and mama c says...

Laurie Carlos is doing an artist residency at CalArts right now. She is directing my partner writer Asiimwe's second year production and workshopping her performance novel, Pork Chop Wars. Again blessed and grateful for her presence.

Laurie invited me to work with the actors on the Pork Chop Wars and it is reaffirming so much of what I know about rasgos asiaticos and my way of doing theatre. I feel that rasgos asiaticos is also a performance novel. It has the potential to be an epic story. I want to travel to China in 2009 to research, write and live for at least a year.

Here are some quotes from Laurie during our rehearsal:

- As an artist you must work with clear vision all the time.
Even if it is to say you don’t know.
- I felt constrained by the way we are able to talk about history across oceans, multilingually. How did we come to be?
- The American play is too small, the opera too dramatic. The story is epic, the novel performed, lending itself to many different mediums.
- As spirit speaks so does the flesh.
- We are a part of each other’s family tree.
- This story moves all the way to the present, all the way to the past.
- In everyone’s body there is a different history so the words provoke a different sense of history for each person. A collaboration of memory and what is happening right then.
- Every experience that happens is the reason we are here. You never know who you are related to.
- Conjure the restoration of the ancestors.
- This conversation happened long before you were born and will be happening long after you are gone.