Granoff Center, Studio 1
Monique Mojica, LeAnne Howe, and Jorge Morejón present a public offering of work in progress titled "Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns," presenting excerpts of the play in process with a discussion moderated by Dr. Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, Brown University.
Mojica, Howe and Mojerón seek to transpose story narratives and literary structures of ancient earthworks and apply them to scriptwriting and performance in order to reanimate Indigenous ways of knowing and make visible that which has been made invisible. "Side Show Freaks & Circus Injuns" is a theatrical performance that dislodges the colonizer’s gaze — the garish pornographic gaze of the side show — from the Indigenous body, and in doing so, reverses that gaze.
A CSREA Faculty Grant Event. Presented in collaboration with the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies and the Brown Arts Initiative.
Related Link: Monique Mojica: Fitt Artist Residency (TAPS)
| Monique Mojica (Guna and Rappahannock Nations) is the Lawton Wehle Fitt ’74 artist-in-residence in November, hosted by Brown University’s Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies (TAPS). She is a playwright and actor based in Toronto. She was born in New York City, but came to Canada as former Artistic Director of Native Earth Performing Arts, Canada’s oldest professional Indigenous theatre company. She was a founding member of Turtle Gals Performance Ensemble. She is perhaps most notable for her roles in Smoke Signals in 1998 and her stage play Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots. Mojica is co-editor of Staging Coyote’s Dream: An Anthology of First Nations Drama in English with Ric Knowles. In 2007 she founded Chocolate Woman Collective with whom she created Chocolate Woman Dreams the Milky Way whose structure is drawn from The Guna mola (textile) art and the pictographic writing that note Guna healing chants. |
| lhLeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian and Native American experiences. Her first novel Shell Shaker (Aunt Lute Books, 2001) received an American Book Award in 2002 from the Before Columbus Foundation. The novel was a finalist for the 2003 Oklahoma Book Award, and awarded Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year, 2002. Equinoxes Rouge, the French translation, was the 2004 finalist for Prix Medici Estranger, one of France’s top literary awards. Evidence of Red (Salt Publishing, UK, 2005) won the Oklahoma Book Award for poetry in 2006, and the Wordcraft Circle Award for 2006. Her most recent novel is Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (Aunt Lute Books, 2007). Her latest two books Choctalking On Other Realities (Aunt Lute Books), a memoir, and Seeing Red Pixeled Skins, American Indians and Film (Michigan State University Press), a co-edited anthology of film reviews were both published in 2013. She is the Eidson Distinguished Professor of American Literature in the English Department at the University of Georgia, Athens. |
| Jorge Luis Morejón’s artistic versatility has been nourished by two decades of theatre, opera, dance and performance-art experiences. He has participated in over forty productions with Prometeo Theatre, Telemundo, Creation Ballet, Ballet Theatre of Miami, The Greater Miami Opera, Brazarte and his own company Thelos Theatre. Most notably, he has appeared in THE MAIDS and SLEEPLESS CITY. In Toronto Canada he performed MIRRORED SPACES in 2008. In California he performed in DIVIDE LIGHT: A New Opera, at the Montalvo Arts Center, THE TEN PM DREAM and THE ELEPHANT’S GRAVEYARD with Sideshow Physical Theatre at The Sacramento Theater Company, and THE WINTER’S TALE and HINTERLAND with UC Davis Theatre and Dance Department at the Mondavi Center. He has a PhD in Performance Studies, with a designated emphasis in Practice as Research, from the University of California, Davis. Currently, he is a lecturer at Miami Dade College and the University of Miami. |