RESUCITÓ

As a director, I have a unique opportunity to curate stories and present them to audiences, guiding their reception of story through precise and calculated sensuous experiences. My language, as a director, is highly aesthetic, and I speak through a syntax of hand-selected symbols through auditory, visual, tactile, and occasionally olfactory and gustatory frames of reference. I cannot control an audience's final perception of an experience, but I ensure they have a hell of a time feeling it. I’ve studied the art of compression and distillation and found that in my essentialist approach, the powers of symbol and frame of reference are supreme in conveying stories to a contemporary audience. The argument is no longer, “I go to the theatre to hear a play” vs. “I go to the theatre to see a play,” it is the amalgamation of all of the senses communing with the diverse array of lived experiences brought with any given audience. 

My directing and devising styles are a blend of the Postmodernist approach to deconstructing codified symbols, recontextualizing them, and then reconstructing narratives, with an emphasis on whose stories are being told and who’s telling them. My favorite tool is the actor and their moment-to-moment relationship with time and space around them. I am not an Aristotelian hierarchist, but have spent a large amount of my training understanding the role of each of his dramatic elements in communicating a story. I have carefully studied the rules and have a knack and habit of breaking them. I acknowledge that the Western tradition of Aristotelian storytelling highly influences my perception of story; however, in an effort to connect with the many cultures that make up America, it brings me great pleasure to experience story outside of the Western framework. 

I am Mexican and Italian, in heritage; two beautiful cultures with rich histories of storytelling, ritual, and performance. But beyond these identities, I am also a gay American, which is an entire subculture within my already Westernized American sensibilities. In all of my identities, I am bombarded with stories and sensuous experiences that cannot be communicated via any language other than performance. My life has, thus far, resided at the intersection of the mundane and the spectacular. And as a romantic, I have found the ecstatic joy of discovering the spectacular within the mundane. I am a craftsman and am dedicated to examining the overlooked and underrepresented and bringing the magic from these otherwise unnoticed worlds to the stage. The American theatre canon has a void of Hispanic, queer, magical, and mythical stories, and any combination of those categories, that I intend to fill in my time on this Earth. I am a collaborator through and through, and I want to work with artists from all walks of life to bring our stories to fruition within the communities we represent. I am a staunch believer that they need to see their experiences laid before them.