JORGE RODOLFO DE HOYOS JR.
I saw the call for young performers aged 16-24 for Keith Hennessy’s new project. I’m a recent college graduate having moved to the city to pursue a life of performance art, and this seemed like an amazing opportunity. When I saw Keith’s last show I found that I was able to have a conversation with this artist, that I understood what he was trying to do in the Project Artaud space and that I would like to work with him or at least observe him work on some level.
I find myself lost in a sense. Both the cast as well as the theme of juvenile incarceration seem foreign to me, and I wonder how I can get myself engaged in this piece. Questions I had initially (and probably still do have) are who am I to be on stage performing juvenile incarceration? I’m 24, finished college, am working as a starving artist (not working to be a starving artist, but working to be an artist and trying not to starve in the process). I feel that the term “Juvenile”--as in under 18 years of age or not adult or living with parents at home--is so far away from me that I would be pretending if I were to be on stage having been billed as a “young” performer. In terms of Incarceration, I have family members who have intimate experience with that, but I feel that I was sheltered from that by my parents who got my sisters and me out of a bad neighborhood when we were young. In thinking about the project or at least trying to think about the project (as research and to get myself “prepared” for it), I keep thinking of my parents and my family. In a way, I feel that my sisters and I are the product of lives where jail and gangs and poverty and drivebys and dysfunctional families were a reality and lived and learned from in order for me to have opportunity (education, a not-minority sense of self, whitewashed kinda basically). It’s like a near escape...a different life that I was sheltered from. I know it’s there, and my parents are constant reminders (their discipline, their hang ups, my grandparents, their etc).
It’s like the thing about Mexican Americans...You’re not Mexican enough to be Mexican, but you’re not American enough to be American. The same here. I’m not a total suburban white kid, but I’m not from the city or a barrio kid. It’s as if things have already been spoken for me.