Performance Work
Multimedia performanCe
Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind
Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind is a concept album and concert inspired by Helena Maria Viramontes’s 2007 novel, Their Dogs Came with Them, a story about the destruction and displacement of a Mexican American community when six intersecting freeways are built right through the heart of the neighborhood. This new work centers music (a mix of Mexican and Afro-Cuban rhythms, jazz, funk, rock, gospel, and R&B) as a driving narrative force, drawing on the theatrical possibilities of a concert and video to create a sonic landscape and rich visual world steeped in symbolism and poetry. The work is created in collaboration with musical director Martha Gonzalez of the Grammy Award–winning band Quetzal, writer Virginia Grise, director Kendra Ware, and designer Tanya Orellana.
Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind is a National Performance Network Creation Fund project co-commissioned by Pregones/PRTT, MACLA, Cornell University, Las Maestras Center for Xicana[x] Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Practice at UC Santa Barbara, and ACTA.
Soñar es luchar
A lucid dream written about wild fires, urban rebellions and the longing to fly. Originally commissioned by The Sol Project for The Play at Home Project, the text was later made into a video produced by allgo and directed by Kendra Ware. Soñar es luchar was shot on iPhones during the pandemic and features performances by Paula Alvarez-Espinosa, Marlene Beltran, Sharon Bridgforth, Lydia Li and Omi Osun Joni Jones.
Premiered at Cara Mia Theatre in an installation designed by Tanya Orellana, as part of the exhibition Remember. Breathe. Dream. and was also screened at the Mid America Arts Alliance as part of the reflect/project exhibition series.
Performance Installations
how do you pull your own sadness up out of the ground?
Created in collaboration with Rafa Esparza and Joe Jiménez in response to Jiménez’s The Presence of Absence and Kites.
…how do you pull your own sadness up out of the ground? And what if you break off only the stem, will it grow back? How do you yank up the tangle of roots? This is the story of a boy who loved trees, who grew up near the Gulf, running and running and listening to the wind in his face, on his back, in his blood—This is the story of a boy who dug holes.
how do you pull your own sadness up out of the ground? is an intimate site-specific durational performance ritual, performed on an empty lot in downtown San Antonio. The performance centered on the making of barbacoa, the meat of a cow’s head wrapped in burlap, buried in a pit in the ground and cooked over a flame for 10 hours. Commissioned for Luminaria in San Antonio, Texas.
Remember el Alma
A live public memorial based on Bárbara Renaud-González’s original prose-poem of the same name, directed by Grise. A mosaic of voices, movement and live music, the actors performed inside 8 X 15 feet nichos on a two-story stone wall façade of the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in San Antonio Texas. Video of a series of real time live feed projections were projected onto the exterior walls of the plaza. The actors were joined by over 100 volunteer performers, women who spanned 4 generations, in a procession to the Alamo where they collectively let out a silent three-minute scream before disappearing into the night. Commissioned by Bihl Haus Arts for Luminaria in San Antonio, Texas.
i was born here
Four performers inhabit large altar installations created by Deborah Vasquez exploring questions of identity, war and memory. Based on a poem by Bárbara Renaud-González, directed by Grise, performed in six 30-minute cycles, the audience was invited to walk through the performance installation that included live music by Rachel Yvonne Cruz and video created by Mirasol Riojas.
Plays
Their Dogs Came with Them
Their Dogs Came with Them by award-winning writer Helena Maria Viramontes, adapted for the stage by Virginia Grise, is a story about what happens to a community, and the people that live there, when four intersecting freeways are built right through the heart of their neighborhood. Much like the structure of a freeway, the lives of four Mexican-American youth intersect and intertwine, unearthing stories about roaming dogs, quarantines, earthmovers ancient voladores and the effects and aftereffects of the Vietnam War, displacement, mental illness, and state violence. Commissioned by the National New Play Network & Borderlands Theater.
A touring concert version of Their Dogs Came with Them directed by Kendra Ware, in collaboration with musical director Martha Gonzalez, is currently under development.
World Premiere: Perryville Women’s Prison in Goodyear, Arizona. Directed by Virginia Grise, Marc David Pinate, Manny Rivera, and Kendra Ware. Six months later, Their Dogs Came with Them was staged under the I-19 Freeway in Tucson, Arizona in collaboration with Borderlands Theater and a todo dar productions, directed by Kendra Ware.
a farm for meme
A butterfly sits in a walnut tree on a 14-acre farm in the middle of South Central Los Angeles; a mother and her three boys live in a tent in an encampment trying to save the farm from police and bulldozers. A story about semilleros and a farm built in a vacant lot after the 1992 LA rebellion.
A coloring book of a farm for meme, in collaboration with Mel Dominguez and allgo, was recently published and is being distributed in communities in Los Angeles, Tucson, Phoenix, San Antonio, Austin and Dallas.
World Premiere: Directed virtually by Elena Araoz during a global pandemic, a farm for meme premiered on HowlRound TV in collaboration with allgo, a todo dar productions, Cara Mia Theater and Innovations in Socially Distant Performance, a research project housed at Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. Rebecca Rivas also directed a radio version of the play aired on the local NPR station for Reunión Revolución, a project of University of Texas El Paso’s Department of Theater and Dance.
blu
An epic poem for the stage, blu traces the explosive after-effects of prison and hunger, desire and war. Soledad and her woman Hailstorm raise Blu, Gemini and Lunatico while their father Eme serves a three-strike sentence. Blu seeks a better way; Hailstorm tries to remember a time before war; Eme yearns for his lost love and fam; Lunatico is true to tradition and Gemini sits alone atop the roof, dreaming of an earth and sky without police and their helicopters, while Soledad tries to hold it all together without having her bruised heart touched or broken, one more time.
Selected as the winner of the 2010 Yale Drama competition from more than 950 submissions, contest judge David Hare commented, "Virginia Grise is a blazingly talented writer, and her play blu stays with you a long time after you've read it." Noting that 2010 was a banner year for women playwrights, he added, "Women's writing for the theatre is stronger and more eloquent than it has ever been."
World Premiere: Company of Angels, Los Angeles, CA, directed by Laurie Carlos. The play was later produced by Cara Mía Theatre, directed by Rene Moreno. blu has also been produced on college campuses across the nation including University of Arizona, Vassar College, University of Richmond, Texas State University, University of Santa Cruz and the California Institute of the Arts, as well as two high schools in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas.
Siempre Norteada
Siempre Norteada: Always Late. Always Lost. is about the aventuras and travesuras of a queer artist from Tejas who makes theatre and a lil bit of trouble along the way. This play is about her adventures in New York, the community she creates to survive, including her Marxist friend, the neighbor-lady friend, her sane friend, and her friend from home, un loco bien loca and what happens when they all meet. Oh (I almost forgot) and dreaming. This is also a play about dreaming.
An earlier version of this script was developed through The Women’s Project Theatre’s Playwrights Lab. A fifteen-minute excerpt of the play was presented as a chapter titled GoAway! in Architecture of Becoming at City Center in New York City.
Barrio Stories
The Barrio Stories Project utilizes cross-sector partnerships to collect oral histories from the residents of Tucson’s historic barrios. The first iteration of the initiative focused on Barrio Viejo, Tucson’s original Mexican-American enclave that was demolished in order to build the Tucson Convention Center. Commissioned by Borderlands Theater and created in collaboration with Elaine Romero, Martin Zimmerman, Milta Ortiz, and Lydia Otero.
World Premiere: Directed by Marc David Pinate, produced by Borderlands Theater and staged site specifically at the original location of Barrio Viejo.
The Architecture of Becoming
A lost postcard, the ghost of an opera diva and the siren call of the City, erupting from the shadows of New York City Center. The Architecture of Becoming is the creation of five playwrights and three directors who have intertwined secret societies, silent films, raucous parties, and the greatest performers of our time with five fictional lives woven through the dynamic history of this great landmark.
World Premiere: Women’s Project Theater, City Center, New York, NY.
DJ Latinidad’s Latino Dance Party
A performance that explores latinidad in contemporary US culture, through the lens of a dance party, comprised of commissioned works by Junot Diaz, Kristoffer Diaz, Michael John Garces, Virginia Grise, Maria Isa, Melinda Lopez, Marcela Lorca, Joe Minjares, Kyoung Park, Sean San Jose, Tanya Saracho, and Octavio Solis.
World Premiere: Mixed Blood Theater, Minneapolis, Minnesota, directed by Mark Valdez and later presented at MACLA in San Jose, California.
behind barbed wire
Commissioned by the Community Arts Partnership to write an original youth theatre piece about the building of the border wall between Mexico and the United States. Developed in collaboration with 50 high school actors and writers, behind barbed wire explores the human impact of the controversial US-Mexico "border fence"—now being expanded into a fully militarized zone at a cost of $3 million per mile.
World Premiere: Plaza de la Raza and REDCAT Theatre in Los Angeles, CA, directed by BJ Dodge.
Teatro Callejero
Writing, acting, directing and founding member of Teatro Callejero, a project of the Esperanza Peace & Justice Center. The theatre collective created performances centered around important issues affecting San Antonio at places ranging from downtown plazas to urban barrios to the inside of the city council chambers. Performance pieces written, performed and directed for Teatro Callejero include: Ahogar, La Gloria, PGA NO, and poema a mi querido San Anto. Grise also directed Agua es Vida and performed in Candida Vendida and La Criada Malcriada.
Solo PERFORMANCE
Your Healing is Killing Me
Based on lessons learned in San Antonio free health clinics and New York acupuncture schools; from the treatments and consejos of curanderas, abortion doctors, Marxist artists, community health workers, and bourgie dermatologists all while living with post-traumatic stress disorder, ansia, and eczema in the new age of trigger warnings, the master cleanse, and Kickstarter-funded self-care. Capitalism is toxic but The Revolution is not in your body butter.
A touring production of Your Healing is Killing Me, that is part Marxist study group, part house party, directed by Kendra Ware is currently under development with Cara Mía Theater and a todo dar productions.
World Premiere: JACK, Brooklyn, New York, directed by Emily Mendelsohn. The performance manifesto was also produced by PlayMakers Rep, directed by Shayok Misha Chowdhury and at Cara Mía Theatre, directed by Kendra Ware.
The Panza Monologues
The Panza Monologues is an original solo performance piece based on women's stories about their panzas—tú sabes—that roll of belly we all try to hide. Written, compiled, and collected by Virginia Grise and Irma Mayorga with additional stories contributed by Bárbara Renaud-González, Petra A. Mata, and María R. Salazar. The Panza Monologues features the words of Chicanas speaking with humor and candor. Their stories boldly place the panza front and center as a symbol that reveals the lurking truths about women's thoughts, lives, loves, abuses, and lived conditions.
World Premiere: allgo in Austin, Texas, directed by Irma Mayorga. The show was also produced by Cara Mía Theater, directed by Mayorga and Teatro Vivo, directed by Florinda Bryant. The Panza Monologues has been produced at major universities across the nation, including Stanford University, Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Los Angeles, Texas A&M San Antonio, North Hennepin Community College, University of California Riverside, SUNY Oneonta, University of Texas San Antonio, Arizona State University, University of Colorado Boulder, Northwest Vista College, Eastern Washington University and Fresno State University.
Dance Theater
Passions
Inspired by Pablo Neruda’s poem A Lemon, in which the poet transforms this mundane fruit into metaphor for passion and sensuality. A single female performer represents the enigmatic lemon, while the male performers take an abstract journey through what Carl Jung calls “Anima Development.” Choreographed & Directed by Stephanie Nugent, performed at Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, CA.
would i then be…
An adaptation of Virginia Woolf's fictional biography Orlando, would i then be…explores the embodiment of feminine and masculine energies and the fluidity of both time and gender. Choreographed & Directed by Stephanie Nugent.
World Premiere: REDCAT Theatre, Los Angeles, CA and later produced at Highways Performance Space and A Room to Create.
Held by Dreams
Who are we when we dream? An experimental monologue performed by Toussaint Jeanlouis. Choreographed & Directed by Stephanie Nugent, performed at Highways Performance Space, Santa Monica, CA.
Translations
Mestiza Power!
Written by Concepcion Leon Mora, Translated by Virginia Grise
Mestiza Power! is a play that moves between snippets of conversations in the market place to a series of monologues told by a domestic worker, a street vendor wearing Ray Bans, and a hierbatera. Concepion Leon Mora introduces us to the inherently complicated world of the modern-day Mestiza through a lens that is at once thought-provoking and humorous. The first draft of this translation was developed in a 10-day workshop at the Lark Play Development Center as part of their US/Mexico Playwrights Exchange Program. Staged reading directed by Daniel Jaquez.
22 Dreams Far from the Sea
Written by Aida Andrade, Translated by Virginia Grise
Matthew, incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, struggles to understand the difference between guilt and innocence. He dreams of the ocean and a woman named Ana. The first draft of this translation was developed in a 10-day workshop at the Lark Play Development Center as part of their US/Mexico Playwrights Exchange Program. Staged reading directed by Marissa Chibas Preston.
All’s Well that Ends Well
Commissioned by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Play On! program, under the leadership of producer and daramturge Lue Douthit. Thirty-six playwrights translated thirty-nine plays attributed to Shakespeare into contemporary, modern English over the course of three years, with a commitment that the commissioned group comprised at least 51 percent women and writers of color. Play On! Shakespeare’s mission is to enhance the understanding of Shakespeare’s plays in performance for theatre professionals, students and audiences by engaging with contemporary translations and adaptations.
Short Plays
Luv Offerings for Elijah
Virtual Birthday Celebration organized by Erk Ehn for Elijah McClain
Her Love is a Garden
Love and Kindness in a Time of Quarantine curated by Regina Taylor, Theatre 3, Dallas, Texas.
Sexo y Revolucion
One-Minute Play Festival, Queens Museum, New York, NY.
Revolution
One-Minute Play Festival, Intar Theatre, New York, NY.
Pulse
One-Minute Play Festival, Intar Theatre, New York, NY.
Imagine the Impossible (3mins)
Latino Theater Commons, New York, NY.
Racism’s Chokehold
One-Minute Play Festival, Intar Theatre, New York, NY.
100 women are on strike because they are hungry
One-Minute Play Festival, Intar Theatre, New York, NY.
Teatro Organico (10mins)
Free Range Thanksgiving Performance Feast, Foundry Theater, New York, NY.
Right to Remain (30mins)
The Local Project, Long Island City, NY.
Call to Prayer
One-Minute Play Festival, Intar Theatre, New York, NY.
ESL
One-Minute Play Festival, Intar Theatre, New York, NY.
Sha-Hell-No! (10mins)
Eco y Voces de Arte Studio, San Antonio, TX.
death sounds like...,
John Street Studio, Providence, RI.
corn does not grow in the museum (10mins)
Highly Impractical Theatre, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY.
woman in the walnut tree turned butterfly
One-Minute Play Festival, Intar Theatre, New York, NY.
flower offerings for lil girls that ride buses
Cornerstone Theatre, Hunger Cycle: One-Minute Play Festival, Los Angeles, CA.
a farm for meme (15mins)
University of Butare, Butare, Rwanda.
Directing Experience
Their Dogs Came with Them by Helena Maria Viramontes, adapted for the stage by Virginia Grise
Perryville Women’s Prison, Goodyear, AZ.
The Passion of Antigone Perez by Luis Rafael Sanchez
Lehman College, Bronx, NY.
Dat Black Mermaid Man Lady by Sharon Bridgforth, Workshop Production
New Dramatists, New York, NY.
Right to Remain
The Local Project, Long Island City, NY.
corn does not grow in the museum
Highly Impractical Theatre, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY.
blu, Concert Reading featuring the band Aparato!
Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, San Antonio, TX.
Remember el Alma, Site Specific Performance
Hemisfair Plaza and the Alamo, Bihl Haus Arts, San Antonio, TX.
Assistant Director, Three Sisters by Anton Checkov adapted by Tracy Letts, directed by Anna Shapiro
Steppenwolf Theatre, Chicago, IL.
Assistant Director, bonded by Donald Jolly, directed by Jon Lawrence Rivera
Playwright’s Arena, Los Angeles, CA.
Director, New Play Lab
Playwright’s Arena, Los Angeles, CA.
Performing Experience
Llanto Collectivo, directed by Cherrie Moraga
PerformaProtesta, ICE Detention Center & Otay Mesa Detention Center, San Diego, CA.
Your Healing is Killing Me, directed by Emily Mendelsohn
JACK, Brooklyn, NY & MECA, Houston, TX.
how do you pull your own sadness up out of the ground? Site Specific Performance
Luminaria, San Antonio, TX.
RiverSee by Sharon Bridgforth
New Dramatists, New York City, NY.
Athco, Or The Renaissance of the Faggot Tree by Dorian Wood, Site Specific Performance Barnsdall Art Park, Pacific Standard Time
Los Angeles, CA.
Digging Up the Dirt by Cherrie Moraga, directed by Cherrie Moraga
Breath of Fire Theatre, Santa Ana, CA.
Pork Chop Wars by Laurie Carlos, directed by Deborah Artman
Brockett Theatre, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
The Panza Monologues directed by Irma Mayorga
allgo, Tillery Street Theatre, Austin. TX; California State University Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Plaza de la Raza, Los Angeles, CA; University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO; Las Hermanas National Conference, San Antonio, TX; Cara Mía Theatre, Dallas, TX; Teatro Caliente! Festival, Phoenix, AZ.
