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