BELOVED: A Requiem for Our Dead
because we refuse to forget you
Premiered November 6th and 7th at the Lab, SF and on November 15th, at the Hecho en Califas Festival at La Pena in Berkeley
In this highly anticipated premiere of the newest Mangos With Chili production, we invite you to join us at the crossroads for a night of conjuring, memory, mourning and celebration. Through elegies of story, song, dance, drag and more, the Bay Area’s noted and notorious queer and trans people of color performance crew will honor our erased, fallen and slain queer and trans people of color family lost to hate crimes, war, colonization, and genocide. We will celebrate our queer legacies and the ways we’ve found to survive through the beautiful resistance of memory, and whisper stories about grief, loss, healing, sweet darkness, and walking between worlds towards rebirth.
Beloved: A Requiem for Our Dead will feature the brilliance and blaze of renowned Caribbean speculative fiction storycrafter Nalo Hopkinson; multimedia invocation performance art heart wrench by playwright and poet Nico Dacumos; In Memoriam, a new collaborative dance theater work by Charlston Chu and Cherry Galette; ancestral prayer/spoken love letter by writer and theater artist Rose E. Sims; a mixed media jazz dance cabaret extravaganza by Charleston Chu, an autobiographical musical journey traversing the Middle East and African Diaspora by virtuoso trio SoliRose; the powerful truth renderings of queer Sri Lankan writer and performer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha; and the premiere of Moorish Salt a burlesque-dance theater/ritual performance art piece by fusion dance artist and theater-maker Cherry Galette.
Through elegies of story, song, dance, drag and more, the Bay Area’s noted and notorious queer and trans people of color performance crew will honor our erased, fallen, and slain queer, two spirit and trans of color family. We will remember queer and trans people of color lost to hate crimes, war, colonization, and genocide, and celebrate our ancestor’s legacies and the ways we’ve found to survive violence through the beautiful resistance of memory. Come here us whisper stories about grief, loss, healing, sweet darkness, and walking between worlds towards rebirth.
ENCUENTROS: Dispatches from the Queer Borderlands An annual showcase in September of work by Bay Area queer and trans immigrant and first generation artists. The 2008 show played to a full house on Thursday 9/18 at La Pena Theatre in Berkeley, CA and featured multi-disciplinary film and burlesque performance by Black Panamanian performance extravaganza Thisway/Thatway, new work from noted Lebanese poet Amir El-Chidiac, a fresh back from the Philippines collaborative multi-media performance memoir and death ritual by Aimee Espiritu and Nico Dacumos, the notorious Chica Boom and more. As the show continues to grow, we begin the work this spring of finding a larger venue to accommodate our expanding audience for the September 2009 show.
WHIPPED: QTPOC Recipes for Love, Sex, and DisasterAn evening of all new work on the miracles, dreams and bullshit our hearts make. Premiered February 27th, 2009
Mangos with Chili knows that queer and trans folks of color do love, sex and total disaster like none other! And we are bringing you a special post-Valentine’s day production where QTPOC are going to tell their true life stories of love, desire and disaster like never before.
In this much anticipated first Bay Area production since October’s wildly successful Queer Borderlands tour, the Mangos With Chili crew present real life queer and trans of color love stories told through spoken word, theater, hip hop, vaudeville and dance, interspersed with video diaries where community members testify to some of the most awesome and ridiculous manifestations of love we’ve found.
Bring your lovenotes and trinkets for the community altar we’ll build to the loves we’ve known and come prepared to hear truths you’ve never heard spoken before, but always needed to. We’ll be brave enough to tell the real deal about the miracles, dreams and bullshit our hearts make.
QPOCALYPSE NOW!
WORLD PREMIERE: Saturday, June 20th, 2009 Somarts,8pm
The end times. 2012. The revolution. The apocalypse. Queer and trans people of color are always living in the end of the world. In this divine new Mangos With Chili performance spectacular, come see the best Bay Area queer and trans artist of color performance ensemble present an evening of all new collaborative work exploring our visions of the end of the world and what comes afterwards. Artists from the Mangos With Chili crew will give you dreams and nightmares about revolution and the end times from many of our cultures through high-intensity theater, dance, spoken word, drag, song, and more, interspersed with video vignettes and an interactive multimedia altar. Come witness firsthand the beautiful, lifesaving high-quality queer and trans of color performance that Mangos With Chili is known for and emerge transformed, awed, and inspired.
Mangos With Chili 