It was an amazing month, having Los Muñequitos de Matanzas back in the U.S. after nearly a decade. We are so grateful to everyone who turned out for a performance or a workshop, and to everyone who hosted and toasted these great musicians.  We hope it’s a real step forward for more people-to-people exchange between our country and Cuba.

At Los Muñequitos final show in NYC, Robert Browning brought MAPP’s Ann Rosenthal onstage during his opening remarks to hail MAPP’s leadership in bringing Los Muñequitos to the U.S.  Ann’s eloquent remarks about MAPP’s decision to seize the moment after the 2008 presidential election, and to open the door to renewed cultural exchange with Cuba, were greeted with enthusiastic applause.

For MAPP, the evening grew even sweeter when, during the second half of the show, Los Muñequitos stopped playing and their manager Caridad Diez came onto the stage to read a statement of appreciation.  She expressed their deep gratitude to all the people they’d met on the tour, but especially to MAPP, not only for bringing them to the U.S., but for doing so, as Cari said, in a way that allowed them to perform with dignity.  She called Ann up to the stage and presented her with beautiful flowers from the group.

Then they went back to playing–and brought down the house!

Let us just say, the pleasure and gratitude was ours too, to the Muñequitos for sharing their music and culture so openly with all of us.

Barbaro Ramos leading a dance workshop with Max Pollak at the Cornerstone Center for the Arts

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This interview took place on February 9, 2011 to discuss Nameless forest, a multidisciplinary performance work conceived by Dean Moss and developed in collaboration with contemporary Korean sculptor, installation artist and poet, Sungmyung Chun. Nameless forest is co-produced by Gametophyte Inc. and MAPP International Productions, and is scheduled to premiere at The Kitchen May 19-21 & 26-28, 2011.

Josh Lubin-Levy: Before we talk about Nameless forest, I wanted to ask you a little about the process of choreographing this work.  There seems to be a contradiction between the often violent content of your work, and the affectionate and caring way I’ve seen you interact with your performers in the rehearsal room.  What is the relationship of this caring nature to bringing such a visceral choreography to your dancers?

Dean Moss: Well, you know in American society violence is so much a substitute for sex.  And so I think it’s an incredibly intimate thing to be violent, especially to be violent on stage.  And part of the use of violence on stage is approaching metaphor in a very particular way – in a very direct way.  To get a performer to go with you, you have to be intimate with that performer.  And you have to have a kind of trust with that performer.  Developing a mode in which you can work with the performer to bring out an activity they might not be comfortable with.  Developing that process is really important to me because I want the use of violence to be specific and I need the performer’s understanding. I need this to be read as behavior in the performer, so that it’s generated by the performer and not that I am directing them.  Part of the interest in my work and part of the reason my work has moved into audience participation is because I am interested in behavior and what happens when you have a kind of behavior-as-form presented on stage.  Read the rest of this entry »

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From: Louis Head
Sent: Wednesday, April 13, 2011 8:23 AM

Hi – First, this not so personal letter is being sent to let you know, if you did not already, that the greatest rumba ensemble in the world Los Muñequitos de Matanzas, direct from Matanzas, Cuba, will be here in New Mexico this coming Monday, April 18 in Albuquerque, and Tuesday, April 19 in Santa Fe.

But then also I want to remind all of you receiving this that you played a significant role in making this happen by joining thousands of artists, arts presenters, writers, cultural entrepreneurs and cultural workers throughout the country in demanding – first of Bush, and then in no less compromising terms of Obama – that Cuban cultural workers, artists, intellectuals and others be allowed to enter the United States to share with their counterparts and the public here. It was an effort far ahead of the curve of the Obama Administration, and it worked. The first Cuban artists since 2003 were allowed into the U.S. during the summer of 2009. Negotiating the terrain necessary to procure visas remains onerous, but this and related efforts have also resulted in the return to the policies of the Clinton Administration to allow some travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba.

Maybe it is cliché to quote Frederick Douglass that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” Perhaps though, given everything we have witnessed since January 2009 – and also as we approach the 150th Anniversary of the abolition of chattel slavery, to which Douglass dedicated his life – it is apt to reflect on that thought. We should also realize that, opportunities to simply see such talent from Cuba can be taken away in the blink of an eye again, as happened in 2003 under the previous administration. Let’s not lose sight of this.

I meanwhile hope that everyone can make it to one of the appearances, or to the Wednesday evening workshop in Albuquerque, as we welcome Los Muñequitos de Matanzas to New Mexico for the first time.

We should thank those presenters in New Mexico that have taken on the still risky venture of presenting works by Cuban artists and cultural workers during the past year. Let’s all support them.

I especially want to thank Outpost Productions, the National Hispanic Cultural Center and the Lensic Performing Arts Center, along with our good friends at MAPP International Productions in New York, for bringing Los Muñequitos to us next week.

Louis Head
Albuquerque

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We had fun sharing these videos with you over the last couple weeks and hope you enjoyed them too!  A BIG thank you to all of the people who joined the MAPP Artist Challenge and helped us not only meet, but exceed, our goal!

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David Roussève’s Saudade (duet by Taisha Paggett & Olivier Tarpaga)

First off, I have to admit to being a pretentious lil’ twit!  So now, with that off my chest, I can get grandiose!  Simply put: I am trying to change the world.  That’s no metaphor, that’s literal.  (Yep, warned you it would be pretentious!)  In this day and age, maybe the notion of ‘changing the world’ seems so darn ‘old school’ (I know… I know… my child of the ‘60’s blood is showing.)  But, in using performance to inject whatever small portion of humanity I can into our crazy, postmodern, postcolonial, global, tsunami-infested, earthquake prone, ‘3-war America’, topsey-turvey-to-the-point-of-delerium, world… I hope to change it one viewer /participant/ patron/ audience member/ community-involved person at a time.  So really, what I suppose I’m intending to say is not that I can change the world, but that art can change the world.

And so what’s this got to do with MAPP?  Simply put: I adore MAPP, I love MAPP, I am inspired by MAPP because MAPP makes me believe we all CAN, indeed, change the world.  MAPP is holding tight to the principles—however old school—that by supporting the creation, production, and touring of performance works that ask challenging questions, that provokes hard-hitting conversation through equally hard-hitting artistry, and that seek to inject a tiny bit of breathing room into breathless lives that have no room to breath… well, with a little help from us, art can indeed change the world.

In MAPP’s hands, those old school principles seem vitally new.  I don’t know that I have ever seen such dedication from such darn good, thrillingly competent folks.  In the boldness of the artists they present and the purpose behind their mission, MAPP makes me feel good about the present state of the arts.  And that alone makes them worth supporting.

Thank goodness MAPP is a vital part of the arts economy.  To say that they are ‘artist supportive’ would be the understatement of the century.  Please support MAPP.  What they do for the field, through what they do for artists, is truly invaluable.  These folks can potentially—dare I say it?—change the world.

-David Roussève

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