voces Resonantes
13
FROM LEFT Michael Aurelio (left) and Jeremy Kinser in the world premiere of Timboctou at redcat. A co-production of the CalArts Center for New Performance and the University of Guadalajara, the play written by Alejandro Rincaño and directed by Martín Acosta featured a binational cast and creative team. Virginia Grise’s thesis play blu was produced at CalArts in 2008. Two years later, it received the national Yale Drama Series playwriting prize, among other awards.
any other member of the countywide alliance. The enduring vigor of this partnership lies in “the closely shared vision of placing the students at the center of everything we do,” she explains. “The Youth Theater Program at Plaza, which was our very first program, continues to be, in a way, cap’s flagship,” attests Avila. “We’ve produced 23 original plays, developed each year by the youth participants with a professional playwright. I don’t know of any other program in the country that produces original content that’s not made for kids, but is made by kids.”
Most recently, Grise was among the 10 emerging writers who received the prestigious Whiting Award this year. Though varying in style from one project to the next, the dramatist’s work keeps its focus on “communities in struggle, communities of resistance,” and, in particular, queer women of color. Grise weaves together poetic reveries and passages of whimsy with sober reflections on history, cultural memory, contemporary politics, and lived experience—from her own background in Texas to her time in East l.a.’s Boyle Heights, whose constantly overflying police helicopters serve as a key motif in blu.
“when i came to calArts, i found that i could just be myself, and not pretend. i didn’t have to choose my own little ‘drawer,’ a category to fit into. The funny thing is that, being in contact with so many cultures, i became more interested in my own. so here i am, more Mexican than in Mexico.” — Jerónimo Rajchenberg, Performer-Composer Program DMA candidate, MFA 12
Writing for Performance Program MFA 09 When Vicky Grise’s thesis project, blu, won the 2010 Yale Drama Series playwriting prize, the competition’s judge, Sir David Hare (Plenty), hailed the San Antonio, tx, Chicana as “a blazingly talented writer.” In blu’s setting of evocative magical realism amid gritty scenes of barrio life, the School of Theater alum tells of the “starlit rooftop dreams” of Soledad and her partner, Hailstorm, as they redefine family on their own terms following the death of a son in Iraq—striving, as Grise puts it, “to imagine a time before war.” In his award citation, Hare observed how the “technically expert” drama enlists “a heady mix of Latino and musical influences to cast oblique light on people you don’t usually come across on the Englishspeaking stage.” Grise’s breakout work was published by Yale University Press and, in 2011, received its full professional premiere at Company of Angels in l.a.
Currently a resident artist at the Women’s Project Playwrights Lab in New York, Grise gave up her job as a middle school teacher in order to study at the Institute with then-faculty Carl Hancock Rux. “The CalArts program was the only one in the country for me, in terms of its expanded scope of writing for performance,” Grise recalls, adding that she saw in Rux’s practice of “working across forms and aesthetics,” and in the choices he made in his career trajectory, a professional model that closely matched her own aspirations. “CalArts made my career; I became the artist I am today because of the training I got there,” Grise says. “But it’s also true that I graduated with an incredible amount of debt, which makes life very difficult after school—and I say this as an artist who already has had success. If there aren’t higher levels of financial support, our schools will educate only an elite class of people working in elite art forms, and we need to hear other kinds of stories—a diversity of stories being told by a diversity of people.”