Su Teatro + Agua, Sol y Sereno

SU TEATRO: Su Teatro has created more than 20 original full length productions that have toured widely to venues such as New York’s Public Theater, The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio, TX and Los Angeles’ Plaza de la Raza. Su Teatro has been nationally recognized for the artistic excellence of its programs through funding from the Shubert Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre Communications Group, and the American Composers Forum. Born from the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s, Su Teatro (Your Theater) began in 1972 as a student-organized theater group at the University of Colorado at Denver. Throughout the 70s, Su Teatro performed politically charged agitprop plays and skits to support social activism and bolster civil rights causes. The 1980s saw a shift in the artistic output of Su Teatro, who began to develop full length plays focused on demystifying the Chicano identity and celebrating the experiences, history, language, and cultural heritage of Chicanos, Mexicanos, and Latinos throughout the Americas. In 1989, Su Teatro, which up until that time had been a roving theater troupe, purchased the old Elyria School in Northeast Denver. Having a home allowed the organization to expand its programming to include annual arts festivals and an arts education program in addition to a full theater season. In 2010, Su Teatro expanded again, with the purchase and renovation of the Denver Civic Theatre, centrally located in Denver’s Santa Fe Arts District. Having paid its property mortgage in full as of 2020, Su Teatro’s plan is to become a regional Latino cultural arts center—the only one of its kind in the area. www.suteatro.org Follow @SuTeatro on Facebook.

AGUA, SOL Y SERENO: Agua, Sol y Sereno (ASYS), founded by Pedro Adorno and Cathy Vigo in 1993, is a theatrical collective, today composed of 11 artists, whose aesthetic and community work maintains a constant dialogue with social reality and a search for the interior poetics of all human beings. It welcomes various artistic disciplines within the theater, such as: painting, dance, music and writing. Their creation workshops are aimed at exploring the concerns and imagination of people of all ages in all types of communities. ASYS has more than twenty original pieces that start from a deep ecological, historical and solidarity awareness. Their comparsasand performances explore art from the streets addressing local and international issues. An experimental practice rooted in the Caribbean and engagage with the inside and outside worlds make the aesthetic and pedagogical work of ASYS a generative space for processes of great cultural, artistic, and philosophical impact. Follow @aguasolyserenopr on Facebook.

Su Teatro’s INTERVIEW WITH A MEXICAN: The Su Teatro ensemble adapts writer Gustavo Arellano’s column ¡Ask a Mexican! to the stage in the form of Interview with a Mexican. The column was a parody of serious Latinx advice columns, earnest and pandering, attempting to sincerely answer ignorant questions on race and culture. He calls the adaptation a “satirical romp that tackles cultural misunderstanding, misrepresentation and straight up racism.” Those conversations are a jumping off point for a deeper artistic response to all things Mexican. There is no depth into which the conversation cannot plunge. The play, with music, dance, and prizes, is offered with limited subtlety and inspired irreverence in a genuine effort to promote discourse and disruption.

Executive Producer: Mica Garcia de Benavidez. Based on the column ¡Ask a Mexican! by Gustavo Arellano. Adapted and directed for the stage by Anthony J. Garcia. “Taquería Arandas” and “Jaguar Jeopardy” written by Lorenzo González Fontes. “White People Walking Their Dogs” written by Anthony J. Garcia. Featuring: Lorenzo González Fontes, Felicia Gallegos Pettis, Miguel Martimen, Paola Miranda. Music Director: Adolfo Romero. Music Consultant: Daniel Valdez.

Agua, Sol y Sereno’s ANTULIO PARRILLA: Antulio Parrilla: Cooperativista en Gracia is a collective theater piece, premiered in October 2019 and filmed a year later at the Braulio Castillo Theater in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, as part of the virtual theater projects developed by Agua, Sol y Sereno in the midst of the emergence of the coronavirus pandemic. The play tells the life of the most important and radical Monsignor in Puerto Rico, through the gaze of the young people who lived through the social mobilization of the summer of 2019 — one of the most massive and effervescent in the history of the island, which culminated in the resignation of the then governor. These young people, demanding social justice during the demonstrations, evoke the figure of Parrilla Bonilla. With this evocation, Monsignor Antulio appears on the scene to recall —together with his mother and the living spirit of Saint Teresa of Jesus— his ecclesiastical, cooperative, social and political trajectory. The piece —with performances, dance, live music and projections— pays a poetic tribute to the thought and essence of this priest and community leader, revealing that the legacy of his integrity, commitment to human rights and love of neighbor continue to lift an entire people.

Concept, artistic direction, projected paintings: Pedro Adorno Irizarry. Musical director: Ronald Rosario Enríquez. Play Script: Collective creation of Agua, Sol y Sereno with texts by Saint Teresa of Jesus and adaptations of quotes and historical events narrated in the book: Antulio Parrilla Bonilla: Bishop and Prophet of Puerto Rico by Miguel Santiago Santana. Featuring: Jean J. Soto Villarini, Patricia Cay Vázquez, Cathy Vigo Murray, Kenneth Salgado Barreto, and Youth of the Summer of 2019: Tania Adorno Vigo, Coralys Marquez González, Alba Taína Ortiz Olivera, Kenneth Salgado Barreto, Cristina Vives Rodríguez, Paola Adorno Vigo, Héctor “Quique” Rodríguez Rivera, Cecilia Adorno Vigo. Music: Original compositions, arrangements, voice, and guitar by Ronald Rosario Enríquez. Jay Álvarez, violin. William Torres, double bass. Iván Martínez, percussion. Patricia Cay Vázquez, mezzo soprano: composition of “Canción de agua y viento.”

Pregones/PRTT is a Partner of the National Performance Network (NPN). This project is made possible in part by support from the NPN Artist Engagement Fund. Major contributors include the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). For more information visit www.npnweb.org.

This free online program is made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council, and the New York State Council on the Arts, with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. Southwest Airlines is the official airline of Pregones/PRTT. For a full list of our funders, visit www.pregonesprtt.org.