Highways Latinx 4X4 2017

4 New Works by 4 Los Angeles-based Latinx Artists, curated & hosted by Corky Dominguez.

–

In Miriam Peniche‘s solo performance “Stripped,” a woman’s journey through death and heartbreak force her to uncover the strength within, laugh through the hardships, and strip down to her true self.

Julieta Garza & Comfort/Disturb‘s “The Journey: Surviving Tales of the Disturbed” is an ensemble, movement piece with dance, gesture choreography, spoken word, clown, poetry, color, shapes, music, and silence! It highlights stories of Immigration, Gentrification, Community, and the invasion of Community and body.

Playwright and actor Marcos Nájera‘s “Fully Compatible with Google Cardboard” is a short, non-traditional performance art infused story. Najera tells the story of Mark, a 40-something gay, Latino man searching for loving sex in an unkind world.  Growing tired for reality, he reaches into the space of the virtual.  Can Mark make a go with a digital man in a cyber land instead?  The audience is invited to take a chair anywhere in the play space and turn their bodies to pick any view at anytime of the story unfolding before their eyes in real time.  Or is it?

Joe Luis Cedillo & Company of Strangers‘ “Prog/Prot/Palabra” is a Chicano@ Street Fable featuring beats by Anthony Valdez. “What’s the word from the Resistance?” Messiahs of the Marches bring Messages of the Movement in an interactive/movement based Teatro piece.

This event is made possible in part by the City of Santa Monica Latino CAP Grant Program, a project of the Santa Monica Arts Commission.

_

Corky Dominguez has over thirty years theatrical experience as a producer, director, choreographer, performer and educator. Solo/Performance Art work include: Good Seed/Bad Seed, My Alien Abduction, Weapon of Mass Destruction, Welcome To The Village of Robbins, Salvadorian Moon/African Sky, Voices from the Holy & Not So Holy Land, and Super-Chingona. Devised Ensemble pieces include: White Boy, Delicious Reality, Global Taxi workshop and This Land performed in Scotland & London. Corky has extensive mask work and has studied masks in Italy.

Miriam Peniche is an original founding member of P.M.S. (The Pinche Mentirosa Sisters) and was an original cast member in Los Angeles’ first production of Real Women Have Curves in 1998. Other shows at CASA 0101: P.M.S. (Pinche Mentirosa Sisters)’s Blind, Deaf & Dumb Dating and Kiss My Mistletoe, La Ofrenda, El Verde, Documenting the Undocumented, Simply Maria or the American Dream, Confessions of Women from Boyle Heights, P.M.S.: Toxic Shock Media, Hoop Girls, Tamales de Puerco and Teatro Moz. She has also done several productions with East Los Angeles Rep including Black Butterfly… and The House of Bernarda Alba. Miriam is the other half of The Girls Productions, which produced her first solo show at CASA 0101 Theater. You can see Miriam in the award winning web series Police Chicks, No Kids No Cry and Fixing Paco alongside comedian Paul Rodriguez.

Comfort/Disturb is a Performance Art Collective seeks to comfort the disturbed, and to disturb those comfortable. “The Journey: Surviving Tales of the Disturbed” is directed by Julieta Garza and Rosa Navarrete, and created by the ensemble: Sujey Gonzalez, Jasmin Iraheta, Suzanne Linares, Beatriz Eugenia Vasquez, Maia Villa, Rosa Navarrete, and Julieta Garza. Song and sound by: J.D. Mata.

Marcos Nájera is a hybrid storyteller: actor/director/journalist. A recipient of CTG’s Dana Fellowship and an Oregon Shakespeare Festival Directing Assistantship, he’s a rebel performance artist for Guillermo Gomez Peña’s La Pocha Nostra troupe and a long time artistic associate of playwright Anna Deavere Smith. He describes himself artistically as Marcos Deavere Peña: the imagined bastard offspring of Gomez-Peña and Smith.  His one-man show about mental health in communities of color is called Neuroplasticity: The Brown Brain. As a reporter, he’s filed stories for NPR, the BBC, CNN and NPR’s Latino USA.  You can hear him these days on KPCC’s (NPR Los Angeles) daily arts show called The Frame as well as the upcoming podcasts for the new PBS documentary chronicling the life of the Brown Buffalo: Oscar Zeta Acosta.  Twitter: @mnfamous / Instagram: @mnfam0us

Joe Luis Cedillo is a Chicano Playwright-Director & Dramaturg who has been part of BLPC for a decade.  He’s been a member of Iowa’s Playwrights’ Workshop, directed numerous works site-specifically, and served his country as a Marine.  Recent credits include being an actor and director for the Every 28 Hours theater project, acting in Henry Ong’s site-specific adaptation of the Chinese epic Dream of a Red Chamber, and being the Director-Dramaturg for Watts Village Theatre Company’s performance-reading of Lynn Manning’s Ochre & Onyx in Boyle Heights’s area libraries in Los Angeles.  He’ll next be directing a reading of his pilot for a new crime drama, Sweet Palms, and a workshop production of 7 Days: A Fantasia on the Life of Miles Davis in Watts this Fall.  He is Artistic Director for Company of Strangers.  FB under his full name, Twitter: @JoeLuisCedillo / Instagram: joeluiscedillo