Performance: "Carmelita Can Be a Beast" by Carmelita Tropicana

Event Date: 
Friday, April 18, 2014 -
12:00pm to 1:00pm
Event Location: 
CSRC Library - 144 Haines Hall
Join us in the CSRC Library for "Carmelita Can Be a Beast," a discussion on race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and the animal species in the work of Carmelita Tropicana, led by the artist herself.  This performative lecture includes video excerpts and what Tropicana calls "a host of characters from a Cuban cockroach to a trans cat, Ursa, a hybrid woman-bear."
 
Tropicana will focus on three works: The Conquest of Mexico as Seen Through the Eyes of Hernan Cortez Horse, a collaboration with Uzi Parnes (published in Aztlán, Spring 1998); With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit (published in Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, University of Michigan Press, 2013); and her latest interdisciplinary work, a collaboration with filmmaker Ela Troyano, called Post Plastica.
 
The title of this lecture references an essay by José Esteban Muñoz, recently deceased, on Tropicana’s solo work With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?
 
Maylei Blackwell, associate professor of Chicana/o and women’s studies at UCLA, will introduce the event and moderate the Q&A.
 
The New York Times review of With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?:

“Americans tend to favor realistic comedy. But fantasy is a great weapon. I thought of this while watching the writer Carmelita Tropicana perform her deliciously outrageous solo piece, With What Does the Cockroach Sit? at INTAR Theater. Points of view we take for granted suddenly become absurd in this setting. Familiar words and phrases become unfamiliar, even a bit uncanny.”

The New Yorker Critics' Notebook on Carmelita and Ela Troyano’s Post Plastica:
“Often dressed like a more surreal Carmen Miranda - Carmelita wears more glitter – the Obie winning, Cuban born star with the thick, funny accent stood tall in her wedgies on the front line where AIDS activism, gay rights and guerilla theatre converged on the Lower East Side, in the late eighties and early nineties. But for Carmelita the fight is never over… "I’m very good with the tongue.” She’s good at other things, too, which will be on display in her new piece, Post Plastica.
 
A light reception will follow the lecture.
 
This presentation is co-sponsored by UCLA Center for the Study of Women and the UCLA Office for Diversity & Faculty Development.
 
This event is FREE.
 
Photo credit: Uzi Parnes
 
Watch the video of this event here.
 

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