| |
|
|
| MARIPOSA: THE JOURNEY
HOME |
Members of Teatro Armonia
Project Titles: Mariposa:
The Journey Home
Recipient Organization: Brava! For
Women in the Arts
Lead Artist: Ellen Sebastian Chang
Genre and Date Awarded: Performing Arts, July 1998
Premiered: August 22, 1999
Ellen Sebastian Chang and four other theater artists collaborated
with Teatro Armonia, a program of Brava!
For Women in the Arts (BRAVA) that serves Mission District teenagers, to create a full-length theater
piece. Participating artists included Michael
Torres, Andrea Thome,
and Sean San Jose. Playwright Naomi
Iizuka worked with the teenaged
participants to develop their writings and then wove together and
shaped their lines, scenes, and phrasings into a script. The finished
45-minute Mariposa: The Journey Home reached many of the
teens’ friends and BRAVA’s neighbors, as it was presented
as the centerpiece to BRAVA’s annual Youth Arts Festival—outdoors,
on 24th Street, in front of Brava’s theatre. BRAVA Artistic
Director, Ellen Gavin, served as the project producer.
Both Chang and Iizuka collaborated with the youth to shape their
creative product without losing the artistic integrity of their original
writings and vision. Mariposa focused on the theme of home—defining
home, leaving home, and finding home. In it, a mother leaves her
family. Years later, her daughter, Elena, leaves home and travels
across San Francisco to seek information about her mother’s
fate. Her journey takes her to the Mission District, where the people
she meets evoke memories of her mother while also providing information
about her whereabouts. The ending is not easy, but evokes a transcendent
joy in the beauty of images and power of words.
Ellen Gavin and BRAVA began to design Teatro Armonia in early 1997
after a series of shootings in San Francisco’s Mission District.
In addition to two murders that occurred among rivaling Sureño and Norteño youth,
a drive-by shooting took place in front of BRAVA’s then newly
acquired facility at 24th and York Streets.
Newspaper coverage of these events stereotyped and misrepresented
the local youth and neighborhood. BRAVA felt compelled to respond
by engaging young artists to script and stage first-hand accounts
of Mission life. Through offering to youth mentorship relationships
with exciting and inspiring actors and theatre professionals, and
engaging them in positive experiences with self-expression and creativity,
Gavin and BRAVA believed they could affect life changes for the young
participants. The challenge was to get opposing groups on the same
stage during the course of the project. In a pilot project that year,
a cluster of neighborhood organizations advised BRAVA and helped
the theater offer workshops in different community locations in order
to engage youth with differing gang affiliations. They achieved very
successful results leading to a culminating performance at the Cowell
Theater. This was followed by a 1998 workshop and performance.
For the 1999 Teatro Armonia effort, supported in part by the Creative
Work Fund, director and designer Ellen Sebastian Chang led the process
for an extraordinary group of actors and directors, playwright Naomi
Iizuki, and 28 youth. The theatrical style and script were built
through a process of layering personal stories by the youth—stories
drawn from their interactions among themselves, at school, in the
street, and in their homes. The script was developed over a six-month
period. Much of the Creative Work Fund grant was invested in transforming
the script into a performance—developing the young people’s
acting skills and shaping their vision for a theatrical piece. Michael
Torres, Andrea Thome, and Sean San Jose, taught the youth acting
skills. Chang provided the direction and design for Mariposa.
The National Theater Artists Residency Project of Theater Communications
Group—an initiative funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts and
National Endowment for the Arts, sponsored Naomi Iizuka’s participation.
Lead artist Ellen Sebastian Chang is a director, writer, and creative
consultant. Among many professional affiliations, she was the co-founder
and artistic director (1986-1995) of Life on the Water, a nationally
and internationally known presenting and producing organization.
Chang also is or was part of several other Creative Work Fund projects,
serving as director for Jon Jang and James Newton’s When
Sorrow Turns to Joy, and for Kitka’s The Rusalki Cycle.
At the Mariposa project’s outset, Chang wrote:
Teatro Armonia is the shot in the arm that is needed to invigorate
the theater making process, its older artists (like myself) and its
audience…. I am challenged by the voice and style of youth.
I have an aspiration to challenge youth to take a deeper look at
their own lives through the symbols they embrace and the metaphors
they live by.
I also sense the importance of sharing beauty and I believe that
many young people lack beauty in their lives and are too often subjects
of the tyranny of reality (rap music that is only about gangs and
violence and TV that insists on being as “realistic” as
possible). It is my goal to invest in each of these young people
the power of creation, the glory of the imagination, and a love for
the hard repetitive work that must be done to reach the latter.
BRAVA is one of a small number of theaters in the United States
that specializes in the creation of new work, and it is the only
one whose primary purpose is to produce and present world premieres
by women of color playwrights. Its productions project onto the American
stage an aesthetic that is simultaneously multicultural and feminist,
while its comprehensive theater training programs serve multicultural
women and at-risk youth. BRAVA has received numerous awards for artistic
and administrative excellence, including the 1996 San Francisco
Bay Guardian “Local Hero” Award and the San
Francisco Focus Magazine/Stoli Artistic Achievement Award. Its
productions have won Los Angeles Dramalogue Awards, the Bay Area
Theater Critics Circle’s award for “Best Play,” and
the Will Glickman Award. BRAVA also has received three national awards
from the Fund for New American Plays.
Playwright Naomi Iizuka (standing, center) with members of Teatro
Armonia
Ellen Sebastian Chang
Ellen Sebastian Chang is a director, writer, and creative consultant.
She began her career as a lighting designer and technician and served
as the technical director and lighting designer for The Blake Street
Hawkeyes from 1979-1983. Her directorial work is highly influenced
by her love of and affinity with the movement, color, and temperature
of light and shadow. Chang was the co-founder and artistic director
of Life on the Water, a nationally and internationally known presenting
and producing organization at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center
from 1986 through 1995. She has had successful working relationships
with many solo performers, including Awela Makeba, Anne Galjour,
Whoopi Goldberg, Holly Hughes, Leonard Pitt, Bill Talen, and Charlie
Varon.
Currently, Chang is a directing and producing consultant with the
Zellerbach Family Foundation’s Technical Assistance Program.
She is one of a handful of artists to receive two Creative Work Fund
grants: in her second project she collaborated with Kitka, a women’s
vocal ensemble, to create a new work based on Eastern European folk
culture. She also has contributed to projects with Jon Jang, Michael
Chih Ming Hornbuckle, and others.
Cast members of Mariposa: The Journey Home
Directing Credits
- Thieves in the Temple
of Hip Hop, solo performance by Aya de Leon (2004)
- Invisible Lines: The
Healing and The Welcoming, a collaboration with Lauren Elder
and the Oakland Housing Authority, a neighborhood theater and
dance performance in the Peralta District of Oakland, California
(2001, 2003)
- The Gentleman Caller,
soundscape location and radio production created for the front and
back porch of a private home (2001)
- KAWIT
LEGONG: Prince Karna’s Dream, with Gamelon Sekar Jeya and Shadowlight
Productions, Cal Performances, University of California, Berkeley,
California (2001, 2003)
- When Sorrow Turns to
Joy, with Jon Jang and James Newton and members of the Bejing
Opera, Cal Performances, University of California, Berkeley,
California and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2000)
- Game of Life,
Suz Takeda (2000)
- Close Encounters of the
Third World, 18 Mighty Mountain Warriors, Latina Theatre
Lab, Asian American Theatre Company, and Culture Clash (2000)
- Don’t
You Ever Call Me Anything But Mother, John O’Keefe,
performed by Helen Shumaker (2000)
- Walkin-Talkin’ Bill
Hawkins, William Allen Taylor for the stage and as a documentary
for “Lost and Found Sound,” the Millennium Radio
Project for National Public Radio (1999)
- Lily Daw and the Three
Ladies, Word for Word, Magic Theater (1998)
- Teatro Armonia, Brava!
For Women in the Arts (1998)
- Mr. Backlash,
Allison Wright, at Venue 9 (1998)
- Dark Passages, Miya
Masaoka, Asian Art Museum (1998)
- Klezmer Mania! Cal
Performances, University of California, Berkeley, California
(1998)
- The
Blues I’m Playing, Langston
Hughes, Word for Word, touring production in Frances (1998)
- Solo Pieces of the Quilt, monologues
by Danny Hoch, Octavio Solis, and Erin Cressida Wilson for Sean
San Jose Blackman (1997)
- Second Skins,
environmental fashion show, The Exploratorium, San Francisco, California
(1997)
- STUFF, Coco Fusco
and Nao Bustamante (1997)
- Mission Possible, Brava!
Youth Theater, Brava! For Women in the Arts (1997)
- G-O-to the D, adaptation
of George Bernard Shaw’s The Adventures of the Black Girl
in Search of God, broadcast on “Sound Print,” National
Public Radio (1997)
- Sanctified, based
on the writings of Zora Neale Hurston, San Francisco premiere
followed by tour to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Miami, and Texas
(1988)
- Your Place is No Longer
With Us (writer and director), created in a Victorian mansion
(1982)
Awards
- San Francisco
Bay Guardian second place fiction award for “Little
Miss Echo” (1997)
- Bay
Area Theater Critics Circle Award for New Directions in Theater, Your Place is No
Longer With Us (1982)
Cast members of Mariposa: The Journey Home
San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown addresses audience at Mariposa: The
Journey Home
|
