winter 2014
12
FROM LEFT
courtesy of jerónimo rajchenberg
Mexico City native Jxel Rajchenberg (left) performing alongside fellow CalArtians Javad Butah (Music mfa 12) and Saba Alizadeh (Music mfa 13) in The Land Trio. cap student Alejandro Lechuga in Lola in Lincolnlandia, collectively created by students in the cap/ Plaza de la Raza Youth Theater Program with guest playwright Laurie Woolery. The play was performed at redcat.
Performer-Composer Program DMA candidate, MFA 12 Mexico City musicmaker Jxel Rajchenberg entered CalArtian orbit in 2008 when he was among 10 international performer-composers invited to “co-create” an interactive opera initiated by CalArts music dean David Rosenboom and poet Martine Bellen. Rajchenberg has since earned an mfa degree from The Herb Alpert School of Music and is on his way to a doctorate. “I fell in love with CalArts in the mfa program and wanted more than two years here,” says Rajchenberg, who plays guitar and other plucked string instruments such as charango, coco-banjo and requinto jarocho, and works with more faculty members than seems feasible. Having immersed himself in the world music traditions taught at the school—from Indonesian to Indian, from Persian to Balkan—he is now applying newfound musical concepts to Mexican folk styles such as Son Jarocho. “I describe it as a ‘contemporary synthesis of traditional idioms,’ musical ideas talking to each other,” Rajchenberg says. “When I came to CalArts, I found that I could just be myself, and not pretend,” he recalls. “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.”
collAboRATioN AcRoss boRDeRs Acclaimed for its daring, formally inventive original productions on stages from redcat and the Getty Villa to venues in Europe and Australia, CalArts’ Center for New Performance (cnp) joined with Cultura udg, the University of Guadalajara’s presenting arm, to bring a production of the provocative border-zone drama Timboctou to rapt audiences on both sides of the border in question—at redcat and Teatro Experimental de Jalisco in Guadalajara.
Set against an otherworldly backdrop of drug wars and cross-border politics, Timboctou was written by Veracruz-based emerging playwright Alejandro Ricaño as a macabre tangle of multiple stories, directed with great poise by Mexico City’s Martín Acosta, and realized with a u.s.–Mexican cast and creative team after two years of development on the CalArts campus and in Guadalajara. Performed mostly in Spanish with English supertitles, the multimedia play was presented in association with Duende CalArts, the Institute’s Spanishlanguage theater project. Director Acosta, one of the most imaginative provocateurs of the Mexican stage, offers a telling description of the creative work carried out across the same boundary that plays so prominent a role in Timboctou. He calls the process “a dialogue of gazes between artists from Mexico and the usa—the only way of tearing down walls and crossing rivers and tunnels without visas.”
coMMuNiTy ARTs PARTNeRshiP In 1990, the Institute teamed with two of l.a.’s most revered community mainstays, Plaza de la Raza and the Watts Towers Arts Center, to launch the Community Arts Partnership (cap)—a free youth arts education program that connects a teaching corps composed of CalArts faculty, student instructors and alumni with local organizations in the city’s chronically underserved neighborhoods. In the intervening years, the cap program—now nationally recognized and emulated—has grown throughout the county to offer high-quality arts training via some four dozen community groups, social service agencies and public schools, helping to bolster academic achievement and opening pathways to college during a time when American public education has languished. Nearly a quarter of a million young people between the ages of 10 and 18, with the majority of Mexican and Latin American descent, have studied in cap since its inception. Glenna Avila, cap’s longtime director and now its creative overseer, points out that cap has conducted more arts programs, across a variety of métiers, in collaboration with Plaza de la Raza than with