rasgos asiaticos
May 19, 2024
Automata welcomes A Todo Dar productions for the LA Premiere of rasgos asiáticos, a new performance installation written by Virginia Grise and created in collaboration with scenic designer Tanya Orellana. rasgos asiáticos explores the fluidity of borders and unearths hidden histories in the historic confluence of China, Mexico, and the United States. Told through a series of inherited stories, fragmented memories and recurring dreams, rasgos asiáticos is created as a space for personal and political excavation.
rasgos asiáticos is a walk-through installation-performance, presented outdoors on the pedestrian plazas of Chung King Road in Los Angeles' Chinatown. Audiences will travel in small groups to six multi-sensory installations that explore narratives of immigration and migration in the US-Mexico borderlands. Viewers will step in and out of Tanya Orellana's visually compelling installations, housed in large shipping crates containing music and text narrated by Marlene Beltran, Lydia Jialu Li 黎珈璐, Elena Campbell-Martínez, Ofelia Esparza, Feng-Feng Yeh and Virginia Grise, played on record players,. Lighting design is by Scott Bolman and soundscapes by Daniel Gower. The final scene takes place inside Automata, facing the koi pond on Chung King Court.
“The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first immigration policy in the United States to target a group by nationality, effectively pushing many Chinese into Mexico,” notes writer Virginia Grise, whose family traveled from Canton, China to Tampico, Mexico to Monterrey, Mexico, where they worked as fruit and vegetable merchants.
“For the Los Angeles production, we chose to create a series of installations in Chung King Court to honor that history, and also because LA’s current Chinatown was created after the original community was demolished for Union Station. Throughout the text of rasgos asiáticos there is this longing for something that no longer exists, something far away. How do you make home in a place that does not want you?” (Grise)
TICKETS Admission is pay-what-you-can.
May 19 at 2 PM
May 19 at 6 PM
May 19 at 8 PM
This intimate experience limits the number of tickets available.
About the Artists:
Virginia Grise is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), and The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press). Her interdisciplinary body of work includes plays, multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site-specific interventions, and community gatherings. She is a founding member of a todo dar productions and has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Matakyev Research Fellow for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, a Jerome Fellow at the Playwright’s Center, and the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre.
Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons and in the juvenile
correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.
Tanya Orellana designs performance spaces for theatre and opera. Originally from San Francisco, she has been a core member of the award-winning ensemble Campo Santo since 2008, participating in their intimate new work process, conceptualizing and designing sets alongside the writing process. Her design collaborations include The Industry’s Sweet Land, a world premiere opera directed by Yuval Sharon and Cannupa Hanska Luger at L.A. State Historic Park, the world premiere of The Heath, by Lauren Gunderson directed by Sean Daniels at Merrimack Repertory Theatre (Lowell, MA), the Mexico premiere of Angels in America directed by Martín Acosta at Teatro Juan Ruiz de Alarcón (Mexico City), Native Gardens by Karen Zacarias directed by Rebecca Rivas at TheatreSquared (Arkansas), Casa de Spirits written and directed by Roger Guenveur Smith at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum (San Francisco, CA).
Tanya received her MFA in Scenic Design from CalArts and is the 2016 recipient of the Princess Grace Fabergé Theatre Award. Her design work on Angels in America was presented in the US Emerging Designers Exhibit at the Prague Quadrennial 2019. She is an organizing member of La Gente: The Latinx Theatre Design Network.
Megan E Carter is an independent creative producer and consultant who has worked on theatrical projects all over the world. She has developed and/or produced devised ensemble work with Ripe Time, Lear deBessonet, SITI Company, Palissimo, and the Rude Mechs; new plays by Liz Duffy Adams, Sheila Callaghan, Virginia Grise, Dominique Morisseau, and Catherine Trieschmann, among others; and dramaturged the American Premiere of Jackie by Elfriede Jelinek, directed by Tea Alagic. She believes in audiences as collaborators and revels in work that is formally innovative, intellectually rigorous, and subversively joyous. Megan has been happily working with Virginia Grise since 2012.
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rasgos asiáticos is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by CalArts Center for New Performance, DiverseWorks in partnership with MECA Houston, Performance in the Borderlands, Fulcrum Theater, and NPN with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. rasgos asiáticos was also created with support from the MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NALAC, Soho Rep Theater’s Writer/Director Lab; and Pregones Theater’s Asuncion Award for Queer Playwriting.