Stories of feminine perseverance and las voladoras, women who fly in a dance originating in Puebla, Mexico, will come alive through Mexican boleros, jazz, funk and the classic rock of the 1960s this weekend in Mott Haven.
Six months after its premiere in California, the theatrical concert “Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind” will be at Pregones/ Puerto Rican Traveling Theater on Walton Avenue this weekend only for shows Friday and Saturday evening.
“This novel about four intersecting freeways being built through the heart of a neighborhood, is a landmark text,” Grise said in an email to the Mott Haven Herald. “Every word spoken comes from the novel. Most of the songs come from the novel. And yet it is not quite an adaptation of the novel. It’s a concert.”
It’s also a story that resonates in the Bronx where neighborhoods were destroyed by highway building in the same era and where activists today continue to battle their environmental and health effects.
Grise, an interdisciplinary artist and playwright, collaborated with Chicana activist and musician Martha Gonzalez for the production. The collaboration is both artistic and a call for unity.
She imagines “a world where we can dance and sing together, a world where we are all free. We are coming to the Bronx to do just that,” she said. “This is a performance about freedom. Mott Haven is a community very dear to our hearts.”
Grise said she was inspired by the spaces helping artists have a place in Mott Haven like AAA3A, La Morada and Pregones/ Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.
“In some ways this is our way of paying tribute to these spaces of creativity, community, mutual aid and solidarity,” she added.
The hour-long production was inspired by Their Dogs Came With Them, a novel of magical realism by Helena María Viramontes, which tells the story of four young Mexican-American women in East L.A. in the 1960s navigating the emergent Chicano Movement, gangs, segregation and the L.A. government building a highway through the neighborhood.
The novel’s title, “Their Dogs Came With Them,” refers to a quote in historian Miguel León-Portilla’s “The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico” about the Spanish Conquistadors’ attack on the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan—present day Mexico City.
Like the Conquistadors destroying the community of Tenochtitlan, in the novel, the city constructs highways isolating parts of the neighborhood from each other. Each book character finds her own way to cope with the isolation and tumult.
This book draws inspiration from the history of LA constructing the East Los Angeles Interchange, which they displaced what the American Society of Landscape Architects estimates as almost 11,000 residents. East Los Angeles is historically a Latino community.
The two performances will feature music from Afro-Cuban and Mexican rhythms, jazz, funk, gospel and rock. The featured artists are artists Lulu Matute—who will be acting—, Gonzalez, Tylana Enomoto and Juan Perez.
Tickets are available for purchase on the Pregones/ Puerto Rican Traveling Theater website. The prices vary for different groups with $37 tickets for adults and wheelchair spaces, $27 tickets for seniors and students and $52 tickets for supporters.
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