Salvage Vanguard Theater (SVT), an Austin, Texas-based theater company, will be in New York City May 22-25, 2017 for a “Next Stage” residency with the Drama League Theater Center (32 Avenue of the Americas). Director Jenny Larson will be developing performance piece Casta written by Adrienne Dawes ’14 in collaboration with composer Graham Reynolds and visual artist Beth Consetta Rubel. Casta is inspired by a unique genre of portraiture that grew in popularity over the 18th century in Nueva España (Mexico). Casta paintings depicted various different racial mixtures in the New World, arranged in a specific hierarchy of race and status, as defined by Spanish elites. The complexities of contemporary racial and ethnic identity(ies) are echoed in this distant mirror of casta paintings. How do Old World anxieties about ambiguous identities reflect contemporary biases? How can the interaction between performance and visual art, specifically portraiture, open a window for a unique audience experience about racial identity? Reservations available online.
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