2014, Dance/Movement, Events, Film, Music, Performance, Screenings, Visual Art

Plena Workshop with Tito Matos in amity of Bomplenazo

Posted on by Alejandro

The Loisaida Center presents:

Tito Matos

founder of: Viento de Agua

2014 Latin Grammy Awards Nominee.

Tito Matos is one of the most impressive requinto players of the plena tradition. He plays other percussion instruments: bomba barrels, congas, among others. He is the founder and director of Viento de Agua. He has previously recorded, played and toured with: Eddie Palmieri, David Sánchez, Miguel Zenón and Ricky Martin among many others. He is still a member of New York’s iconic bomba and plena ensemble Los Pleneros de la 21. Tito is the founder of Plenazos Callejeros a movement that takes plena to street corners in different Puerto Rican towns.

 

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 1:00pm – 3:00pm

Taller de Plena

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Master percussionist Tito Matos teaches a basic plena workshop suitable for all levels. The Puerto Rico native has traveled the world playing plena, an Afro Rican musical genre. Students will learn basic rithmic patterns from the traditional to the contemporary style of playing the hand held drum known as pandereta. 
 

Eventbrite - Plena Workshop with Tito Matos in amity of Bomplenazo

Bring your own Drum or Pandero.
 
All ages Welcomed!
 

3:00pm – 5:00pm

Screening of Plenazos Callejeros

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Documentary, followed by Q&A with producers and musicians

Plenazos Callejeros is a documentary about a movement that revolutionized Afro Puerto Rican musical genre: plena. Every month a bunch of pleneros would gather at a street corner to play and talk about music. The video takes viewers on a journey through the last 30 years of the plena tradition.

Director: Mariana Reyes Angleró

Producers: Mariana Reyes and Tito Matos for Viento de Agua Inc.

Editor: Juan C. Álvarez Lara

 
2014, Books, Events, Poetry

InVisible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

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InVisible Movement:

Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam

 

 ¡Gracias to all who joined us for the book release!

September 17th, 2014 @ 7 PM

Poet and scholar Urayoán “Ura” Noel, an Assistant Professor of English and Spanish at NYU, presented his new book InVisible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), the first book-length critical study of Nuyorican poetry.

Discounted copies of the book are still available for sale.
 
 

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“A crucial contribution to our literary history, In Visible Movement charts the evolution of an increasingly visible movement in the literary arts, shedding light on many related poetries of the past six decades in the process. Noel proposes ‘an understanding of poetry performance as revisionism: operating across and along page and stage,’ an understanding that proceeds from the poets themselves.”

—Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author, Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation
 

About the author:

Urayoán Noel is a poet, performer, scholar, and translator who is currently an Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Albany and Visiting Assistant Professor of English at NYU. His books include the poetry collections Kool Logic/La lógica kool (Bilingual Press, 2005), Boringkén (Ediciones Callejón/La Tertulia, Puerto Rico, 2008), Hi-Density Politics (BlazeVOX, 2010), and Los días porosos (Catafixia Editorial, Guatemala, 2012), and the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam(University of Iowa Press, forthcoming). His other works include the performance DVD Kool Logic Sessions(Bilingual Press, 2005, with Monxo López), the multimedia project The Edgemere Letters (2011, with Martha Clippinger), and, as translator, the chapbooks ILUSOS by Edwin Torres (Atarraya Cartonera, Puerto Rico, 2010) and Belleza y Felicidad (Belladonna, 2005). He has been a fellow of CantoMundo, the Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Ford Foundation, and his creative and critical writings have appeared in Latino Studies, Contemporary Literature, Small Axe, Bomb, Fence, and in numerous national and international anthologies. Originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, Urayoán Noel earned his B.A. from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, his M.A. from Stanford, and his Ph.D. from NYU. He lives in the Bronx.

 

 

Performance, Residencies, Visual Art

2014 Artist in Residence – Dey Hernández-Vázquez

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The Loisaida Center is proud to announce our current

2014 Visual Arts-Performance Residency Recipient:

Dey Hernández-Vázquez

Hernández will present the installation/performance piece:

Casita: for Julia de Burgos

About the piece:
 

In the danger of having the memory of Julia reduced to “the stereotype of the bohemian poet who lived a tragically short life…”The artist will use Julia’s poetic images to create a space that lifts off from the page allowing the spectator/participant to drift into the actual space where the artistic experience is taking place, la “Casita”. The architectural installation will mark out personal territory in the public realm.

 

About Dey:
 

Deymirie “Dey” Hernández-Vázquez is an Architect, Teaching Artist, and Puppeteer who works in a variety of media. She is a passionate advocate for the arts as an active educational tool. Issues of race, identity, language, and community are fundamental to her work as a cultural educator and artist. For the past 6+ years, she has designed and facilitated art workshops with AgitArte, a non-profit organization dedicated to initiate and support artistic and popular education projects in disadvantaged and marginalized communities to further the struggle for social justice. Dey is also an artist and puppeteer of the radical workers’ heater collective, Papel Machete. Their performances in community, theaters, streets and protests employ puppets, masks, objects and music to denounce exploitation, build solidarity, and agitate to action in the struggles of the working class. All of their cultural work is generated collectively through facilitated creative processes and construction workshops using papier mâché as their medium and exploring a wide range of forms and styles that include toy theater, cantastoria, shadow theater, table-top puppetry, humanettes, cut-outs, masks, and giants. Dey’s arts and architectural background are key to the design and construction of giant puppets, puppetry booths, shadow shows and toy theaters. Dey Hernández-Vázquez received a MA from the School of Architecture, University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 2010. She currently lives and works in Boston.

 

Dance/Movement, Residencies, Theater

2014 Artist in Residence : Jeca Rodríguez Colón

Posted on by Alejandro

The Loisaida Center is proud to announce our current

2014 Dance-Theater Residency Recipient:

Jeca Rodríguez Colón

Rodriguez is currently in the development stages of a piece with the working title:

(M)others.

About the piece:
 

The piece has four female characters, all women, 2 of which are ghosts or memories from the family of the main character, one character who is the mother of the main character and the main character. Through their movements and their occasional dialog the audience will be able to witness how the invasion of the United States of America influenced and affected each of this mothers. Some were affected directly by the lack of education, others by the alcoholism and abuse of her veteran husband and the others by the unspoken past of their mothers.

 
About Jeca: 

Jessica “Jeca” Rodríguez-Colón  is a Puerto Rican performer with over 12 years of experience as a dancer and choreographer. She began her contemporary dance training with Petra Bravo and Viveca Vázquez. She holds a B.A. from Hunter College with a double major in Dance and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She was the recipient of Hunter College’s 2005 Choreography Departmental Award. Jeca is an MFA candidate at Transart Institute with Plymouth University. After participating in the EMERGENYC 2013 program at the Hemispheric Institute she began to explore performance arts and public interventions. Her work is connected to different aspects of the maternal kinesthetic language in space and the politics that surrounds it. She is currently part of inaugural cohort of The EmergeLab@BAX, a laboratory initiative with the support of the Hemispheric Institute and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Her latest work includes a street intervention in collaboration with Mette Loulou von Kohl “Manifest Collective Movement”, a future installation “Sneak into My Maternal Chaos” and future performance “Desde Adentro” to be presented August 2014 in Berlin, Germany.

 

Residencies, Theater

2014 Artists in Residence – CABORCA

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The Loisaida Center is proud to announce:

2014 Theater Co. Residency Recipients:

CABORCA

Led by playwright/director Javier González, CABORCA is an experimental theatre company making plays that move seamlessly between the irreverent and poetic, the personal and political, and the highly entertaining and intellectually challenging – inspired by Brecht’s view that to be challenged is also to be entertained. Based in New York City and working in both English and Spanish, our work includes new plays, classical adaptations and devised creations.

 CABORCA started working together in 2002 at the University of Puerto Rico, continued collecting at Columbia’s MFA Theatre Program, and officially became a company in 2009.

 CABORCA steals its name from the novel The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño, in which a magazine of the same name is the official organ of visceral realism.

Read more about CABORCA’S residency program.