JOSÉ TORRES-TAMA & ARTEFUTURO PRODUCTIONS
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  • VIDEO CORTADITOS
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  • Taco Truck Theater
  • PhotoNOLA2020
  • VERDE GRITOS PANDEMICOS En Español
  • Teatro Sin Fronteras Late Night
  • Photography
  • WORKS ON PAPER
  • BOOKS
  • Free People of Color
  • TOUR
  • PRESS
  • Pictorial Chronicles of Anti-Immigrant Hysteria
ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS 
is a sci-fi Latino noir genre-bending performance that is visually dynamic,
profoundly moving, hilariously absurd, and challenges the anti-immigrant hysteria
gripping the United States of AMNESIA.

Informed by a docu-theater process of filmed interviews the artist conducted over a ten-year period in the cities of Houston, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Tulsa, and Washington DC, Torres-Tama "documents" the lives of the "undocumented" in an effort to humanize a people dehumanized for political gains in a system that readily exploits their labor.    


ALIENS sold-out a two hundred seat theater at the RUTAS 2022 International
Performance Festival in Toronto, Canada in September.

BROWN University hosted two
ALIENS performances, as part of their
"MARKING TIME: Art in the Age of Incarceration" Fall 2022 Events.
 
In a visually stunning one-man performance using ritual as art, José Torres-Tama takes you on a painful journey from the sacred to the profane as he embodies the dozen most dramatic of the 100 stories he personally video recorded over a ten-year period as his magnus opus effort to “document the undocumented.”​
---DC Theatre Arts 


The performance is timely, intelligent, heart-wrenching, thought-provoking, and quite funny.
​In Aliens, audiences are able to see a performance artist at the top of his game. 


--- The Theatre Times (Houston)


In a scintillating, utterly absorbing seventy-five minutes, Mr. Torres-Tama dissects the current immigrant situation from a personal viewpoint that reaches back through American history to its earliest days and follows that thread to the present moment… José Torres-Tama is a performance artist of the highest caliber.    -—Theatre Notes (Los Angeles)



UnU

University of Rhode Island ALIENS Residency
Tuesday, Sept 12 - Tuesday, Sept 19, 2023


ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS 
Friday, September 15 @ 8pm
Edward's Auditorium
Free for all students, faculty, and community at large.



Other Recent Touring Projects

ALUNA Theatre & RUTAS International Performing Arts Festival 
in Toronto, Canada hosted three performances of 
ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS 
on Sept 29 and Oct 1 & 2, 2022.


 Space One Eleven in Birmingham, AL,
presented 
ALIENS on Oct 15, 2022,
as part of their Social Justice Festival during
Hispanic Heritage Month.
Torres-Tama's residency from Oct 12-16, 2022 was supported by the
National Performance Network. 

The
College of the Sequoias in Visalia, CA
presented the show, as part of a residency from Oct 25-27, 2022.


In New Orleans, Torres-Tama performed an excerpt of ALIENS
for the Association of American Studies Conference on Nov 3, 2022. 

ALIENS at BROWN University
The
Center for Latin American Studies, 
the
Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice,
and the Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre
in Providence, Rhode Island hosted
​a one-week residency
from Nov 13-18, 2022.
In collaboration, these BROWN U entities presented two performances of
ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS
on Thursday & Friday, November 17 & 18, 2022.



About ALIENS:
In 2019, t
he anti-immigrant hysteria reached brutal proportions with the mass killings at an  El Paso Walmart, and award-winning performance artist, published playwright and poet,
José Torres-Tama takes on the haters in ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS.


He offers an inventive tour de force of heroic stories with heart, humanity, and humor that challenge the vilification of a people in search of the elusive "American Dream."



In the Latin American tradition, the artist bears a social responsibility to articulate the people’s struggle
--la lucha de le gente--when they are denied effective means to have their voices heard
against colonial oppression.

ALIENS is a creative response to a system that strategically attacks immigrants while exploiting our labor.
If artists do not challenge such systemic hypocrisies, then we abet the abuse of power with our silence.
--JTT
 


ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS
is an inventive Sci-Fi Latino Noir
performance solo that exposes the hypocrisies of a system
that vilifies the same people whose labor it readily exploits.


Satirizing the absurd status of immigrants as “extraterrestrials” through a sci-fi prism informed by comic film shorts inspired by Star Wars and The Matrix films, Torres-Tama deftly shape-shifts into a variety of “aliens,” who challenge a nation that has migrated to the “Dark Side."

He offers a clarion call for the
United States of AMNESIA to remember
​the words emblazoned on its iconic Statue of Liberty,

Give us your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
the wretched refuse of your teeming shore
.


ALIENS also chronicles the rise in hate crimes against Latinx communities,
whether they are US citizens, permanent residents, or undocumented people.
The dehumanization of immigrants has spiraled into a societal norm, and all brown Latin Americans
are seen as suspect--akin to terrorists and demonized as political scapegoats.


ALIENS was developed by  a docu-theater process of filmed interviews the artist conducted
with heroic people, who shared their epic border-crossing stories to escape economical
and political despair, and the profoundly moving performance has been
critically acclaimed for putting a human heart and face
on the persecuted immigrant.



The ALIENS collaborators that have contributed their genius skills are: 
John Grimsley, sci-fi lighting design
Audio Dali, sci-fi sound-scapes
Bruce France, sci-fi film shorts
Claudia Copeland, classical vocalist
with a recording of a 13th century Ode
to the Black Madonn
a.


ALIENS was developed through a National Performance Network Creation Fund Award,
and co-commissioned by MECA in Houston,
​ the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans,
and GALA Hispanic Theatre in Washington, DC.



ALIENS, IMMIGRANTS & OTHER EVILDOERS
opens with a Kabuki-like performance ritual, and José Torres-Tama inhabits
an enigmatic and silent "Alien" performance persona that enters
carrying a large red wooden cross with dollar bills
hanging from its center post.

A haunting recording of a 13th century ode to the Black Madonna plays,
and creates a "faux religiosity" for a truly conceptual
performance ​ritual that is visually stunning.  
Exploring the Underbelly of the "North American Dream Mythology"
& Creating Performance Art as an Act of Resistance to Cultural Amnesia


The performance artist has to have the courage to expose his/hers/their open wounds
on stage for personal pains to speak to our universal truths. --EL JTT 
 
Since 1992, José Torres-Tama has written eleven different solo shows including his critically acclaimed The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina, which chronicled his dramatic escape on a stolen school bus three days after the levees breached in September 2005.

The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina (Toured nationally & Internationally from 2005-2011)

At the invitation of Leo Garcia, Highways ED, The Cone of Uncertainty was mounted at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica, CA by November 2005--three months after the apocalyptic abandonment of New Orleans and its people by the Bush Administration.

It was the first show on the stages of the country written, created, and performed by an actual survivor of the storm and "Katrina refugee".
In addition, The Cone remains the only performance on national stages that immediately chronicled the contributions thousands of Latina/no immigrants made to the reconstruction, and the myriad human rights violations they were subjected to while resurrecting New Orleans from the dead.


In the fall of 2006, then Ohio State University Theater Dept. Chair, Dr. Leslie Ferris, invited José for an artist-in-residency program that was crucial to the development of The Cone. In fall 2007, The Cone was presented to 300 scholars at the Association of Theater in Higher Education (ATHE) Conference in New Orleans, and Torres-Tama brought them to their feet with this deeply emotional, visually engaging, and politically provocative performance  while the city was still in ruins and in full recovery mode--only two years after the federal flood.

From 2005 to 2011, The Cone of Uncertainty toured nationally and internationally, and was performed at Roehampton University and Live Art Development in London, the Bluecoat Art Centre in Liverpool, and the Centre for Performance Research in Aberystwyth, Wales. American Theater Magazine profiled The Cone of Uncertainty tour through the UK and Wales in their May 2009 issue.


In U.S. academic institutions, The Cone was presented at Vanderbilt University, University of Maryland, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, New World Theater at U Mass Amherst, Kalamazoo College, Geneseo State University of New York, GCSU, LSU, and others.

$CASINOAMERICA$: A Performance Chronicle of the Hoboken Fires & a Culture that Glorifies Greed
(Toured nationally & Internationally from 1996-2003)

Other performances include $CASINOMAREICA$, and this is the only performance that chronicles the Hoboken Fires of the 70s and 80s that burned out a community of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Ecuadorians in one of the most brutal cases of "urban renewal" and gentrification exacted on people of color. It was hailed as a "Renaissance" for the Square Mile city at the edge of the Hudson. City elders have done everything possible to bury this history, and the tenement buildings were renovated as high-price condominiums with a view of the Manhattan Skyline.

We lost family members in those brutal fires that burned my people out of Hoboken, and it took me 20 years to begin exploring this trauma through performance art. --JTT

Hundreds of Latina/no families were displaced while many men, women, and children were burned alive in LATE-NIGHT landlord-arson fires exacted for SPIC REMOVAL! $CASINOMARICA$ also toured internationally, and was performed at Schindler's Factory in Krakow, Poland for an international performance festival in 2003 and the PERFORMA 2000 International Festival in Maribor, Slovenia.

It too received critical acclaim, and Torres-Tama's wok began developing greater national attention. In 1996, he was awarded a Regional Artist Project Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to first develop $CASINOMARICA$ as a performance installation in New Orleans.

What Critics Said of $CASINOAMERICA$:


Torres-Tama is both a versatile writer who can be lyrically evocative as well as bitingly humorous, and an impressive performer.
---The Philadelphia Inquirer


CasinoAmerica knows how to keep the eye and the ear stimulated and the mind engaged... Torres-Tama combination of imagination and technique is impressive. ---The Times Picayune (New Orleans)

Dressed in black but wearing a red cape as he dons the role of El Mephisto Moderno, Torres-Tama takes the audience on a ride through human weakness. It is often funny, and sadly true.
---Art Papers (Atlanta)

His dramatic monologues maintain that notion of chance and mirror our culture's exploitation of one another and our apparent oblivion to that invasive cancer of greed.
---New Orleans Art Review


Other Solo Performances:
Between the Pen & the Sword / In Exile Close to the Equator (Toured nationally 1999 - 2005)
Channeling the Spirits (2004-2006)
The Dream Knows More Than You (2002-2003)

Letters to an Invisible Father (2003)
American Mantra & Other Rituals (2001-2002)
The Chain Gang Project (1998-1999)
$CASINOAMERICA$: The Gamble for the American Dream toured nationally & internationally (1996 - 2004)

We Are Patriots with Dark Faces: A Big-Mac Hip-Hop Attack Exploring Consumer
Culture & Vilification of Black & Brown Men on TV, Film, & Mainstream Media

(His first major breakthrough solo toured nationally & internationally from 1994 to 2000)
Songs of Love & Despair (1992-1993) Commissioned by the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans


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  • Home
  • About
  • SHOWS
  • DOCUMENTING THE UNDOCUMENTED
  • NO GUAC SHIRTS
  • Contact
  • US OF AMNESIA PERFORMANCE
  • Pictorial Chronicles of Anti-Immigrant Hysteria
  • COLOR OF MUSIC
  • ART STORE
  • LECTURES WORKSHOPS
  • NO GUACAMOLE PERFORMANCE
  • WRITINGS
  • Community Ensemble Projects
  • Poetry Without Borders
  • Immigrant Dreams
  • Channeling the Spirits
  • PhotoNOLA2022
  • VIDEO CORTADITOS
  • TACO TRUCK FILM
  • Taco Truck Theater
  • PhotoNOLA2020
  • VERDE GRITOS PANDEMICOS En Español
  • Teatro Sin Fronteras Late Night
  • Photography
  • WORKS ON PAPER
  • BOOKS
  • Free People of Color
  • TOUR
  • PRESS
  • Pictorial Chronicles of Anti-Immigrant Hysteria