This is the fifth installment of my newsletter about theater, process and practice. If you’re new: Welcome! You can find previous installments here: We All Need a Prehistory, A Heap Of Broken Images, The Art of Transitions, and Taroturgy.

👋 Hello again, friends!

It feels good to be back after a summer hiatus and a whirlwind start to the semester. As many of you know, I made the big move to Atlanta to begin my new job at Emory University. And so far, I’m loving it.

My colleagues in the Theater Studies department have welcomed me with true Southern hospitality (think baskets full of Georgia peaches, welcome parties, and endless patience with all my questions). The students are incredibly bright and eager to learn, which makes teaching a joy. Plus, I lucked out with a fantastic apartment in a hip neighborhood right next to Atlanta’s BeltLine – a sprawling walking/biking trail that’s basically a wonderland of restaurants, breweries, quirky shops, public art, and cool repurposed industrial buildings.

During my first month here I was invited to direct a staged reading of The Successful Life of 3 at Theater Emory. This 1965 absurdist gem by María Irene Fornés explores masculine rivalry inside a love triangle with the zippy energy of a vaudeville.

Fornés was a true visionary —she’s been called “Mother Avant-Garde,” “the greatest and least known dramatist of our time”— and her influence on US theater is immense. (Seriously, Paula Vogel once said that every American playwright’s life is divided into two stages: before reading Fornés and after.)

My fascination with Fornés began in college, when I played a torture-loving lieutenant in her chilling play The Conduct of Life. In preparation for the role I traded my long hair for the harsh lines of a military cut, started my mornings with jumping-jacks, pushups and pull ups, and studied Marguerite Feitlowitz’s A Lexicon of Terror: Argentina and the Legacies of Torture. I also worked with a medical expert to understand the precise physiological effects of a bullet wound to the chest. The work paid off: audience members weren’t shy about their disgust for the character. “Psychopath,” “terrifying,” and “most disturbing death onstage” were among the more memorable comments I got.

The philosopher Agnes Callard argues that “art is for seeing evil.”

Fornés’s The Conduct of Life and my current project about family history and Spain’s Fascist past feel like siblings. Both sit on a continuum that engages the aesthetic enterprise of making “evil” visible, of interrogating its mechanisms and our fascination with it.

So let me turn now to the family history project and share some new developments.

Right before rehearsals for The Successful Life of 3 started, I hopped over to Berlin for Humanity in Action’s Democracy Fellowship conference. There, I had the opportunity to present my School of Memory workshop (a ‘companion piece’ of sorts to the performance I’m creating where I can engage participants in a more interactive dialogue around questions of historical memory).

On my way to Berlin, I stopped in Madrid to see my family and delve into Spain’s National Military Archives. I was on a mission to uncover information about my great-grandfather, who was executed by Fascist troops at the end of the Civil War in retaliation for a crime he may or may not have participated in at the beginning of the war.

What I found was like stumbling into a postmodern novel: a narrative splintered across hundreds of documents like letters, depositions, and death certificates; a chorus of unreliable narrators; contradictory accounts; a chilling core of evil. Rather than clarify, the documents cast a cloak of ambiguity over the events that unfolded in that Spanish village almost a century ago.

But amidst the chaos in the archive, I stumbled upon something extraordinary: my great-grandfather’s signature.

In the absence of photographs or any other tangible traces, this simple inscription felt powerful and moving. A direct link to a man lost to history.

After coming back from Europe, I started collaborating with video artist Attilio Rigotti. Based in New York, Attilio is originally from Chile, and has become my primary partner in exploring the intricacies of family and national history. He’s a founding member of Glitch, an “interdisciplinary company creating work to explore and expand intersections among the digital, the physical, and the spiritual.”

Attilio and I have been collaborating remotely, sending each other small ‘digital gestures’ that might become part of the show.

In one of our Zoom sessions, he introduced me to ‘datamoshing,’ the process of manipulating the data of media files in order to achieve visual or auditory effects when the file is decoded.

He mentioned this process as a potential avenue to dramatize the way the archive can insert itself into a person’s being.

For instance, take this description of my great-grandfather from the military file I saw in Madrid:

Jesús Calleja Doñoro was affiliated with the UGT [a left wing trade union]. At the beginning of the war, he denounced the town’s sexton when he tried to flee. The sexton was arrested by the red militias, and murdered in Calleja’s presence in Los Santos de la Humosa. [Calleja] was a great propagandist of Marxist ideas. He is a dangerous element for the national cause.

(Let’s leave aside for the moment the ‘objectivity’ or lack thereof of this account.)

Next, take that picture of me as a toddler at the beach that I put at the top of today’s newsletter.

Convert the photo file into a text file. You then open that text file and copy and paste any text you want inside the photo’s original code (in this case the description from the military file).

You then re-convert the text file back to an image file, and the result is this:

In Genesis, after Cain kills Abel (myth’s first civil war), God marks Cain.

Nobody knows exactly what the mark was or what it looked like, but it was visible to others, perhaps a Hebrew or Sumerian letter placed on either the face or the arm.1 The Hebrew word for mark (א֔וֹת) means letter, sign, omen, warning, gesture, miracle, wonder, remembrance.

With datamoshing I can both remember, and literally mark myself with letters and text.

In a sense, this project has become a way to mark; a search for Cain, for a mark that transcends generations, embedded in the very fabric of my family tree.

Share

Working remotely on what ultimately will be a live, embodied event poses many challenges and comes with frustrations. But it also opens up new possibilities.

To finish my update, I’m excited to announce that I will be part of a piece presented at RedCat’s New Original Works Festival in Los Angeles in just two weeks.

Ajani Brannum (who facilitated that incredible dramaturgical session I wrote about here) has invited me and three other collaborators to join them for CONGRESS, a “performance project that examines some links between patriarchal wounds and creative practice […] a metaphysical reality show — a broadcast from the void.”

I’m contributing remotely and asynchronously to the piece, and I’m really grateful that Ajani asked me to be part of this.

If you’re in LA November 14 through 16, please come see the work!

You can learn more about the festival, and buy tickets on this link.

That’s all from me for now. As always, feel free to drop me a line to say hi, or recommend this newsletter to a friend. And if you come through Atlanta please let me know!

Leave a comment