| Thomas lives just down the street from Casa Marianella, a shelter for recently arrived immigrants, predominantly asylees, that have recently been released from detention. He’s been involved over there for the past three years helping folks transition into housing and find work among other things. Thanks to that connection, Rude Mechs has been working with Casa Marianella residents for the past two years on projects like the set construction for the restaging of Not Every Mountain and the renovation of Crashbox. The Co-Artistic Directors thought it would be interesting to involve the people making our sets and building our theater in making some art with us and so we wrote a few grants to start a new program called Why We’re Here. After beta testing workshop and having conversations with staff at Casa Marianella, we launched Why We’re Here in September.
Alex, Madge, Shawn, and Thomas began meeting with residents at Casa Marianella every Wednesday night. We met outside, masked, in a large circle of picnic tables in the yard at Casa Marianella. We adapted some of the exercises and prompts from Off Center Teens, our performance art program for young people. The idea that we proposed to the Why We’re Here participants is that we would be making a piece of theater together based on their stories and experiences. We had an overwhelming turnout. After a couple sessions we realized in order for everybody to participate (there were enough people that we couldn’t hear from everyone during one session) and to make things pandemic-safe, we needed to meet in smaller groups.
We divided people up by language group—Spanish, French, Portuguese—four or five people in each group. We met around campfires in front of the theater and shared pupusas and tamales in Rosa Lidia’s front yard. We took each other on walking tours and made maps of the city. We were staging scenes from Shakespeare, Waiting for Godot and West Side Story–with the intention of “Ruding” them of course. Just as we were dipping our toes into working on adaptation, the Covid numbers climbed and Austin went into Stage 5. This corresponded with colder temperatures making it difficult to meet out of doors. The program was placed on hold over the holidays as we figured out how to continue working during a pandemic. We really didn’t figure that out.
In fact, it still seems unclear how we can share any of this work with an audience. For the time being we’ve changed tactics and will be conducting one-on-one oral history interviews under the guidance of Public Historian Martha Norkunas. She will be leading us in an Oral History workshop next week. The material will inform the way in which it is shared with an audience later in the spring. It is our hope to mash it all together and make a performance we can share with you as soon as it is safe. We are starting to think Why We’re Here may not look at all like a staged play. The performance might even be helping Rosa Lidia get her pupusa business off the ground. And the best thing we can do is connect her with her people hungry for delicious pupusas. Please let us know if you’d like to be audience to or a sponsor for this kind of art-making. |
