn this in school, how to turn the guayaba leaf into medicine. What day to plant the yerba-mora? How to mix the malabar gourd with honey? Make palenquetas. Know where the sun sets and rises, where the mountains are. In what direction is the ocean? Gempasuchi, orange and yellow maricolds. Welcome, nuestros antepasados. Our ancestors first showed us how to work with the land, with our hands, so that we could have something to call our own. Fourteen acres of farmland in the middle of south-central Los Angeles after the riots. The first thing that grew was the cactus. One of the siete guerrilleros, Nopal, is strong and independent. Then the other plants grew too. In January, avocados, bananas, and cabbage grew. In February, mushroom, squash, and mangoes grew. In March, artichokes and grapefruits grew. In April, radishes, pineapple, and spinach grew. We planted those that had always lived there, and those that had just arrived. We prayed for the farm, and it grew. On the corner of Forty First and Alameda, we created something, something we could call our own. We learned how to work with the land, and each other. Then came their bulldozers. Sun, hot, hits the asphalt, black, the bulldozers tore down the fence to the farm, uprooted the plants. Rows and rows of cabbage, carrots, beets, aguayaba trees, avocados, tamarindo, vines, bearing huge pumpkins, chayote, a loquat tree, maize, until the farm was just an empty lot, except for the walnut tree. It's illegal to kill walnut trees in Los Angeles. Meme knows the word for police, for bulldozers, the word for helicopters, but Meme remembers the farm. He knows what quempasuchis is, knows the word for sweet potato and pumpkin in Spanish, gamote y calabaza. Meme knows the difference between rosemary and mint. In Meme's eyes, I see the butterfly. In Meme's eyes, I see the walnut tree. I see light. In Meme's eyes, I see love. Don't worry, we're going to plant more things. When you pull something out of the ground, it grows back. Meme is learning capoeira at the community gardens in East LA. He's trying to decide if he wants to be a ninja or a warrior, changing his bandana from face to head. I tell him he could be both. He insists that's impossible and takes off his bandana and decides that he's going to sew all his bandanas together to make a kite stretched across bamboo sticks. Meme knows how to make tights that fly in the sky. One day, he too will soar above the treetops. One day, he'll become a butterfly. Even after the bulldozers came and tore down the farm, and the bananas still grow. My name is Sharon Bridgeforth and it's my great privilege to be in conversation with you here. We invite you to put your questions and your comments in the chat. And I invite you to, in our virtual way, just give energy of gratitude and light to Marlene, to our interpreters, to the puppeteers, and to everyone that was involved in bringing this work to us. I want to honor the kids, also known as the Tongva people, who are indigenous to the land that inspired a farm from Meme. And I invite us to breathe into honoring the indigenous people of all the lands where we are. And our ancestors of light and progress, whose blood and vision we stand in. And as I invite Vicki and Elena to join me, I want to acknowledge that this work is made of tears. It's made of visioning, mythology, dreams, desired futures and paths. It's rooted in traditions of storytelling that is prayer and prophecy. And so Elena and Vicki, please join in. And one of the things that I want to say is to call you writer, Vicki, and to call you director, Elena, is shorthand. It's coding. This was ceremony. And I thank you. And I'd love to hear both of you speak about your process with this work and each other. And Vicki, if you can start by giving us some context for this piece and its history. When I first moved to Los Angeles was when I went to graduate school in 2006. And I happened to land in this big blue house in East Los Angeles with a group of incredible women. I was renting a room in this house with Vanessa and all of the children and Hailstorm who somehow also lived there too. And I learned so much from them. And I think that one of the biggest things that I learned is what it meant to raise a family in community. And so the kids really were raised by a community of folks. And I made me really think about how we're raising, especially our boys, what future and how are we raising our boys so that they don't replicate old ways of being in the world. And I think that Vanessa is a single mother and the community that supported her really were trying to do that. And so I originally wrote some seeds of this then when I lived in the house. And then when COVID hit and everything was canceled and everything was put on hold in terms of theater. I was just about to begin a residency both at Caramilla Theater which is a three year long residency and at Algo which is a year long residency. And I fell out like a lot of people. I lost a lot of my work in 24 hours of time. And I went into a process of real grieving. I was sad for a very long time. I was alone and solitary. And just allowed that to be true. And the first thing that I did actually Sharon was to call you and say I want to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing right now. What is my job not as a theater artist, but what is my job as an artist as a person in this world? What is my job right now? And you really encouraged me to stay in the place of curiosity and exploration and love. Always love is always centered to your practice. And so in the middle of beginning this residency I started by planting. And so we started my partner and I did these huge garden beds in the backyard. I shoveled a whole lot of dirt. I planted a whole lot of plants and revisited this piece and started to think about it as a coloring book initially. And so what I love about this text is that it's four pages of text and we're imagining it in all these different ways. One of which is a coloring book because I wanted kids to have something to do when they're at home, if they couldn't leave. And I wanted what they had to do to be from a place of just imagination of making things completely with what they had at the house. And so while I was working on the coloring book with Mel Dominguez who is in Tucson, Arizona, an artist in Tucson, Elena started doing these experiments from her house with handmade objects and puppets. And so I sent her the text and I said, do you think that maybe we could turn this into a theater piece or into a show? And she said, well, let's try. And then she got this incredible group of students to join her and Marlene. And the first question that she asked them and I'll let her take over was how do you grow something with just what you have in the house? And so everything that people are using as the puppeteers are things that they had in their home, construction paper, light, measuring tape. And we began to grow the piece from there. Beautiful. Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like theater separates itself from film and other recorded media in a couple of ways. But one in which one way I think the way that I've come to really learn through this process with the piece is that theater doesn't give you everything and it invites you to use your imagination. And theater makes something from nothing. On stage, we literally only have our bodies, our voices and our imaginations. And then maybe we've got some design around us. And at the same time, I was inspired by that kind of feeling of the body to how do we put of the body on film? And how do we also put nature on film? Well, one way would have been for me to take my camera and bring it to a garden and show you some pretty flowers and some beautiful vegetables. But I wanted to really think about what is theatrical in this? What is how can we inspire everybody to create nature inside and create nature from nothing in the same way that the farm that this is based on was is in the middle of a green desert. There's not a whole lot of greenery around there. There's not a lot of parks. There's not a lot of places for that sort of refuge. And then to, for these people to take an empty lot and grow this four acre farm that was feeding massive communities, I thought was 14 acres. Yeah, 14 acres. Yeah. And so making nature, making beauty, making sustenance out of nothing was kind of the impetus of this. So as opposed to trying to give you the reality of the situation or filming the farm, we decided to actually bring community together, these communities. There's so many supporters and sponsors and artists working on this from radically different places and communities and countries that just bringing them together and saying, okay, only using what is inside your home, how do you make nature grow and bloom? And then pulling all of those ideas together. It's just been so fun. It's the only thing that's recorded, I wanted to say, is the archival footage by Claudia Mercado and Maceo Edwards who was coloring the coloring pages. And the only reason we recorded Maceo's sections is just because he was so young. Everything else was performed live. And where do you all see yourselves going with this piece or with other work together or not? You know, it's so funny because this morning we were, I was thinking about how hard it is to be at the whims of Wi-Fi in the theater world. We're always at the whim of something that's uncontrollable and uncontrollable. And just thought, okay, well, you know, Marlene's neighbor could have a movie streaming next door and it could throw everything off. And there's something exciting in that and terrifying in that and it makes you really give yourself up to what you can't control. And I have found it so freeing. And so I was actually thinking, I was like, oh, I got to call vikings. We got to figure out what's the next piece we're going to do in this virtual way as a way to hopefully inspire us and innovate our way of thinking, bring in more experimentation. So hopefully we can bring it back to the theater that kind of experimental freedom that we're feeling right now because the stakes don't feel so high for some bizarre reason and bring that back into the theater when we can gather again. Something that I think is true of this moment is that I feel like at some level, as an artist, people are really asking the question, how do we support you? And so when I gave the artistic director of Gotta Mia four pages of A Farm for Mime, what he asked me was, how do I support this work? And what do you need from the theater? And my immediate response was, I want my three-year residency. I want a vacant lot. I want to use the next three years of my residency to actually create theater on a vacant lot, to build something there in community with folks and to make something together. And I would love it if in three years from now, we can actually go back and revisit this piece together and see what we're able to do in that time. But I think that now is really the time, especially as artists, that we are actively engaged in not just the symbolic making of new worlds, but the material making of what does it mean to imagine something that's possible. I never would have imagined we would be having a national conversation about defunding the police in my lifetime. I never imagined that. And it has made me realize that as an artist, I want abolition to be at the forefront of everything that I do. I want our people out of cages, out of prisons, out of detention centers. I want us to be free. And I want all of my work to reflect that desire and work towards that goal. That's a perfect place to end this conversation. Of course, we could talk for a long, long time, but due to the constraints of our time here and the programming that's coming up, we need to end. And that's the word. So may it be so, may we make it so, may we dream it so, may we pray it so, may we pour a little of our blood in it so that it will be. Thank you all. Appreciate you. Thank you, Sharon.