Developing Frontera Aesthetic through New Work Creation

Abstract

Developing Frontera Aesthetic through New Work Creation Kim McKean (bio), Georgina Escobar (bio), and Adriana Domínguez (bio) “It seems to me that the great question that our culture faces now is whether it’s going to have the resilience to redefine itself and take off again.” —Thomas McEvilley1 Creating Monsters On the first day of rehearsal for the University of Texas at El Paso’s (UTEP) semi-devised and collaboratively written new play Monsters We Create, the room buzzed with excitement. The script had been developed over a fifteen-week semester the previous fall, with a team of over fifty student playwrights, actors, and designers involved in creating the piece, led by visiting professor of playwriting Georgina Escobar and assistant professor of theatre Kim McKean. With a production draft fresh off the printer, Escobar and McKean were ready to stage UTEP’s first-ever collaboratively written new play as part of the theatre and dance department’s 2019–20 season. The undertaking of Monsters We Create was significant to the department for several reasons. Chief among them, UTEP had dedicated its 2019–20 season to staging solely Latinx works in response to a lack of BIPOC representation in previous departmental programming. Along with Monsters We Create, the season lineup included works by Karen Zacarías, Josefina López, Adriana Domínguez and Jay Stratton, Virginia Grise, and Andrew Siañez-De La O. Furthermore, on August 3, 2019, three weeks before development was to begin on Monsters We Create, a gunman massacred twenty-three people at a Walmart in El Paso, with the stated aim of targeting people of Mexican descent. The tragedy of the Walmart shooting, set against the backdrop of vitriolic anti-immigrant rhetoric from the Trump White House, forced our community and student body to recognize their vulnerability, making engagement and representation feel more imperative—and making it essential that our students have a voice in telling their own stories. Monsters We Create was an integral element in the season, as it gave our students an opportunity to construct their own narrative, claim ownership over their experience, and oppose the hateful, fallacious narrative promulgated by the president. It also provided playwright Escobar studio space to continue the exploration of her “sci-femme frontera” aesthetic, a fluid approach that combats classical Western demands of form and beauty and uses speculative narrative to act as an aesthetic corollary to the lived experience of inhabiting a border region. Compelled by our work as scholars and practitioners who regularly engage in discussions surrounding programming and representation at our institution, this essay critically examines the development process for Monsters We Create, where three Special Topics courses (Playwriting, Performance, and Design) were employed to create the play. We investigate how, by generating the material through three separate classes rather than a “performer-centric” devising model, our multidisciplinary process became its own unique “border culture”—one in which, as Gloria Anzaldúa describes in Borderlands/La Frontera, “the prohibited and forbidden are [the] inhabitants” of the creative space [End Page 205] (25). Finally, we analyze how redefining and redirecting techniques from Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty advanced the sci-femme frontera aesthetic established in Escobar’s earlier work by actively embracing the inherent “duality” of the Latinx identity of our students. Ultimately, through our semi-devised, collaboratively written new-work creation process, we promoted student engagement and ownership of the artistic process and diversified our department’s audience base by connecting our community more intentionally with work that was created in, and by artists from, the frontera. The Frontera as Setting Monsters We Create is a dystopian femmetasia2 set in the year 2030, in which a climate crisis called the “Big Sink”3 has caused rising sea-water levels to drown the United States’ coasts. Along the border, in a place called “Sun Town,” a series of ominous threats have surfaced. Namely, NAFU (New American Forces Unit) has imposed Malthusian Law, which mandates sterilization camps (STAMPs) for immigrants along the border in order to control the ever-rising population in the desert. Our story follows two immigrant women who have been detained in these camps and sterilized. By activating VOX...