 I'm a LATC scholar-in-residence along with Chantel Rodriguez and Dr. Jorge Huerta and I'm also a member of the steering committee and as a scholar here in the Los Angeles area have been helping to have several conversations in various theaters and among theater artists and talking about issues of violence and trauma. So this conversation is an example of that. To really think about the specific work that we're doing here at Piquento, if you're going to all of the plays, going to the tutulias and really thinking about if we're going to boil it down to what is a common theme that threads throughout the work that we're seeing on stage at Piquento, violence is certainly one of the predominant themes that we see thread through. So I'm really excited that we have the opportunity to talk about that theme, talk about the way that these theater artists are engaging with that theme as a very central part of the work that they create and doing it in a very deliberate and conscious manner as well as just seeing it as part of the artistic work that they do and to talk with you because I think all of us who live in a culture where survivors who come from colonialist histories of violence allow us a personal survival of survivors of violence, yet the theater I think is a very powerful place that we have to have an exchange to talk about violence, to collectively address stories of violence, but most importantly to leave with a vocabulary rather than to have those stories and those vocabulary just given to us without any kind of space of response. So I'm really excited about the work that we do here in the theater. I think it's important to probably begin with why are all of the people here on this panel specifically brought together to talk about issues of violence and trauma and writing and staging the stories about violence and trauma. So I want to briefly introduce each panelist. You'll hear more from them about their work. And I want to talk about, you know, you can look at their profiles online as well as their biographies online, their web pages, but I want to introduce them to talk to them about why they've been so incredibly important to my thinking about this topic. I left on the page of 15 fleeing a home of violence in a very toxic environment. I knew at a young age that I didn't leave. I don't think I would have survived. And various parts of my family history showed that, that I needed to get out to survive. When I left, I think one of the reasons why I survived and I always share that story because I think sometimes when we hear people have experienced issues of violence and trauma, we just hear the story of how they're processing it and how they've been broken. But we don't often see how that's a source of insight and wisdom as much as a source of wounding and that people can actually emerge from those environments and be happy and have very productive lives. And I think the theater is part of that healing and part of keeping us happy and sane and making those experiences generative, not just for ourselves but for others. So for me, literature and theater saved my life because it showed me that the story I was experiencing was just one story. It wasn't the story of my life or the world and there were other stories out there. And in doing my work, the stories created by the artists here on this table are part of my healing journey, part of the journey that I get to share with my students, part of their connection with the work. But I think there's some of the most tremendously gifted, talented storytellers on the American stage today who are bravely talking about their cultural experience and sharing it with us. And as a lot of our playwrights have so widely taught us, it's the things that are most specific but actually end up being the most universal. So that's a little bit of a lie about these particular panelists. To my immediate left is Dahlia Cruz, a Puerto Rican playwright, a New Yorker-Rican playwright from the Bronx. Her work is brought together in the collection of people at Bronx and other plays published by Low Passport Press. She's the author of over 52 plays. She's a student of Marine Fournes and is carrying forward the tradition of that, of having to study with one of our greatest writing teachers and playwrights and her own work as a teacher. But also, I think in her voice, as someone who is fearless, who's not afraid to play with poetic images, with metaphor, and to go to very, very dark places to open up the space of insight. She's a huge, huge fan of her work. We know that Bronx is an incredibly important play about how families bear the burden of incarceration, the prison industrial complex, and also their generations of poverty and violence and how they get passed on from father to child and just so many other beautiful plays. But if this isn't our scholar's vault, I hope we'll be able to look at it and look at that further. To the left of Victoria is Amina Anthony, an incredible performer, a solo performer, a solo performer, playwright. Her book is published Las Pociconas, three locas with big mouths and even bigger brains. It's a wonderful piece of solo drama as well as comic performance. And two of her plays that you may have seen in the Los Angeles area, as well as nationally, are cruising for vessels and east of times. And both of those plays are very much looking at queer Latino experience and how stories of violence have specificity in that context as well as more broadly in terms of being daughters, lovers, citizens of our culture and looking at the theater that we work as in Amina's words of medicina. And I'm just really honored to have Adelaide be part of the work that I do with students at UCR. She has had a huge influence on the next generation of artists in the way that she experiments with performance and brings some dramatic storytelling to the stage. So she's really excited about the work that we're going to compare today. And then at the end of our panel is John Foss Merchant and he's representing Rikabee Hines who was unable to be a guest today and Foss is in Rikabee's play, Dreamscape which hopefully people in the room are about to see it. For those of you who haven't got it to see it, the play is published in Dan May's Anthology State Word Voices from Hip Hop Theater. The play has evolved since the print version but the print version will give you a very strong and powerful sense of the story. It's incredible play that uses hip hop, inflected dance, beatboxing and experimental forms of dramatic storytelling to speak about the murder of a young girl by the police. It's based on real life stories that in Riverside, California where the police riddled a young woman who was asleep in her car with bullets and shot her to death in the plate and it's about each bullet that pierces her life and the parts of her story that were lost. Foss is an incredible actor and vocal performer, I think he's a vocal performer rather than a hip hopster because even the people who are visionados of beatboxing are astounded by what he's able to do with his voice and he's going to talk with us today just about the embodiment of stories of violence having to illustrate and bring us into the realm of the scenarios of life just through the voice and what he does in his face and his presence. So it's my honor to have these three people with us today. I have Anita Anthony. We're going to begin with that one. McTally hates to go first. Respecting my elder, he's supposed to go first. We're saying thank you to make this England throw up possible and the opportunity to always have a critical lack of time is that I think it's a very adamant about doing this as a solo performer. My work primarily was in that regard it was a very purposeful choice because the beautiful thing about university performance is when you're not a vocal theater singer is that you get an opportunity to have questions and answers from the students. Usually they're just so excited to be here to have conversation with the artists and partly because we realize those students, that's a future. Those are future artists. Maybe they haven't come out as artists yet. I don't know if it's clear to other things but coming out as artists that way. So gracias for the space. And then also for me, it's critical to acknowledge that I'm here as an artist because my my work was for many years which is Sheree Zabata and today it's still the the only prominent international Chicago Desmond playwright that we have having the opportunity to be mentored by her as well as by her poetic senator for three years also as a performance artist. They really had such a profound influence on how my work shifted in particular ten years ago. And so Tiffany introduced me as a solo performer and I was telling her earlier that what I was telling Zabata earlier that the choice to do solo performance as Chicago Desmond that just created an influential really was a pragmatic choice. One, because I knew the kind of topics that I wanted to address as a writer and be a pilot of items so like Tiffany many of us in the group I could have very easily been another statistic should have been you know, according to what is offered to us as young competitors I was as eight our family definitely had to contend with domestic violence alcoholism, drug abuse incest, pedophilia I mean you name it, I feel like the isms were just the violence that I was born into, that my family that my family was contending with because of this history of intense colonization it's just the cycles that have been repeating themselves and with colonization and racism and alcoholism and to that degree like Tiffany I feel that it could have been the destruction of me as an artist but I too gravitated to theater my mother was I mean we were poor, welfare kids so she could never put me in the dance classes I wanted to but she was fine allowing me to stay after school and at that time because they still had after school programs UIL plays and that was my outlet and so they after a very much became my safe space it became the space where I learned that to a body other characters was also a lean but I didn't have to live my own life that for a few hours after school I lived in silos and I'm I'm in someone else's life and gosh their life is more profitable than mine into a teenager that was wow so and I'm glad that I used vulgarity because I have to say that although I very much have been entrenched in the academics that one of the the tenets in my work is always to mix up the language the composition along with what is the poetry the musicality and also what is street language a lot of times in one sentence it's constructed in a way where you have these words that seem to they shouldn't live together well but in many ways in that microcosm of looking at that sentence like in one of those it's a reflection of who I am that I grew up through the barrio and that's a ghetto and I always say that that's because white people can't hold their arms they couldn't make that so barrio so I came to the barrio and that's also placed me in a very specific time period and the influence of the sixties of Chicano theater and all that so along those lines I feel like the work that I do is not so different from other artists in that the crux of drama is conflict and we all know that as our vista so one of the things that I'm clear about is that when I bring violence as a topic to any of my performances it's in order to make the dramatic action work in a piece, in a play, because scenes move through conflict and two, it's about really investigating what has not been said in my communities and so I stand on the ground unapologetically as Chicano and Hoda together and for many years even when there were day-sayers and folks who in a very well-meaning way insisted that I had enough talent to do mainstream theater or to even do mainstream Latino theater and I knew early on that that would have been a violence that I would perpetuate along myself because it would have been again a cutting the way or a silencing so I'm actually really happy that I made those decisions when you make choices like that your careers kind of go up in a different way and so I'm honored that Tiffany calls me among these artists of the American stages because to be quite honest we really don't have Hoda's on the big American stages or even the Latino theater stages and I think that that's in part due to this idea of that perhaps our work is not relatable when in fact what has often happened by being that we work with the craft instead of course I am writing for a very specific um, and audience and I'm always thinking I'm going to get this I'm going to get this I'm going to hear them laughing I hear the dramatic pause and I know it's getting to that intended audience overwhelmingly after shows it's also been everyone else who has come in as Wittens so I also have a very different relationship to audience because of what I've done in the last three years that shift ten years ago was also asking audience to be Wittens and that my work became offering that it wasn't so much about oh I'm just going to go do a show this is great, I want to talk to my peeps afterwards you know the applause that I think a lot of performers can get addicted to I have actually getting anxiety after shows talking to people because it's not why do you work you know the work is situated in a very conscious place of this is the body that I have to offer to this piece, to these words and to this gathering, this circle and these Wittens and so as Wittens it's again building on all those years of so as a prophet saying you're not passive, right? you're my audience and so I'm still following along those veins and bringing the work I'm just keeping it grounded in a space that is looking at an experience that is not delimiting in any way because the way I look at it is by putting words that are queer, Chicana, feminist indigina putting all of these elements together holistically means that it's an opportunity for people to enter the work through those different spaces as opposed to saying like, well I don't know anything about Chicana but the brother could be Chicano and that's enough to get him in at least culturally or linguistically so I'm going to kind of pause it there and leave it open for some of your questions later because these are wonderful for this piece so thank you so much so I hear you, the question the implicit question that I want to make explicit is thinking about what is the role of violence in your work and I hear you saying violence is a lever, it's a springboard but it's also an undercurrent, something that you're responding to but also continually processing well I think that we don't we don't never escape violence and people who maybe did not grow up in these intense households that many of us have experienced, like you say living in violence society so I'm always processing what I've survived and I'm going back to that moment of like, well I'm not that I live at home at 17 I'm not that 17 year old teenager who was one homophobic two, Hispanic identified three, complete not too sure that's changed too much but it had so the process has been about going through the work so for me in a very humbling and true way I would like to think that my work helps others and I've had some audience members say your work saved my life or it helped them come out or help them deal with their families so I'm here because my work is saving my life we're now going to hear from Julie to Mcdally up to and ask her to wait for the last welcome and ask to ask her to talk about the role of violence in power work because I feel like aesthetically as a storyteller I'm sitting under a marion you've talked about in the past about how she really really pushed you to be able to go into a place of incredible honesty and what that meant for you to come to terms with that place of incredible honesty could also be a place of grappling with very difficult and dark things and over the span of your years of a playwright producing or 52 plays really just the incredible lyricism that you've been able to about the honesty and pressing stories about talking about issues of scarification issues of imprisonment issues of serial violence you know serial murderer and what would make a young girl open the door to somebody like that and let someone like that in their life so I was hoping that you would share with us just thinking about the role of violence throughout your career over 52 plays when Tiffany asked me to be on this panel the first thing I thought it was like I read about violence something that never occurred to me that I do I thought I wrote about love I thought I wrote about family but then it just so happens that I read about love and family from people who happen to be violent so I wouldn't call it a theme for me because for me a theme signifies something that it's like a lesson you want to teach people or your overriding message and violence isn't the message survival is the message healing is the message love is the message and it's like we go through these horrible things every single one of us but you know and it's like we need to address our truths sometimes our truths are hard in dark places and sometimes there are places where you can offend your family and members because you're telling the story giving the cheese play and talking about changing about people you shouldn't open your mouth about but we're not those type of people or we don't want people to know we're not those type of people or that never happened to you it didn't happen to me that happens to my family all the time is that my story or is that your story the story is that but the fact is that I write fiction I write plays so I hope if I'm worthy of being a parent that I'm writing everyone's story that I'm trying to create a world that is filled with many emotions and violence is incidental it happens to be how those people went through life so that was my first guy he was like I don't think I should be in that panel but I guess I do I think people I've been told I write about blood it's like how do you write about blood it's red you don't write about blood you write about the letting of blood you write about the band that you put on top of the wound that's bleeding and so in the course of all of my work I think I've tried to there's a place that's safe for people to to be as ugly as they can be and they can do it in a beautiful way that also addresses their poetry and the poetry of poverty the poetry of people I should say better the poetry of people who happened to be poor and I mean I think in my early my early days of writing people often confronted me about how can people don't talk that way in the south france I thought oh yeah they do I do and I'm from there so how do you how why are you denying my poetry so for me finding the most violent part of my existence as a player that's always been the confrontation with people trying to identify my work as something they can identify easily as opposed to something that they can embrace and absorb and maybe learn about later but you don't have to label things that actually a theatrical journey has many parts and many things yeah I love that makes me think of just really why I think for me it's important to think about focusing on stories of violence that we're telling not just specifically about violence but it's not just about that thing I think you're the larger culture any Latino actor knows has talked about you know you go into an audition and people want to put you in a box and have you play a certain kind of role and the reality is a lot of the roles that we are stereotyped in are attached to performances of violence but I think the difference in our theater is exactly what we just identified it's not just about the theme of violence it's about processing trauma it's about attaching it to love it's about having a space for great amounts of complexity but also the poetry and the visual artistry in the conversation we opened up we have several directors and designers in this room and I hope they will launch in to pick up with exactly some of the comments we've delineated about the poetry of it I want to turn to hearing from pause about how as a vocal performer just how you use the voice to really put us in an emotional landscape of processing stories of violence specifically through Worker Behind's dreamscape but I also heard you talk before about how that's had you really tap into it's open up a space where you really think about your own histories of processing violence and the kinds of complexities that you write through the performance and I'm hoping that you'll layer that in but also maybe give us an illustration of how you use your instruments to really process the story that you're telling through dreamscape absolutely hello everybody hello if I need the microphone just leave it to me I'm part of this festival I just thank you all for accepting the ear and allowing me to be here so I started off boxing at 6 grew up in the city of Pomona stayed with it and Pomona was just like probably any other city that has a hard luck story I went through it I was surrounded by violence the neighborhood I grew up in was populated by a gang called Bloods it was an interesting it was an interesting journey because on one hand I had a dad who was a pastor and I was in church every day literally on the other hand I had friends and uncles who lived the street life and that was what it was and so it was almost it's almost wrong to say that there was a good balance to have but I gravitated towards my uncle at age of 6 in boxing was just something fun it was just something that I saw as just being whatever making sound effects as I got older and started to experience life dealing with families that had divorced and dealing with almost a sense of domestic violence to where to where my three sisters I had four children we would get spankings from my common mind my dad's wife mom that type of situation and then my mom ended up getting custody of us and she promised that she would never do that type of thing to where she would bring in somebody that we were unfamiliar with and then she did the exact opposite where she married this guy and she met that we had no idea who he was and he ended up breaking things around the house and he had flares of anger you know that would happen and here it is you know 17, 18 I wanted to break his neck you know and I didn't need this I'm still here but beat boxing became one of those things I've always struck when I was 12 years old and a lot of people didn't know how exactly it was like 12 and most people think oh that's actually cool and no you don't, you really don't because you call the girls house at the age of 12 older women I had a curfew I had to be in bed by 7.30 I can't go on the day and I can't call girls in my class because I think I'm 40 years old understanding the gift of beat boxing and what I had it ended up becoming you know as they shared it ended up becoming that abdomen to where now I'm able to utilize this to stand on the stage to be hurt you know in the beginning at 18 standing at an open mic and beat boxing that was my way of screaming to the world without saying anything it's like here you see me I have something to say because again up until that time at least in my high school there were riots it was this black and brown thing that it was a lot of tension in the city you know that's built over from the prison system and so it was like battling all of those things and still trying to keep a cool head how do you do that well you need to chat you need something that opens up and you just run through let me just give all of this negative energy that I have and allow it to become a positive influence and so that work and my art ended up becoming my way of saying hey listen this is who I really am like listen to me and as she said like you know after you perform a show it's bigger than just here and oh you're good okay but there's something deeper like why am I doing the things that I'm doing and I started to utilize that beat boxing to talk to kids and trouble neighborhoods or anywhere for them to let them know like listen life gets stuff things happen but there's something bigger and greater this is where I came from that's not who I am it defines a small little piece of my life but you can utilize these negative things that happen in your life to build to grow and to stack them up so in that way you can touch the clouds and go beyond and find out what your potential is and so with that utilizing beat boxing it has put me on platforms and it has allowed me the opportunity to share you know where I come from and the things that I've experienced with youth with you know people that are older than me and you know different things to their nature utilizing it in a setting for the play is extremely interesting only because of the simple fact that you know Kirby he sent me a script that showed to her so I did exactly that and he said you're going to be you're going to be playing an officer no I don't think so that's what I never told him that way you know I'm okay and part of that is that I shared this during our conversations after the play I just did not like officers at that time and to be quite candid it was it was almost the same type of disgust that I had for my mom's husband and my dad's wife simply because it's like you don't understand me and you're judging me you're not trying to get to understand me it's not your job to understand me but to see something and say oh this is what that is that transcends to the culture of hip hop and it's beyond that because that's something that everybody can relate to and so driving my mom had a Ben's S500 and I love driving it but I hated it because it was such a big car and I was like I'm a big guy but I was I had like a Honda Civic at the time and so being compact and having this boat to drive it was like oh this is luxurious but it's too much car just when it's driving my mom off at church and I see the policemen driving towards me I'm heading west to go do a show in Culver City and I see him something in my mind said he's going to turn around I probably shouldn't have thought that because he did exactly that and he got behind me okay I didn't do anything wrong everything is clear I had nothing to be afraid of I don't know why I had an ethnic moment where I wanted chicken which is where I was going my way to I wanted chicken and I knew that there was a church's chicken that was just a big box and I had this craving before he got behind me so driving down the street he gets behind me I still want chicken so I'm going to get him when I get to the light to where it is there's a double line I'm not going to cross over there because now I see you're behind me I'm not going to give you a reason to do anything so I'll make the left still double lines I'm not going to cross over these double lines because you're behind me you're still behind me let me make sure that I do the right thing and try to find a place where I can turn around alright that's cool I seem a little suspicious at this point but why are you bothering me this is the question that I'm asking get off the car license, registration and insurance I handle my license it's my mom's car I don't know whether registration or proof of insurance is okay that's cool you still need those two things where are you going well I wanted chicken but it's back there I didn't want to make a wrong time were you afraid afraid of what why should I be afraid well because I was behind you I have nothing to be afraid of nothing at all he goes and runs my license he still hasn't had the insurance registration still doesn't have those things comes back my mom is in me free the car is completely clean he's searching through do you have any marijuana paraphernalia blah blah blah do you have any guns or grenade I'm going to dance here I can't lie with this voice do you have a bazooka in the car this is a true story I wish I could make this I wish I could I wanted to be smart but I knew that there was something you know what I mean this is one of those states somebody asked me if I had a bazooka and I was like oh yeah I actually left that two people in one cell with this yard cell and it makes you think why do they ask everybody this question then he tries to have a small talk and you know obviously I came back clean you never got proof of registration you never told me why you pulled me over you never told me these things put this stuff to me to understand like me acting out and being enraged like what does that do it doesn't do anything meet somebody everybody else because in hip hop that's something to do that's cool we have to afford it we don't need that but I'm going to lie to be there to help but it's one of those things where it's like how do I get rid of that anger and that type of thing having guns put on me and ask stupid questions like I can't portray police officers because that's what I'm accustomed to that's what I'm accustomed to and then getting into this role with Dreamscape there was a moment to where I started to realize would Kirby actually have the opportunity to meet with the officer who was testimony and that opened up the humanity to where it's like okay every officer isn't bad everybody isn't bad there's people that take advantage of the opportunities that they're giving and they don't do the right things with them like asking people to help as soon as they're caught it's just wrong but that's one incident should illustrate every single officer the officer that I portray he made a mistake, he thought he heard a boom he made a mistake and started shooting everybody else started shooting was it right? No, should it be justified? I don't think so but for me to stand on stage and to try to illustrate and again push through this avenue all of my disgustingness not allowed that to be the point of departure to say listen this bad stuff happens but how can we make it better how can I take this bad experience and make it something that can be enlightening and I did exactly that I found a way to balance the negativity and to make it something that can be enlightening to people and by doing so it's helpful for these members especially ones who again have brothers and cousins and fathers who are police officers who are just trying to make an honest living who they're every day waking up is to protect themselves and so it's wrong for me to use my biasness to try to demonstrate that my voice has been an unfair advantage becomes a very dynamic presence because it's almost like God talking to you in a sense you know it's and I say that facetiously but it's one of those things in the play you know it's this girl that has been shot at 23 times but those hitting her three of them being flabelled and it's like this voice it's almost commanded it demands and commands and it's one of those things that says you have to listen to the information that I'm giving you this is what happened to her this is how we destroyed her and how are we going to make it better and so utilizing this gift has been such an honor and a pleasure to be able to beat boxing to be able to use my skills and this voice to be able to beat her and to say something that can transform so much way of thinking I really hope to say you can only change what people know you can't change what they do but giving them that information will hopefully influence them and encourage them to make those changes in their everyday lives and that's really powerful to hear that and have that perspective about the performance and I was just thinking from the point of view of playwright and playwright performer just thinking about how your work has taken up play and the people to continue what will happen in the storytelling I want to be mindful of time and creative space for the dialogue with the audience as you can see our panelists are incredibly generous all three of them have so generous coming out to UC Riverside and speaking to students but in my own career McDelia when I was a graduate student I sent out a very naive request I thought I was writing about representations of violence and Latino drama and I sent out a call to the Hispanic Arts Foundation the Association of Perspectives of Arts in New York a cold call before the internet to ask playwrights could they contact, would they be interested in my writing about them and McDelia was the first person to contact me and send me her work so it's incredible to have people of such generosity here on this panel to the audience to respond to some of what you've heard but also to ask questions specifically about their work or they're thinking about staging and telling stories in Spain Dr. Wertham Thank you all for the wonderful, wonderful insightful comments Alina I was quite taken I hadn't heard you say this before that you had gone into the so-called mainstream Latino mainstream violence against yourself and I've heard other people responding to that a little bit might you elaborate a little bit on that? Well I feel that it's been interesting throughout the years you know because I spent a greater part of my I think my formative years was the first play that I directed through the company that I co-founded at a Vian theater company which really shadowed the man and I spent well over a decade or more so collaborating with Moragano's plays and it was always interesting to me that during auditions I would have other Latinas or the Chicanas come up to me and ask you know well let me take it back actually even while we were at Stanford there were individuals who were not Latinas Anglo identified and here's who we're trying to authentically but to do justice to the work and they come up to me and be like I want to audition it's a great audition but you may not get the role because we're looking for someone Chicana I think it's a complicated conversation and it's appropriate to have in our day and age because when I was coming of age in theater Latinos were fighting to do Latino roles and then when you know it'd be us looking for peers who are also Chicanas Latinos, those same Latinos would come up to me like why is that important? and I throw back the question does it matter to have a Latino role when there'd be Anglo women vying for the same position and although authenticity is problematic terrain there's something to be said about insight or knowledge and there's something to be said about all those years of auditions and even to recently like trying to cast for our feature film and finding an incredible ally to work opposite I always have to remind people who are playing these roles hey I'm acting too I know I'm the hood and this is a lesbian role but this is still acting and so when I talk about it would have been violence on my own persona is that quite often if you think about the Latino experience in the terrain of American theater we have been asked to be silent or why are you doing Latino theater why do you have to do your identity politics on the stage and so I'm surprised sometimes when Latinos don't extend that kind of experience over to what it means to do queer Chicana theater right and to to be asked to be silent about a part of our experience that is defining because of the kind of society that we live in I mean we've made great strides but I still have people in my very close communities getting killed for who they love or who they sex and so it has been critical to stand on this ground of not internalizing that violent act of silence because in the same way these traumas that we're talking about what the works do in many ways is break the silence and in breaking the silence it is that transgressive part of our art making for me I feel that I really began to understand what it meant to do transgressive art when these experiences which are mine and they're also not mine which I love that we've got it brought up in the fund media because I deal with that too in my fund media especially saying like is that a possible and so and it actually gave me very angry because as soon as I was like I was like I don't think so it's like I'm going to borrow from everything but everything is a composite that the transgressive part in art making in taking these terrible subjects and putting them out of the world publicly turns it into art and the poisons and the toxins that we're supposed to keep and ingest and stay quiet about are actually expelled and they're expelled into art form right so it may have therapeutic effect but I'm not interested in doing therapy with my audience I want to make the best work possible and in making the best work possible whether it's a comedic vein or a combination you take people through a journey so that's why it's always been important to know at an early age in my political consciousness that I could not internalize the fear that others had about what it meant to be I don't mean to be Chicana lesbian in my work and so the reason I said it's important to talk about it because an actor is that even if you think about what's happening now with film when people are demanding we have trans actors or individuals they're not getting those roles I like to think of it in some ways like gentrification in this way because white America has always had this sense of entitlement and it is acting and actors believe we need to embody every role possible white America but white actors have had the opportunities to play anything in everything from historically black face to brown face to yellow face which is brown face to yellow face and it's a gentrification of our roles of our experiences and like gentrification it doesn't work the other way around there was the colorblind era of the 90s and that had its issues but more often than not you're not going to take a I know that if I want to play a head role because politically it's been important to me I have to write it and play and prove yet again that no this is acting I have no interest in playing a head role but so I think that it's bothered for how we think about whether violence is part of the story and then also what happens to get those stories reduced and then when I see her there's this play Salt that I had an opportunity to do out of a stand-up regard and I think it's an incredible play and I wish it would get a professional production but I feel that because she's so great in the topics and where she goes with the stories that she's telling there's still fear around that about seeing ourselves even in this playground where we're supposed to be cathartic we're supposed to walk away from it and so there's a I feel that there's a consistent violence down to writers who are willing to not play a safe and so that's the challenge I would throw back to letting out the air and the communities is like how do you really support on a professional level these artists who are pushing the ground I want to bring up Marisa are you here on Marisa? Is that you here? Do you want to ask her questions? We were talking earlier we had the pleasure with Magdalen and I to talk with Marisa and just to segue from Alina's commentary a minute ago she asked you know we hear so many stories of violence through journalism, through media you know we experience in our own families the question that she asked that I want to cause it to Magdalen is why go to the theater to engage in stories of violence when you know plays about violence that we're already speaking in why would you choose to go to the theater to engage in stories of violence rather than escape from stories of violence? I think I already touched on that I think we're not writing just about violence obviously I think if it's artistic then it's about healing so the question is as an audience member do you want to just escape do you actually want to have an internal deep and visceral experience and with any artist we always want you to have a visceral experience we don't want to just entertain you and some people just want to entertain but when we have difficult journeys I don't know saying she doesn't like to talk after her plays because she feels like she already showed that I was through that too I feel like I would show to you why do you want to see my face? you already saw that thing why do you want to see this weird little face? and I think sometimes people are when I was at Sundance the first time I was playing one of my first plays called Lillian which is about a girl who gets pregnant when she's a teenager and the father of the baby is a junkie that dies in her arms and it's about her journey into poverty trying to keep this baby alive and then we have to question is the baby even alive what is she keeping in this box that she's putting all this love into so I went to Sundance with this play and so I met my director there for the first time he was a very nice white man and he met me and he was like are you a big doc? and he made a joke I thought she'd be wearing leather and I was like well I love the knife in my luggage and I don't fit into my leather jacket anymore so he just looked at me like are you serious? she had a knife and I was like what are you talking about? he said well you write such violent visceral images and there's so much visceral language in your play I just I didn't expect you to look like a nice you just look like a nice what? you didn't think I was going to be a nice person I would write about not nice but it infuriated me because I'm writing so directly especially that time when I was a young writer so directly about what sort of what kind of fucked up language and world is in a world that they don't see that it's as if you were afraid to meet Shakespeare because you wrote this play about a guy who kills his father so that guy was always that poison on it's like nobody says that it's fiction and it's poetry and it's the retelling of stories that are universal stories and so that was the point so what Mati was saying that she often felt that when we talk about violence that we're getting reduced to that type is it reductive to show these stories of violence and for me it's set out to write a story of violence I write characters and they happen to have sometimes they don't have that violent background but sometimes they do and why it's important to see that if you see it every day in your everyday life in the media all the time you live in a violent world it's because we cannot not face our own truths all the time and as artists we're sort of that's sort of our what's that word to really write those stories that tells the truth about our experience on this planet and as soon as we start writing entertainment it ain't that entertaining really and it's also the kind of thing that you can go and see and you're like okay I'm going to have to eat afterwards you had no experience you didn't really live and breathe from your actors you didn't really live and breathe with the language and you didn't allow yourself that moment of recognition that I was on stage oh I understand that oh that's why I do that oh that was my mother and it breaks down it's not about gender or ethnicity it really is about are we ready to prepare to enter a world fully as human beings and take a human journey and all of us have incredible human journeys and we need to tell those stories and it's important to tell them because we want to be identified as you know we are the violent peoples and we are that's why I'm supposed to be caring and I was like I should have recognized because apparently then I'm legitimate then I'm really ready to write the story because I am that story in every minute of every day and we're not because we're human beings and we actually like to laugh and like to dance and like to have fun or you dress too brightly for like normal people it's like that's not necessarily Latino I know lots of Latinos who love to wear black so why why is there this urge to define us all the time the definition it will always separate you it will keep us separate as people and that's why you keep thinking I have lots of friends who are like oh it's such a multi-country world and we're all it's like really is it it's such a beautiful dream and for me it's always going to be a dream and I also I really appreciate my friends who are different from me I like hanging out with you know hearing another story and you know another story I'm sorry it sounds fantastic but it's also a story that's familiar to me I grew up in the Bronx in the 70s and it was nothing but games and it was always you know and um so you understand and then the police would question every trust and we still don't and yet we have police in our families so what's my point my point is you can't say we can't do those stories in violence we need to do the stories that move us we happen to be ones that have hopes for violent journeys but why do they become why do you see them mostly on those stages maybe because they're dramatic like animal like Macbeth like Medea like you know it's like theater is dramatic otherwise it's boring or it's entertaining and I think I think one of the things that theater does and maybe one theater in looking at the theme of violence have such a symbiosis is um violence takes away our ability to be present and have voice and the theater is completely about making us present with the actors and about our coming into voice we can deliberate the story but also our experiencing the storytelling and that we see ourselves on stage we leave the public forum that we're able to talk about it so I think right there's something very organic there on an almost dramatic and I just want to add that um I gravitate towards theater precisely because of what the media says about us because they're not giving us the full story for the complexity they are giving us judgment like you said there's another violence for us in the neighborhood but it seems to be sound rights and I find that when I come and experience and witness these works where my is on display then it becomes what I think I would say the violence is there working usually is that moving those scenes along and the trauma of the character working but you get character you know and you get these other sides of our peoples that a new spice is not going to give me or even an article of the paper so I feel like it's the antidote to everything else that's in the cyber sphere blocker sphere whatever whatever that sphere is called I definitely want to piggyback and confirm everything that they just said and um it is one of those things to where even you know with our piece it opens up that dialogue and allows us to have a conversation to say this is happening you know with Kirby often times he'll say you know when he was writing the plays how do you get someone to sit for an hour and just keep hitting the head with another gunshot another gunshot another gunshot and it's consistently going but it's one of those things to where as she said the media when they covered the story even the officer that reached out to Kirby he said well I hope you know playwright did his research and mentions that the girl had GHP in her system and that she was a member of the gang and it's that even if we look at the stories that are projected now in the media with you know the Ferguson incident Trayvon Martin's and endless other stories they try to attack the character of that person as it is to validate why they are going like they're going because he was messing up in school and because he was smoking weed and he's going because he just shot lifted it so he deserves to be gone and Tyisha Miller deserved to be dead because she had guns in her trunk she had a gun in her lap well the gun was an outlaw and the beauty of the piece and presenting it in theater is to allow the audience and whoever that has never heard this story before sit and understand like this is just a human being and if someone would have taken a moment to just stop and think for a minute that person possibly could still be here and they could contribute something to this society and so again it's more about you know the media only gives you what they want to give you whereas with theater we have the opportunity as artists to express that there's more to the story there's another side and to open up that dialogue with only we did this play in Poland and you know we thought oh there might be a language barrier you know they got the only thing that they might have missed was riverside references or American culture things that are embedded within our society but other than that they understood the story because of the music and they gravitated towards it they knew like as soon as we got off stage and started to have these conversations the story started to clear up hey I live in this area over here and we just experienced this many deaths and we had this relationship with the police and so it's this universal thing to where it's like okay now we're bonding because you're dealing with the same thing I'm dealing with and vice versa for people that may live in a bubble because everybody may not watch the news and feel comfortable because they live in an isolated area if it's happening over there it doesn't apply to me but with theaters we're able to say hey this is happening regardless if you know it or not if you want to pay attention to it or not listen if you want to contribute so be it but now you are aware of what's happening I want to say too I don't want to forget that because even when the plays are hard one of the strategies that I know I personally love in other ways do it too there's a lot of comedic medicina in our violence as well and I remember talking about this the last time how critical it is to have the cartajales and the humor right because nobody's here writing just this dirt because that's bad writing you know you're just going one intense tone like if you become totally deaf then to what's happening on the stage so you do use these strategies as writers and as performers when is the moment of respite so the audience can just laugh and open up for a moment and then you take them back in so there's also all kinds of writing styles to address these issues of survival it's just also love comedy in a theater you get to breathe with actors when you take that breath and you take that moment to think about what you're seeing to think about what you're experiencing to think about the things you need to fix for yourself and know that you're not alone because you've actually breathed in another world and it actually becomes part of your own that's so different than reading something in a newspaper because whatever they say in a newspaper you can always burn a newspaper although there are some theaters that have been burned but you're probably not going to get up and throw a match at that particular production um, yeah well I like some kind of what I think comedy is it's interesting you know we talk about violence and video your birth is violent I mean it's very traumatic right and like before a flower blooms it's like everything's right and I think when the work that I've seen here when there's violence or whatever there is we get to see a little bit of the boom and we get to see a little bit of the birth and the possibilities of what comes from the violence and the beautiful parts that can happen I mean the Recurby piece the Dreamscape of Thought I mean I think it was amazing because I got to see possibility and the violence and when these tragic things happen and I think it's important to give that possibility or you know you know what I mean in that way and I just it's just this like I think that's saying it's just not just that there's that bloom or the possibility of that bloom and I think that's what makes comedy a theater because if not then we're not going to want to go to theater right and how that's part of that bloom it's part of the work and so I think it's important that theaters that we kind of at least offer that kind of thing and Adelina you're awesome man I can't see because of the loose I recognize it's true man hey I mean I am not a queer Chicana but I love your shit I think it's great that it's really doing Dilo right she's awesome but you know that's all but you know what I'm saying it's like it's human you know what I'm saying and I think that's why we go to theater to get a human experience you know because we see you we see your face and we could put a face on whatever the news puts on it and we actually get to see it well thank you I'm offended your solo works Tony I want to make a comment maybe I should respond to it so I was thinking about how violence in mainstream is a lot gratuitous you can put a parentino and I don't hear the same criticism about him portraying us some people actually think it's artistic but it seems like what I'm walking away from this conversation is that when violence is when violence by the the dominant culture against us is being portrayed there's a lot less sensitivity about it right it's almost funny it's almost entertaining it has really very little effect however it seems like you're doing it portrayed on our stage is that we're portraying violence against ourselves as well as being committed against ourselves and it seems to me that by doing that you actually give a face to ourselves as portrayed as violence and victims of violence but it seems like there's a disconnect and imbalance of those in power the powerful committing violence against the powerless is misdual it doesn't mean anything it is only when we take it into our hands we have faces that we then are able to respond to and yet have barces but then if we're waiting for that to happen with the dominant culture it doesn't and yet when we portray it there's a criticism of you're only portraying that life can you respond to that? you go I gotta take one more sorry can you just repeat the last part so what's the question is about just to paraphrase it my understanding is we're almost going to catch 22 and then when the dominant culture like Quentin Tarantino engages in an ascetics of violence it's celebrated and the dominant culture will more featured as part of stories of violence we're put in a box it's often through stereotypes in our own theaters that's where we get to really show the complexities of it we're not just perpetrators of violence we're a victim of violence violence is a very complicated part of just the complex story but how do we grapple with the fact that it's really in our theaters that we get to put a complex space on it but the risk is that we're going to be read as reductively focusing on stories grounded around the issues of violence that can be reductively read rather than broadly read like what McDowley was saying look, there's violence in it but this is a play about love so the question is there is a question I was asking for a response part of the question is exactly that when we portray a piece not only of us as being victims of violence but also perpetrators of violence there are the what do we think we've been talking about through this whole that's been people keep raising the question of identity and why we're still in the inner identity I think we are in two businesses here we are in the memory business and we are in the identity business and so by putting those spaces what you're doing you put a face on them and I think that is harder for the dominant for those in power and I say dominant but it's the power when those in power then violence against those without power it's so much easier when we are faceless and by giving us a face there is an element I think that you challenged that and I'm asking is that something you can respond to is that something part of the 10th part of the result part of the process I think it's a little bit of everything dealing with hip-hop culture when you examine hip-hop I was sharing an earlier one before this started how you look at earlier stages of hip-hop I was very revolutionary and you wanted to you know everybody wanted to step against what was happening to the powers that be and you know let's fight the power different things that I mentioned and you had artists like NWA who came out and when you look at them for face values like oh here are these criminals or dogs or carrying guns but if you're listening to what they're saying it's like this is what's happening in our neighborhood you guys are forgetting about us we're coming from cops perpetuating the violence but at that time it was like listen this is what they're doing to us this is how we're being marginalized they're just trying to put us here but we're bigger than that and then all of a sudden once they start making ruckus and people start paying attention and all of a sudden they were threatened and they were on FBI's most wonderful this is what it is I hate the fact that hip-hop has turned into one of those things to where it went from being let's stand up against the power and let's try to make a change within ourselves and uplift to now it's one of those things to where you have youth and people that are looking at it and trying to emulate those things in a negative sense there is no more value within women there's no more value within community that's being said or being commercialized it's almost like they fail for debate to where you have artists now let's just go out and party and do this it's okay to kill somebody it's okay to do this it's wrong, personally I don't agree with it I personally don't even really listen to hip-hop music but it is one of those things to where hopefully I'm answering your question it is one of those things that does need a response and you do need to at least acknowledge it because with hip-hop it has the power to cross over those bounds with our piece we get the question asked is there a reason why I portrayed the officer when clearly he wasn't of color? once you do that and take away if I were white playing this part it then becomes about white men killing black people versus power against power the very first play that we did the very first performance that we did was in my hometown of Pomona a very diverse crowd when we got through with the play the emotion that arose in the audience which was very diverse you had Latinos, you had blacks you had whites, you had Asian everybody stood up and talked about their experience and needless to say it's not just white killing black it's everybody the issue at hand is how do we get it to stop how do we get it to stop so presenting that we presented in the best way possible with the play and again taking you on that journey to where you can see the life of this character but it's bigger than that how do we get that issue to stop hopefully that it comes back to the earlier comment about the things that are most culturally specific are the things that allow us to really press on the universal question or problem and I think also in white theater mainstream theater there is always but with my plays there is a certain kind of energy and darkness that is really scary to most people so I feel most of those people but I feel like when my play is presented in the Latino theater with the Latino audience with the Latino cast the same questions don't come up about why I'm writing this did I do a good job did I portray those people honestly did I find the beauty in the darkness whereas when it goes outside of our community there is this feeling that you're supposed to defend what you're doing and it's a difficult thing to deal with on a daily basis because it can make you stop performing it can make you stop going into theater you're like they don't get it and I'm never going to be paid enough to do it for fun because it's not what excites me as an artist I don't want to just write for money I actually want to actually I feel like I want to write poetry in the theater and I want it to be about people who don't normally have voices in the theater and that becomes sort of why you do it that doesn't mean that I expect that it's going to get done someplace else I was also going to say that I'm really glad that you brought up the comment about memory and identity because I don't get caught up with people who say they're overidentity politics precisely because of the specificity precisely because identity is tied to memoria so when I identify as Koji Kana I might also culturally attaching myself to memoria that has not been necessarily presented on stage and that part of my agenda have an agenda is to make memory make visible what has been forgotten by others in my community so they're interwoven in such a way and I I think that the whole idea of identity politics or devices that's coming from the hegemonic culture who would have us without identity so we can assimilate and then attach ourselves to white America's memory but good thing about memoria and I love I mean she has memoria and I want to be respectfully present in the memories of other identities and that's coming from a place you know how to issue any kind of imperialistic impulse to come into our our stories in our theaters and be okay not knowing be okay not being in the center of the knowledge base you know and so of course that's what we should be doing and I agree in one and echoing Daria that at some point I think years ago I just not that I stopped caring about what people were going to say because I've had some people be very angry with me because I use the word hoot then and reclaim violent language as a queer and they don't understand it so I have to call yourself that because I am very good at it thank you and those acts of reclamation are part of the part of the work and then my job again was not to worry so much about the critics about the content but I'm listening you know I have my condo of artists and people whose opinions I care about and the form and the artistry behind it so it's kind of a way where you filter I have a good question for the gentleman you said you made a statement saying that Quentin Tarantino gets praised I kind of think it's sometimes criticized the most obviously he's gotten well that's what I I personally do appreciate most of his work just recently I know the movie which was kind of like one of those things that it was Daring which I mean as I said it was very Daring I don't know I think I appreciate more or less him presenting that did I defend it? Not necessarily because I've been going back to that identity I don't identify with that you know he used the n-word probably a million times in that movie but it's the way that I look at it but it was something that happened it was a part of history and a part of the memory should it be relived no but I don't I mean I don't feel as though that he necessarily gets praised more than other playwrights or directors or anything we are we're on our last minute to have a closing comments or a question for the panelists just Stephanie I wanted to ask you specifically about staging these works that are sometimes it's mostly about I don't think these papers are sometimes implicitly because everybody you don't set out to write stories about it is just a high bid that it's like an undercurrent to be and also to try and better at these people performance or two people performance like these are times where people guys want to be dreamsy and a lot of the times we see this sort of nice bare blown staging so I want to ask us playwrights, theater makers and actors what goes into the process and decisions to have a very specifically only having a certain thing on the stage I'll start answering that one of the most important things I learned at my time in San Francisco Muraga was a concept of body as text so as a solo performer and even in two person shows when I'm conceptualizing staging where I'm working with the director it's our bodies that matter when you see someone walk on to the stage we're reading that body in Soria so it becomes very mindful as well when you decide what props are going to be on stage so let's that girl who is my dominatrix character in the Osecona series well she's a chicanagaptic dominatrix talk about identities a lot and she brings out this whip at some point it's purposeful because there's a history of violence attached to a whip and so there's this character then making a choice to with permission to create violence and then to also have violence put on herself so I think that with every performance or every play you're making decisions about what images are going to be there and of course the directors come in and interpret it as designers and do things differently I know that I've tried to be very aware of anything put on stage is going to form a performative act so even a piece of paper that you leave on the side I'm going to look at it all of a sudden if it's on stage it has a purpose it's something great about doing is that you have an opportunity because it's not film where the camera focuses in and comes in almost extremely close up you have an opportunity to ask your audience look at this, look at this and it's something that can begin to carry symbolic weight as the story develops so for me the choices are always connected to what's the story about and what are the visual cues to either help move the story along or to give you information about the character same thing with Dreamscape two chairs, two bodies as she said anything we're curvy anything, any type of movement anything on stage has to have a purpose and to have two chairs and just two individuals on stage is talking about someone being shot to death if I'm a firm believer that your idea of life shouldn't be an idea that somebody gives to you it should be your own idea so to see something you should create it in your own mind so to see just those two chairs and to be told the story begin to become more about what the story is versus like she said the props so we have a prop car that was there a telephone prop and I have a prop gun it becomes more about how that telephone prop doesn't look like a telephone the car doesn't and that becomes even more powerful because again it's that's your vision of what it is and again it's more about the story and the sounds and then taking on this journey about this girl's life versus what you're actually seeing I think as a writer I always choose specific shadow for my teacher you choose specific objects that identify the character and that's the only thing that you really need to put in your play you should write novels it's nature is way too long I thought it was a bad play writer but she would say if it doesn't have to be then don't put it in because what you want to show in your text is exactly the important stuff and the other stuff is all cream on it it's how great your directors are what your lighting one of the best productions I've ever had was a crazy lighting director I had a lighting designer in Greece who was a hermit at it it was the most beautiful lighting I've ever seen it was so hygienic I was like it's terrible that he's a hermit but he was such an amazing lighting designer and I thought what happens in people's minds that was the stage it was these lights it was so beautiful and it was in greek side it was revelatory what you could do with design so I think as a writer and performing when you want to have your indicative objects but you really don't need that much more when the actor is really present and the text is really present and the audience is really listening thank you so much before we leave I want to send out a virtual shout out and hello to Luis Alfaro who was not able to make this panel today because of a missed flight coming back from Chicago but you've been here with us during the conversation in spirit and I would like to thank our panelists and to thank you as an audience for an incredible conversation and thank you so much thank you