A Laundry List
I’ve decided to start cultivating a public project journal. What does that mean? It means that I will attempt to update this blog more often with any thoughts, ruminations, or progress I have with all my project ideas. I’m doing this for two reasons: to hold myself accountable for committing to my project ideas and seeing them through the end, and to have an archive of my past thinking on some of my work that I can refer to in the future. Don’t expect any fancy, engaging, or even coherent writing since this space will need to be dry and technical sometimes. Or maybe even spiritual. Idk, I have a parenthesis in my artist name, I’ll let that vibe do the talking.
There’s several projects that I’ve been obsessing about, that I’m having trouble seeing through. Here’s a (shorter, curated) list:
Every Room is a Pluto Room: It’s a play about a Church of Loneliness in a dystopian world where people are placed into a caste system based on their desirability. It’s hard to write this project because I’m trying to lean on perspectives I don’t have. There’s an asexual character, for example, and I am so sexual in my private life that I really want to find an ace collaborator who can offer some perspective and really make sure that this character is being represented in a complex fashion. It’s not an experience that I relate to, so all the more reason to try to do things responsibly. But beyond that, the desirability politics in question force me to address colorism and fatphobia in ways that make it hard to write in a “neutral” manner. It’s hard to write a character without knowing what they truly look like, especially given the subject matter, so I’m going to have to make a lot of choices about who these people are. Wish I had funding to assemble a group of collaborators for this. For now, I just need to write the play, and then think about the rest later. I’m about 30 pages in still. Received residency support from Almanac Dance Circus Theatre.
the [cod] and the ]catfish[: Working title, I think. Digital media project that culminates in a theatrical performance. It’s a fictional message board narrative where an audience learns about a community of people who are all secretly catfishing each other. I think there’s a spirit that inhabits the internet, and lures audience members (and catfishers) to the community by a weird viral email link. The spirit compels them to meet each other. It’s based on a lot of personal experiences I had catfishing as a teenager. It’s a tough project because it requires me to learn skills I don’t have, and I’ve been contemplating going to a coding bootcamp so I can be able to implement it. There’s a lot of stuff in this idea about trans identity as well – some trans people find themselves by putting on their parents’ clothing, and others create an avatar and a username. Felt like this idea was too hard to pull off, but an assignment I received from Theatre Philadelphia’s Content + Criticism Cohort inspired me to pursue it (albeit slowly).
can I please have a Turner Prize so I can stop trying to kill myself?: Abbreviated as a Turner Prize, this play is written in collaboration with generative AI services such as ChatGPT. Very much based in a lot of the debate surrounding AI art, but also rooted in some very personal struggles with ambition, tokenization, and competition. I see a silhouette of a main character: a neurotic, non-binary Latinx artist person who constantly wants to kill themselves because they don’t get high-paying gigs or awards. They discover an AI technology that makes their art and submits applications for them, and it ends up being more successful than the artists’ actual work. The AI has something it wants to teach them, or it breaks through the reality of the play in a strange way. This person reminds me of a lot of community organizers/culture workers/artists that I know, including myself. There’s a constant intensity they have, and they’re the type of person who blurts out a lot of word vomit surrounding very heavy subjects like decolonization or leftist politics or appropriation - even at parties. This is all I know about them: that they spend the majority of the play in spiritual pain. For some reason, the video game Cruelty Squad keeps coming to mind when I think about this play. I really don’t want this to be a self-indulgent sob story about an artist who can’t find work, but maybe there’s a way to use that fear in my favor.
Pase Lo Que Pase (I Will Always Find You): Still looking for development opportunities for this one. It’s a bilingual horror play I wrote when I was living in Colombia. I received development support through readings with PlayPenn in Philly and The Sol Project in NYC, and now I’m looking for some alternative art spaces that might give this project some help. This project has some strong video design elements that really need to be implemented, and I’ve been applying for a few residencies to help manifest that reality. I also really want to have a community-driven dramaturgy session with Honduran people who can help shape the work. A lot of it is related to the 2008 coup in Honduras, and I really want to make sure I do right by their struggle, since so much of what happened over there is unheard of by Americans. The map images in this blog are actually from some experimentation for the project using DALL-E. (Disclaimer: I don’t care if you judge me for using DALL-E. But if you’re interested, the prompt I used was: “a horrifying map with eyes and mouths on top of it that is ever-expanding and decaying and has no limits.”)
A lot of these ideas are tough to implement, but my hope is that by creating this journal, it’ll become a ball of energy that can be utilized for later. I was inspired to start this by a choreographer named Meg Foley, who I’m working with at the Painted Bride right now. There’s also this quote by adrienne maree brown that explains some of my intentions: “What you pay attention to grows.”