Storytelling is a dreaming art: My Artist Statement

I believe that the theatre artist is the sacred story teller of the modern, urban world. Throughout human history, fraught with distraction, confusion, shared pains and joys, the story teller has been there to unite the people in their commonalities and help them to make sense of their experiences, giving them a necessary release, a larger or fresh perspective, or perhaps just new energy to return to the struggles of their daily lives. I want to be the kind of story teller that doesn’t have to solely rely on words and linear storylines, the kind that can pull threads of universal truth from the collective unconscious and weave them together with personal experience and insight, then let them go and invite the audience into the work through their own imaginations and experiences. I come from a family of story tellers from Mexico, who in the midst of strife took time to play the accordion or talk to the birds. At the same time, I grew up in the midst of American culture, where people often feel isolated and quietly resigned to a pace of living that leaves little time for reflection and whimsy. It’s been my choice, and perhaps the responsibility of the artist, to walk a more sensitized path. The ‘real world’ can be a disheartening kind of place, but under its sometimes distracting façade is the thread of odd beauties, tiny joys, harrowing sorrows, and quiet longings that weave the fabric of the shared dreaming we call reality. It is exactly this kind of dreaming that my work aims to magnify, deconstruct, fantasticalize, romanticize, sympathize with, and filter through the lens of specificity, personal revelation, and a resigned sense of humor about the absurdity of it all. If by living fully in some minute detail of our human condition and its fragilities on stage, someone somewhere feels less alone in her or his struggle, and can momentarily sit back and laugh at our folly, then my artistic integrity will be satisfied. If in the shared power of the dark, we can dream some kind of whimsical dream, or perhaps cry for our secret hopes unrealized, and walk back into our lives a little lighter, then I will have begun to live up to the respect I have for the healing power of the theatre. If through honesty, vulnerability and the careful interplay of sound, image, pacing, poetry, story, laughter, and silence I can take the audience on a journey with me, wherein they may find something for themselves, then I will have make my small contribution to the fine art and lineage known as storytelling. I have been called a stubborn, impractical, even innocent idealist, a disheartened romantic, and a hopeless dreamer. I would like to celebrate those parts in all of us, in all their frailty and sweetness. I would like to add a little more dreaming into life, to balance the ‘realism’ we have no choice but to face every day. In service of that I will continue to employ surrealism, theatrical clowning, butoh dance, moments of nostalgia, music, stylistic boldness, verbal nonsense that disorients reason, ridiculousness, absurdity, relentless emotional one-track-mindedness, escapism, beauty, and raw truth confused by too many perspectives, as my major influences. And I will try to keep it simple, relying more on imagination than fancy technologies, and leaving some things unsaid, for the audience to fill in. I am still essentially an only child growing up half in an imaginary landscape, creating whole worlds out of a few articles of clothing, an interesting stick I found, and a good fairy tale. I want to stay true to that kind of suspension of disbelief, to remind us of the human truth that we are all playing a kind of game here, one in which we have invested our lives.

If I have any major intention as an artist, it is to take people into the dark, quiet space of the theatre and invite them to dream, to remember and acknowledge the most innocent and vulnerable parts of themselves, to laugh together at our follies, share our common pains and disappointments, to recall the logic of seers of the past, the ones who knew how to shift the unconscious with a carefully crafted gesture or word, and through all this to somehow lighten the burdens we carry and give them meaning