Border Culture Explored in NOGALES: STORYTELLERS CARTEL COUNTRY, A Play by Richard Montoya

Nogales: Storytellers in Cartel Country by Richard Montoya (American Night, Water & Power) of the acclaimed Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash (A Bowl of Beings, Chavez Ravine), will be performed at Mesa Arts Center (MAC) Nov. 17-20 as part of the MAC's Performing Live Series.

Nogales: Storytellers in Cartel Country traces in reverse the devastating headlines of a Mexican boy shot by US Border Patrol across the border fence. San Francisco theater artist, Sean San Jose, co-founder of Campo Santo, directs. Show times vary; tickets available at the Mesa Arts Center box office, at mesaartscenter.com or by calling 480-644-6500.

THE PLAY

Richard Montoya and ensemble members from San Francisco's Campo Santo unpack the story of a Nogales boy, shot in the back 15 times by a US Border patrol agent. Interviews with family members, Tohono O'odham community, gun enthusiasts, street kids, and Sheriff Joe Arpaio himself mix with multiple video projections, visual art installations, and ample humor to go beyond the headlines to explore this real life tragicomic theater of the border.

California artists Montoya, San Jose, and filmographer Joan Osato traveled to Phoenix and on through to Nogales, Mexico to immerse themselves in the border region. The play is the product of conversations with the people they met as they traversed the border landscape. The play is a journey into border culture, grappling with the flux of immigration and migration. Tensions rise under anti-immigration sentiments responsible for the militarization of the border. The play is a meditation of place, crossing over, crossing borders, bullets crossing and lives crossing.

INNOVATIVE STORYTELLING

The play's innovative approach to tackling a complicated subject gives the audience a deeper and unique perspective into the characters and situations presented. Nogales: Storytellers in Cartel Country is crafted in the style of more than 30 years of Culture Clash work, where plays as performance pieces are created from going into places and following many threads of a central issue. Complimenting this method is Campo Santo's interdisciplinary aesthetics. Artistic director of San Francisco's acclaimed Campo Santo Theatre, Sean San Jose interprets Montoya's interview-based script style through a distinctly Bay Area, "hybrid performance" aesthetic, which San Jose pioneered over the last decade: a place-keeping multimedia/interdisciplinary theatricality developed through working with non-traditional theatre collaborators like hip hop artists, installation artists, print makers, videographers, puppeteers, and multimedia artists. The end result is a "post-dramatic" theatre experience that is part performance art, documentary theatre, spoken word, and gallery exhibition.

The process that informs Nogales: Storytellers in Cartel Country is ethnographic in nature: interviewing, investigating, outreaching, being in a place and regenerating stories and art from these authentic experiences. Nogales: Storytellers in Cartel Country is told in full focus of poetic text, clinical language, film/video, song, dance, spoken word, dreams and nightmare escapes.

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