The Avant Ricuas: A Cross-Generational Poetry Bombessa


Featuring:

Victor Hernandez Cruz

Urayoan Noel

and Edwin Torres

 

This event is a reading, performance, and discussion among three Puerto Rican luminaries, celebrating the publication of Hernandez’ new book, “Beneath The Spanish” (Coffee House Press). It will take place at our Center on Wednesday, October 25th at 6:30pm

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Beneath the Spanish is history, the clash and melt of cultures, the conquest of the New World, colonialism, bilingualism, fragmentation, and cubism. Poems built of tobacco, sugar, café; Spanish, Arabic, English; José Martí, Federico García Lorca, and William Carlos Williams. A history and exploration of Hernández Cruz’s Caribbean roots as well as a documentation of and counterpoint to the origin of the European cultural intrusion into the New World, Beneath the Spanish deconstructs and reconstructs a wounded history, offering a prayer for communication between distances, oceans, music, dance, and mountains, revealing the past in the present moment we live.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

VICTOR HERNANDEZ CRUZ is the author of several collections of poetry including, most recently, The Mountain in the Sea and In the Shadow of AlAndalus. Featured in Bill Moyers’s Language of Life series, Cruz’s collection Maraca was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall and Griffin Poetry Prizes. He divides his time between Morocco and his native Puerto Rico.

 

Fantasy Island: Panel Discussion

Puerto Rico’s economic spiral has spread uncertainty on the island. A 120 billion debt in bonds and pension responsibilities has been deemed un-payable while a U.S. Fiscal Supervision Board suggests further austerity measures. About 170 schools have closed and a third of the island’s real estate is unoccupied. Puerto Ricans keep fleeing en masse while foreigners move in, altering the urban and cultural landscape.

Artists, scholars, activists, and other thought leaders from various sectors are in conversation throughout the diaspora with the intention of creating awareness and dialogue that can generate solutions. How can art further push to inform socially responsible urban development and shed light on inequitable real estate practices that cause displacement and economic disparity? What about this cult to tourism and its implications on the field?

This panel discussion will focus on the role of the arts in community development, the economic crisis in Puerto Rico, its implications and parallels with other cities/countries, tourism economy, real estate development, and disaster capitalism.

Speakers:

F. JAVIER TORRES  ArtPlace America

f. javier torres

Latest Blog Post: Reflecting on the Interstate’s Impact on an American City

F. Javier Torres is the Director of National Grantmaking at ArtPlace America. In his role he is responsible for building a comprehensive set of demonstration projects that illustrate the many ways in which arts and culture can strengthen the processes and outcomes of the planning and development field across the United States. Thanks to ArtPlace he has travelled across 48 states in the last 3 years and visited a wide variety of community contexts. This travel has expanded his interest in the networks and knowledge sets necessary to sustain creative placemaking as a practice over time.

Prior to his role at ArtPlace, Javier was Senior Program Officer for Arts and Culture at the Boston Foundation where he led an exploration of the role of culture as a tool for transformation, sustainability, and as central to the development of vibrant communities. Javier spent six years as the Director of Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, a program of IBA, a community based multi-disciplinary arts complex that operates as a regional presenter and local programmer for Latino arts. Currently, he is a board member for Grantmakers in the Arts and an advisory board member for the Design Studio for Social Intervention. He has previously served as a board member for the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, MASSCreative, was a member of the MA Governor’s Creative Economy Council and Chair for the Boston Cultural Council.

 

ED MORALES  Journalist and Writer

ed morales

https://edmorales.net/

Ed Morales is a journalist who has investigated New York City electoral politics, police brutality, street gangs, grassroots activists, and the Latino arts and music scene.  He has been a Latin music Newsday columnist and longtime Village Voice contributing writer whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Miami Herald, San Francisco Examiner, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Jacobin, and The Nation. He was a contributing editor to NACLA Report on the Americas a frequent contributor of op ed columns for The Progressive Media Project.

Ed Morales is currently writing Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, a definitive view of how Latin@s matter in the US’s race debate, to be published by Verso Press in Spring of 2018. In March 2002, he published his first book, Living in Spanglish on St. Martin’s Press/LA Weekly Books. A second book, The Latin Beat: From Rumba to Rock, was published on Da Capo Press in 2003. Morales is also a poet whose work has appeared in Aloud: Voices From the Nuyorican Poets Café (Henry Holt, 1993) and various small magazines, and whose fiction has appeared in Iguana Dreams (HarperCollins, 1992), and Boricuas (Ballantine, 1994).

He has participated in residencies as a member of Nuyorican Poets Café Live, touring as a spoken-word performer in several cities throughout the East Coast, in California, Florida, Texas, Denmark, and Washington, D.C.  Morales has also appeared on CNN, Hispanics Today, Urban Latino, HBO Latino, CNN Español, WNBC-TV’s Visiones, WABC’s Tiempo BBC television and radio, and the Fox Morning News in Washington D.C.

Ed Morales is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, and occasionally appears as a host on WBAI-FM.

 

SHEY RIVERA RIOS is the Artistic Director of AS220.

shey

 

With a professional background in administration, Rivera is also a performance and installation artist, musician and writer. At AS220, she focuses on community engagement, cross-sector partnerships, and strategic planning, alongside a team of program leaders. Rivera was part of the founding team of Festival de la Palabra in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 2010 (the largest literature festival in Puerto Rico, still ongoing), and reactivated the historic Museum House Concha Melendez in San Juan with literary arts programming. She is an Intercultural Leadership Institute (ILI) Fellow, Brown University Public Humanities Fellow, and alumni of the Leadership Institutes hosted by the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) and the National Association of Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC). Rivera is a Certified NonProfit Accounting Professional (CNAP) and has also served on multidisciplinary art grant panels for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), NALAC, and Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Rivera serves in Congressman Jim Langevin’s Art & Culture Advisory Committee and Providence Mayor Elorza Art & Culture Transition Team. She also serves in the Downtown Improvement District and Providence Parks Conservancy Advisory Committees, as the Dept of Art, Culture+Tourism’s Public Art Committee and Providence Cultural Equity Initiative’s Cultural Think Tank. She has been a speaker at Tulane University, University of Puerto Rico, New Bedford Museum of Art, RISD Museum, Philadelphia Mural Arts, and national conferences on art spaces and community development, including Alliance of Artist Communities, Pittsburgh’s Community Development Summit, Congress of New Urbanism, and NALAC, among others.  http://sheyrivera.com

 

Moderator: HUASCAR ROBLES writes and makes art about technology and culture.

He has published with The New York TimesChicago Tribune’s HoyMetro San Juan and other publications in United States, Puerto Rico and Brazil. He was a correspondent in Haití and  published Puertos príncipes: temblemos todos, a journal and photo book on Haiti after the earthquake. He is currently an Op-Ed contributor to Puerto Rico’s El Nuevo Día. 

The Country Under My Skin, Los silencios de Santurce, Portraits of Marassa, are some of his photo and multimedia performances in the U.S. and Puerto Rico as well as the documentary The Invisible Coast, on Haitian merchants’ struggle on Puerto Rico’s Loíza town.

He has participated with The Dart Center’s Ochberg Fellowship (2009), Center for Justice and Journalism’s Urban Fellowship (2009), AS220’s Artist in Residence, and Brunetto’s School cultural exchange in Brazil (2006). His collection Country Under My Skin as acquired by Rhode Island’s Historical Society’s Permanent Gallery.  Robles has an M.F.A. from New York University.

 

 

 

 

Fantasy Island – Exhibition Open

For Shey Rivera Ríos and Huáscar Robles, Hurricane María is an atmospheric manifestation compounded by the fiscal crisis troubling Puerto Rico’s urban landscape. The installation and performance Fantasy Island is an experience that explores how tourism and consumer culture sell a “fantastical” luxury lifestyle, a tropical paradise twisting crisis into “opportunity”. A door opens into a real estate office selling dreams of luxury and reconstruction and the viewer delves into a dizzying spell of animated gifs, performance and altars.

For Fantasy Island, Rivera transformed Loisaida’s space into a real estate office surrounded by a black and white grid that envelops visitors while monitors flash GIFs that borrow aesthetics from the vaporwave movement. In one image, a hand waves a wad of cash to a “Puerto Rico” neon sign while icons of the Virgin Mary and a ram, both cultural symbols of Puerto Rico’s syncretism and colonial history, spin in an enticing, dizzying spell. Viewers are also inspired to reflect on how natural disasters such as the path of hurricanes affecting not only Puerto Rico but also our Caribbean neighbors maybe twisted into “opportunity” after the crisis subsides.

For the Loisaida Center, a cultural enterprise with deep roots in the Nuyorican and Latinx New York community, Fantasy Island stretches the island to New York and its Puerto Rican and Caribbean diaspora as it hits common issues they all grapple with.

The opening and closing reception will include a special performance.


Exhibition Viewing Hours: Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm and by appointment.


Throughout the fall, and beyond, the Loisaida Inc. Center’s programming will provide opportunities to pledge support to the relief and recovery efforts in the Caribbean.

 

Ecokit Puerto Rico

 

We are Puerto Rican artists living in New York who have collaborated extensively with eco-conscious nonprofit organizations, journalists and media.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria we conducted a quick assessment of needs and have assembled a list of immediate relief items focusing on portability, reuse, waste reduction and effectiveness in off grid situations.

We took this terrible situation as an opportunity to rebuild in sustainable ways, especially given the dilapidated & dangerous state of the island’s waste management which has produced toxic ashes in now hurricane stricken areas.


Visit EcoKitPuertoRico.org

You can help by fulfilling orders here. These resources will be delivered and shipped from our Center directly to trusted sources on the island.


How it works: 
  • Place an order for items on the ‘NEEDS LIST’ page

  • Ship items to our pick up center:

         Eco-Kits Duffle Help

         Loisaida Inc. Center

         710 East 9th Street

         New York, NY 10009​

  • Sorted items are immediately given to our volunteer travelers.

  • Eco-kits get picked up at airports in Puerto Rico by our contacted community coordinators and delivered to the following list of grass-roots organizations:

    Iser Caribe is our fiscal sponsor, a non profit ecological organization based in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico.

    Loisaida Inc. Center, extending its support to the Puerto Rican community is housing our drop-off and pickups in its Lower East Side Location.

    Creatives Mean Business, supporting with communications, and design needs.

    Beneficiary Organizations in Puerto Rico, these organizations are the grass-roots recipients so far of the Pre-Assembled Kits:

    Taller Salud
    Casa Ruth
    ASPPRO
    Overseas Press Club
    Comedores Sociales de Puerto Rico
    Centro de Periodismo Investigativo
    Asociación de Foto Periodista de Puerto Rico
    Casa Pueblo
    Boys & Girls Club of Puerto Rico
    Boricuá: Asociación Boricua de Agricultura Ecológica
    Farmer Foot Brigades
    Colectivo Vueltabajo
    Colectivo AgroEcologico Guayabacherry
    Galeria Betances
    Ridge to Reefs
    Biblioteca Juvenil de Mayaguez
    Planeta Feliz

Merengue Prieto New York 2017

Loisaida Inc. Center and Afro-Inspira presents:

Merengue Prieto New York 2017

Marily Gallardo, choreographer/artivist and founder of Kalalú Danza Artes Escénicas, has come from Dominican Republic to share with us her work and provide a master dance class, interactive talk and healing circle. All funds are to support Kalalú Danza Project in keep moving forward their mission and work in Los Mercedes, Dominican Republic.

You are coordially invited to:

MASTER DANCE CLASS: Merengue Prieto / rhythm dance session – traveling steps with TAMBORA. Incorporate another perspective that focuses on the origins of popular tradition and its makers through the execution of poly rhythmic-gestural patterns and to enjoy “merengue” afro. 
INTERACTIVE TALK: “Mujeres de la Candela” (Women of the Fire) / pedagogical experience on identity and black women power such as how women power and values are transmitted within the afro-descendant communities, like courage, daily intelligence, and spiritual beliefs, etc.

HEALING RITUAL: Creative full moon circle.

Class starts prompltly at 5pm followed by talk and healing circle.
Suggested Donation: $25
This event is FREE, no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Please bring comfortable clothes and shoes.


Eventbrite -  Merengue Prieto - Master Class

_____________________________________________________________________
Mission:

Kalalú Danza, Dominican Republic
For Kalalú Danza, the Afro-antillian concept is presented as one that encompasses and is a synthesis of thought and expression of the socio-cultural diversity of the Caribbean. From that premise, Kalalú’s pedagogical approach affirms a particular study of rhythm and movement, of its oral tradition, and symbolism which influenced by “the Afro” can be found in the popular artistic manifestations of such cultures. Such artistic manifestations provides the basis to generate performance, scenic, and pedagogical proposals which contributes to the development of the local communities as well as the individual and social transformation.

Noches de Bohemia with IRIS CHACON


Buy TicketsComprar Boletos


Your contribution will support our commitment to the Puerto Rican and Latino Cultures and the preservation of our heritage in New York City.


Made possible through the generous support of AgeWell New York

AgeWell New York

Open Community Textiles Workshop

Loisaida inc. is proud to present Tejedoras de Magia with Daniela Fabrizi. This open community textile workshop will be complementing with costumes, banners and flags the Cabezudo and the Parade Making workshops to debut in the Opening Community Parade of the The 30th Annual Loisaida Festival. This collaborative atelier will be open to visitors and the community at large during the whole month of May, all FREE.


Specific Dates by theme:

Re-plasti-cycle your Garments: July 2017 New Dates TBD (3pm-6pm)

Costumes! Banners! Flags! GIANTS!: July 2017 New Dates TBD (3pm-6pm)


Workshop description:

  1. Re-plasti-cycle your Garments

Learn how to reuse plastic and repurpose everyday plastic trash into your own hand-made fabric. We will focus at making fabric from plastic junk, crafting our own textile patterns and building handmade garments and wearable pieces that would be used by individuals at the parade.

This workshop is aimed at younger audiences, who are in the beginning of their journey on their textiles and design interests. Also participants will explore the idea of reusing, recycling and re-inventing with what they have and experiment letting their mind to be their own limit to create new beautiful and usable things.

(Recommended for Pre-teen and Teens)

  1. Costumes! Banners! Flags! GIANTS!

Fabric is one of the most versatile, used and indispensable materials that could transform any parade into a memorable experience within any community. On this workshop we will learn and apply some basic skills on textiles to make costumes, banners, flags and giants. Open to all artists interested in textiles with any experience. In collaboration with Zuleyka Alejandro.

All creations can be part of this year’s edition of the Loisaida Festival Community Parade.

(Recommended for kids, adults, EVERYONE)


Artist Bio:

Daniela Fabrizi. Always inspired by the work of women and her own travels, she is a costumes and textiles lover. Based in New York, and having working experience in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, France and London, she works in all crafts related to this medium: from film, tv and theater to textile arts work with the community and her own independent projects. She enjoys the most working and sharing her craft with the community, while learning and getting inspired from them.

Contact Daniela Fabrizi at dani.fabrizi@gmail.com or call (347) 314-3555

The Loisaida Festival’s 4th Annual Theater Lab

 The Loisaida Festival’s 4th Annual Theater Lab

Co-produced by MEZCOLANZA NYC & Loisaida Inc.


Brief description of participants and their performance, visual, theatrical or musical pieces:


1. Teresa Hernández / Performance / 15 min

Title: (A) parecer  

About the piece: Performance-space intervention and body. Appearance is a human condition that reveals the uniqueness of each in the encounter with the-othrx. Ten years ago he works with a woman dressed in a black suit. She has named her-the walker. She goes out and walks in and out, complains, reveals in she a-seem what she lives.

About the artist: Stage performer. Actress, dancer, creator-interpreter, author and director of her own texts, self-management activist. She has spent more than twenty-five years research and practice from the frontiers of dance, theater and performance. Looking for other ways of doing, narrating and being on stage, starting with the integral study of the body, space, and its own text. Their themes surround; Identities as shifting and complex lands; Art and it´s established canons, violence and power with its multiple faces and bifurcations. Precariousness is a fundamental part of its ethics. Hernández’s career has been recognized by the United States Artists Foundation under the discipline of Theater Arts. (USA Role Fellow-2011). She is the second Puerto Rican on the island to receive such distinction, being the only one in the field of theater. She holds a master’s degree in “Management and Cultural Management” from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras precinct.


2. Kairiana Núñez / Performance / 10 min

Title: La basquetbolista

About the piece: Set in a basketball game’s tight quarter, a Puerto Rican basketball player has to row hard against the opposite team’s defense in the presence of a referee that unfairly penalizes her and does not call the true fault.

About the artist: Actress taurine and Puerto Rican. Graduated from the Drama Department of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, (2009). He began his career in 1996 with Pedro Santaliz, and later became a founding member of the theater group in the streets Jóvenes del 98 under the direction of Maritza Pérez Otero. Later he continued his training with Puerto Rican teachers and artists Rosa Luisa Márquez, Teresa Hernández, Viveca Vázquez, among others. In Argentina, she trained at Sportivo Teatral with Mirta Bogdasarian and Ricardo Bartís (2011-2013, Buenos Aires), and was part of the Quinto Piso Theater Companies, directed by Daniel Godoy, and El Rizoma Collective (2011-2016, Buenos Aires) . In 2017 he returns to Puerto Rico, where despite the imbalance, she bets on continuing to grow artistically, professionally, Ideologically and humanely.


3. Mickey Negrón / Performance / 18 min

Title: Transgressed Body

About the piece: An emigrant, homosexual, transvesti. Strength in the voices of the minority.

About the artist: Mickey Negrón Puerto Rican artist. Artistic director of the Asuntos Efímeros art platform. Enthusiastic writer. Free thinker. Nonconforming gender. Cultural manager. Singer. Moving. Student who never finishes. Fan of pop singers and frustrated athlete. It just premiered as a critic. Currently works an artistic residence at the Center of Fine Arts to be presented in August 2017 and coordinates the second edition of Quiebre: International Performance Festival in Puerto Rico.


4. Yan Christian Collazo / Performance / 15 min

Title: Untitled 

About the piece: Character that intervenes in the intermediates, comments the pieces, is ally of the public. Uses a half mask makes jokes about the current situation on the island in relation to the floating islands that we are all talking about individualism, migration and the condition of the migrant.

About the artist: Yan Christian Collazo: Actor, poet, creator, dancer. Puerto Rican. He holds a Bachelors degree in Drama with a second concentration in Foreign Languages ​​specialized in Italian. Studied at “Universitá Cattólica del Sacro Cuore” in Milan, Italy; Specialized in poetry and Italian literature. He took workshops with Latin American theater groups including Malayerba from Ecuador and Yuyachkani from Peru. De Clown with maestro Luis Oliva of Puerto Rico, David Martínez Sánchez of Spain and with the group “Pig Iron Theater Company” of Philadelphia. In 2012, he was part of the group La Pata de Cabra, acting in the play ‘Cortadito or Capuchino’, directed by his teacher Rosa Luisa Márquez. The Festival of Theater of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture was invited. He obtained an MFA in Ensemble Based Theater. He was selected to participate in the “Mad River Festival” along with the company of the school “Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theater. He has been invited to the “2017 River Theater Festival” in Blue Lake, CA and to “California Summer School for the Arts” in Los Angeles, CA. After completing his short tour with his thesis, he will move to New York with a view to forming a multidisciplinary theater group and establishing a working and collaboration bridge between Puerto Rico, New York, California and the world.


5. Awilda Rodríguez Lora / Theater Lab MC / Contemporary Dance / 19 min 

Title: Untitled

About the piece: Contemporary dance movement piece that accounts for its status as a migrant who absorbed American culture and made it theirs.

About the artist: Awilda Rodríguez-Lora is a performance choreographer and cultural entrepreneur. Born in Mexico, raised in Puerto Rico, and working in-between North and South America and the Caribbean, Rodríguez Lora’s performances traverse multiple geographic histories and realities. In this way, her work promotes progressive dialogues regarding hemispheric colonial legacies, and the unstable categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Rodríguez Lora is currently a host/coordinator at La Rosario in Santurce (Puerto Rico) where she is creating, researching, and producing her life project, La Mujer Maravilla, while developing new strategies for the sustainability of live arts in Puerto Rico. After more than ten years of work as a fully independent artist, she is committed to further studying how artistic economies can be harnessed to support alternative forms of life rooted in communality, creativity, and social justice. laperformera.org.


6. Jeanne D Arc / Dance / Flamenco / 15 min

Title: Untitled

About the piece: Contemporary dance & Flamenco intertwined with poems of protest by Federico García Lorca

About the artist: Jeanne D Arc Casas (1984) was born in Aibonito, Puerto Rico. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Individualized Studies from the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. In 2011 she earned a master’s degree in performance and choreography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque where she was a Moderna and Flamenco dance instructor. Since January 2012 is part of the company Soledad Barrio y Noche Flamenca. She has made a large number of tours in the United States, Canada and Argentina Europe and the East. It also teaches lessons in modern dance, contemporary dance and body movement in different schools and universities. Recently Jeanne D ‘Arc Houses participated in the program of residential artifacts of the Fine Arts Center Luis A. Ferré de Santurce, PR where shows the show Hij @ s de la Bernarda directed by the teacher Rosa Luisa Márquez.


7. Poncili Creación Artist Collective/ Performance / Art Installation  

About their piece: During the month of May Poncili Creación will be studying the Loisaida community and its mural history in order to produce a performance piece that speaks about the short comings that the community has faced in the past and still face today.

Inspired by Loisaida, Poncili Creación will create several of their unique sculptures based on Loisaida’s murals and community. Using different elements they will create a performance to be presented at the Theater Lab.

About the artists: Poncili Creación conceptualizes and designs interactive experiences for all ages. The company has been conspiring for over half a decade, in which they have shared their work with several countries throughout their international tours to the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. Their creation technique consists of several disciplines which lead them to create complex structures that resemble different forms through different mechanisms and means of creation. These objects, often humanized, can induce placebos and metaphorical experiences to the spectating mind that often goes from passive interaction to active observation, in the attempt of decoding what happens and transforms before their eye. They currently reside in Puerto Rico and dedicate their time to the study of objects and reality.


8. Yaraní del Valle & Gabo Lugo / Music  / Performance / 20 min

Title: Pura’s Lágrimas

About the piece: Musical project developed by Yaraní del Valle and Gabo Lugo that fuses pop music with electronic sound supports and stage theatricality.aims to comment and provoke conversations about identity, gender inequality, her experience as an immigrant and the devastating effects of colonialism, the political condition that Puerto Rico has been a victim of for more than a century.

About the artist: Yaraní Del Valle Piñero is a Puerto Rican actor, singer, dancer, educator, cultural promoter, and activist based in New York City. Her interdisciplinary approach to artistic creation has led her to train and to collaborate with theater directors, choreographers, musicians, filmmakers, writers, and educators as a performer, co-creator and/or curriculum developer. Some of her projects include CHAMACAS,  ChicaPReneursSeniors In Motion and Pura’s Lágrimas and latest co-founder of Caicú, a nonprofit organization that serves as a cultural platform to empower Puerto Rican artists beyond geographical barriers.


9. Lizbeth Román / Music / 40 min

About the piece: Original music that fuses the Caribbean bohemian with multiple rhythms and a Lyric of the everyday that joins the poetic with the street jargon.

About the artist: Lizbeth Román is a Puerto Rican songwriter, theater and singer. With her scenic force accompanied by the porosity and intensity of her voice, Lizbeth has established herself in the independent scene with her original music that fuses the Caribbean and bohemian vibe with multiple rhythms and a lyric of the everyday that connects the poetic with the street jargon.


10. Alejandro Aldarondo  / Art Installation / Site-Specific

Title: Durational

About the piece: Site-specific art installation uses threads or strings that seeks to trace our multiple routes. Uniting as a collective, migrants from here and there. Respecting our qualities and differences, exalting the reasons of movement of each one, looking for a common place from which to leave, is born this installation of threads that looks for the earth and wants to take root. 

About the artist: Visual artist Puerto Rican, is dedicated to build facilities with textiles and thread in open spaces. Design and make clothes. Artist / installer, performer, designer, costume designer and dancer. He has a bachelors degree in Interdisciplinary Studies illustration and Drama. Associate Degree in Fashion Design. Has worked on several projects for: Wire / Mezzanine · PR / NYC / The great fantastic circus  and the fashion event: Bohemian Sunset.


About TheaterLab co-producers:

MEZCOLANZA NYC 2017 – 12th Edition

Mezcolanza is a cultural platform born in 2013 in the city of Buenos Aires produced by Helen Ceballos. It gathers short pieces of artists and multi-disciplinary collectives in order to maintain a live and open stage for the processes and creations of emerging artists in different cities around the world. We aim to erase distances and expose pieces of author, which account for the social reality that is lived in our changing environments. To date, Mezcolanza has hosted over 250 artists among the cities of Buenos Aires, New York and San Juan de Puerto Rico. On this occasion, Mezcolanza visits the city of New York for the third time and celebrates its twelfth edition. We have convened 14 multidisciplinary artists. These artists work in theater, performance, movement, music, improvisation, construction, musical composition, costume making, sculptures, sound and video art. In this edition of the Festival Loisaida and within the framework of the Theater Lab. Mezcolanza presents the urban interventions of 14 outstanding artists from the local and international scene of Puerto Rico, Latin America and the United States, interlacing the scenic discourses of these creative artists with their status as permanent immigrants.


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Community Parade & Pageant – Open Workshops

The Loisaida Center logo

The Loisaida Center

proudly presents:

 Community Parade & Pageant – Open Workshops


Workshops begin: Thursday, May 4th 2017
Open daily from 12:00 pm – 3:00 pm (except Mondays)
All workshops held at Loisaida Inc. Center – 710 East 9th Street NY NY 10009
FREE! All ages welcome.
Children under 14 must be accompanied by an adult.


Overview:

Loisaida Inc. has commissioned three masters in the arts of street theater to develop and implement a FREE month-long intensive collaborative atelier of parade-making & pageant techniques to kick-off the Loisaida Street Festival on its 30th anniversary. Daniel Polnau, Pablo Varona and Adam Ende (link to bios below) are three veteran puppeteers and distinct street artists with extensive US and international experience coming together in Loisaida to engage our surrounding community in an exploration of what is possible with humble and accessible materials. They will offer their skills and mentorship in diverse formats of inter-active public art aesthetics, messaging and celebration.


Workshop dates and description by theme:


Tutabanda (Tootophone)

Dates: Thursdays (May 4, 11, 18, and 25) from 12:00pm to 3:00pm

Description: Let’s start a musical street band from scratch! Bring out all of your inner musical joy in a band of wonders and learn how to make your own costume, design your own mask, help build a float, build your own musical instruments (with materials sourced from any local hardware store) and collaboratively come up with a choreography. Open to all artists, specially musicians and dancers.

(Recommended for ages 18 – Adults)

Cabezudos (Big-head puppets)

Dates: Tuesdays (May 9, 16, and 23) from 12:00pm to 3:00pm

Description: This workshop we will celebrate local history by creating an ensemble of big head masks– portraits of the important artists, activists and gardeners who shaped the neighborhood, such as Bimbo Rivas, Carmen Pabón, Tato Laviera, Armando Pérez, and Jorge Brandon aka “El Coco que Habla”, among others.

Participants will learn sculpture techniques with clay, cardboard, and other materials, the finer points of “paper mâché”, and painting skills. No prior experience necessary– all participants will discover that they have the innate skills to make beautiful portraits and caricatures. Included in the workshop will be mask movement and performance, so you will not only make a head, but learn how to embody it.

The creations will be part of the 30th Anniversary edition of the Loisaida Festival’s opening Parade and its Theater Lab.

(Recommended for ages 13 – Adults. No unaccompanied minors will be allowed.)

Giant Tiger and Jaguar Puppets:

Dates: Wednesdays (May 10, 17 and 24) from 12:00pm to 3:00pm

Description: Open to anyone who wants to make wearable-danceable- carry able art and help create. Join our team of guest artists and local luminaries in a highly collaborative and experimental open studio where we spin straw into gold! All levels of experience- from the curious to fluent!

Families, adults, teens, individuals, organizations welcome. See your dreams come to life when we bring our creations to the street in a spectacular parade that celebrates the spirit of Loisaida past, present and future!

(Recommended for ages 6 – Adults. No unaccompanied minors will be allowed.)

Open Community Workshops:

Dates: Fridays, Saturdays & Sundays (May 5,6,7,12,13,14,19,20 and 21) from 12:00pm to 6:00pm

Description: The Loisaida Festival Parade & Pageant counts with workshop space to build anything related to the parade. Any individual or group that would like to use our space, can come in on the Open Community Workshops. If you reach us beforehand, we could also reserve a space in the workshop and help with your designs and craft.

Please note: The parade is on the 28, May 2017, it starts at 10am and finishes at 12pm. We are asking all parade volunteers to be there, at least, two hours before (~8am) the parade starts and to anyone else that is parading with us, at least one hour before (~9am).

(Recommended for ages 6 – Adults. No unaccompanied minors will be allowed.)


Instructor Profile:

Daniel Polnau – Artist, puppeteer, director of Tiny Town artists collective and  Strombolli’s Medicine Show. Daniel Polnau has created puppet parades, circuses, and outdoor theatre spectacles for over 30 years. He specializes in creating larger than life puppets out of recycled junk and up-cycled materials making the mundane become extraordinary. At the heart of each highly collaborative project he strives to demystify the creative process, and quicken the innate creative abilities in all, regardless of age, abilities, or arts experience. His projects and residencies have spanned the globe from Moscow, Bali, Alaska and Puerto Rico.

Pablo Varona – Artist, puppeteer and resident of Casa Múcaro in Las Marías, Puerto Rico. Spends most his time living close to the forested mountaintops of Puerto Rico as the artist liaison of Casa Múcaro, Las Marías. He is amazed by the immeasurable value that the reuse, recycling and/or “forgotten” objects do when it comes to the transformation of urban contexts. His interests revolve around making these issues relevant and accessible to the general audience. Lead artist at Honey for the Heart Parade, Athens, OH, 2015 and Art Director of Loisaida Festival Parade 2016.

Adam Ende – Puppeteer, founder and director of Jawbone Puppet Theater; artistic and managing director of the Islewilde performance festival. He has more than 20 years of extensive experience directing puppet shows, parades and festivals around the US and Taiwan, as well as writing shows, building puppets, performing, and leading workshops in puppet making and performance. His particular specialty is making portraits in puppet.


Even though everyone is welcome to participate in all workshops without previous registration we ask that you to please fill out this form.


Volunteer to give life to the 30th Loisaida Festival Parade, join here!


For any questions please contact: Zuleyka Alejandro (787) 636-4413 or Pablo Varona (787) 412-1220

The 30th Loisaida Festival

A celebration is coming:

The Loisaida Festival has been historically celebrated on the Sunday before Memorial Day, this year is on:

    Sunday, May 28th fom 12:00pm – 5:00pm

2017’s theme is Immigration where we’ll be recognizing and celebrating the Im/migrant experience in the Lower East Side – The Gateway to America, and celebrating the Latin American Immigrant and their contributions to this community, city and country.

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