THE ARTS PAPER – ARTICLES

Riccardo Hernandez makes a scene

Hank Hoffman

Riccardo Hernandez. Photo by Charles Erickson.

Scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez hates the phrase “set design,” with its implications of illusion and falsity.

“I think it’s old-fashioned now,” says Hernandez in an interview at his home. “The Europeans have a better word: scenography. It’s more about the whole conception you put on stage, not just the walls or flats or whatever.”

Hernandez earned his MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1992 and now teaches at Princeton University. Since leaving Yale, he has established an international reputation. Although he concentrated on designs for opera at Yale, in his professional career he has worked on Broadway musicals, avant-garde and traditional operas, regional theater productions, contemporary and classic dramas, and more.

Born in Cuba, Hernandez grew up in Argentina. He inherited his love of the stage from his father, an opera singer. Starting at age 7, Hernandez attended the Teatro Colón regularly with his father, relishing the environment and the spectacle.

“I really wanted to sing, to be a tenor,” recalls Hernandez. But when he reached puberty and his voice changed, he couldn’t sing anymore. He had vocal nodules and needed surgery. It was, he remembers, a mess. Fortunately, around the same time, he experienced a production that signaled an alternate path to the stage. His father took him to see the opera Andrea Chénier, which is set during the French Revolution.

“The design caught my eye. I remember there was a shiny black floor. But all you saw as they were singing was the huge shadow of the guillotine just growing on stage,” says Hernandez.

After the performance, his father took him backstage to meet the designer.

“Somehow, I knew instinctively I wanted to be part of this,” Hernandez says.

Hernandez’s work usually begins with a call from a theater or director. After reading a play – or listening to the music if it’s a musical or opera – Hernandez sits down with the director. Gleaning a sense of the director’s vision of the work, the designer “continues the conversation via sketching or working in three-dimensional form – models – which is what I do.”

“I try not to have preconceived notions but it’s hard,” Hernandez says. “Because you read the play or hear the music and you get excited and things start formulating in your head. Sometimes you get attached to your vision before the director says, ‘No, no, no, it’s the opposite.’”

Some directors can articulate a detailed sense of what they want. Others, Hernandez, says, are more “vague or visceral.” The Hungarian director János Szász – who also works in film – falls into the latter category. Hernandez has worked with Szász on productions including a staging of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull.

“What’s amazing about those guys is when they hit it, it is just unbelievable. It’s not something you’ve seen before,” explains Hernandez. “It’s coming out of a place that’s, one, not safe, and completely unknown, really recreating Chekhov on stage as something you’ve never seen. When ideas are so strong, you just go with it.”

As with any artistic endeavor, scenic designers have their specialties: the commercial Broadway designers, the realists, the avant-gardists. Hernandez says “people call me for minimalism, suggestive” design work, a sensibility he attributes in part to his studies at the Yale School of Drama.

“Those days, Ming Cho Lee, the teacher, would talk about ‘finding the edge’ of a play or opera and really putting it on stage,” recalls Hernandez.

He has worked several times with the avant-garde-oriented director Robert Woodruff of the American Repertory Theater, as well as Szász. At the conclusion of Appomattox – a Philip Glass opera about the Civil War directed by Woodruff – Hernandez’s design called for horses dipped in canisters of a blood-like substance beneath the stage to be pulled up one by one, raining “blood” on the scene.

“Even when I’ve done musicals, they’re usually more weird, odd,” Hernandez tells me. “Let me put it this way – they’re not going to call me for a revival of Hello, Dolly!

“There’s an old tradition in American theater that the designer should be like a chameleon and change according to the play,” says Hernandez. “What I’ve discovered is that once you realize that set design is much more psychological and at times even metaphysical, you realize there’s no such thing as a signature. It’s almost like you’re going to the therapist and you basically spew your guts out. Whatever’s out there, as ugly as it is or might be, that’s what counts.”

In a sense, scenic design has a poetic dimension. Where poetry boils down language to concentrated imagery, a minimalist approach to scenic design involves choosing those elements that deepen and reinforce the interpretation of the text. Hernandez recalls an argument he had with a French director who had seen the Szász production of The Seagull.

“He said the ceiling was a ‘symbol.’ I said, ‘No, it’s just a ceiling,’” Hernandez tells me. “But when you activate it with rain, actors, music, then it becomes something else, then it takes on a life of its own. Theater can only exist as long as it’s alive with the actors in performance.”

For Suzan-Lori Parks’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play Topdog/Underdog, directed by George C. Wolfe, Hernandez’s design was a “little room in the middle of nowhere.” The play’s protagonists are two African American brothers named Lincoln and Booth; it takes place in an indeterminate time between the 1970s and the present. Lincoln, the older brother, works in a seaside carnival reenacting the role of Abraham Lincoln at the moment of his assassination. Wolfe, Hernandez says, believed “the room should show history, the essence of the society, not only American history but American possibility at the time of Lincoln.”

“With Topdog/Underdog, the director and I thought all the elements should be real,” recalls Hernandez. “Not that we did a naturalistic play. It wasn’t naturalistic. But the wallpaper was real. We found a floor from the 1800s somewhere in Rhode Island.

“Proppy stuff became no longer props but a real element,” asserts Hernandez. “It was like a film set as opposed to a theatrical environment.”

I ask whether design should ever call attention to itself. On Broadway, Hernandez notes, “there are moments when you want that kind of spectacle, the theatricality of things moving and mechanics doing the work for you.”

Hernandez’s work on the Hal Prince production of Parade – a dark musical about the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Georgia – garnered him a 1999 Tony Award nomination for scenic design. Prince’s staging of Frank’s trial for the murder of a young factory girl was particularly challenging.

“Hal kept saying, ‘How do we show the trial? It has to be from many different perspectives. We have to see Leo’s perspective, we have to see the audience, the jurors,’” remembers Hernandez. “He wanted through the course of the trial for the entire location to keep shifting perspective. It was extremely complicated. At one point, there was some commotion in the trial and the whole thing turned on its side. Do you need that for the play? It’s to be debated but it’s fun.”

At the other end of the spectrum was the work Hernandez did with director Dan Sullivan in 2006 on David Hare’s Iraq War play Stuff Happens. Sullivan has a reputation as a “very realistic director,” according to Hernandez. But, aware that realism isn’t Hernandez’s cup of tea, Sullivan took a different approach with Stuff Happens.

"He said, 'I think the action should be here,' literally pointing to the middle of the theater itself. I'm sure he thought it was a crazy idea," recounts Hernandez. "I took it very seriously and decided to put the audience inside the proscenium," on both sides of the action.

Hernandez likens the production to a TV studio. The audience saw all the instruments; the only furniture was chairs that the actors moved to create different locations.

"What's amazing is that the play is all about text and George W. Bush and the Iraq War. But because we simplified it so much, the audience became like a voyeuristic entity," explains Hernandez, an experience akin to “being inside CNN listening to George W. Bush talking to Tony Blair. It became very vital."

It was scenography that incorporated and transcended the proscenium, in tune with an Internet-charged, media-saturated time.

"Theater is a place," says Hernandez, "where suggestion and imagination go a long way."



Perception: arts, identity, and access

OluShola A. Cole

	OluShola A. Cole

Those of us who have been around the arts community recognize the pattern: gatherings of creative focus groups, board meetings, etc., the feedbag of conferences for arts administrators and roundtable discussions. We’ve been having the same old conversation and asking the same old questions about art for decades: Is the face of art changing? Is the audience for traditional art venues shifting? How can we shift focus to grab a drifting audience? What is our community? How is our organization perceived? How can we pull in the (insert underserved community here) population? Who do we serve? Why are we here? And my all-time favorite: Who are we?

It would be completely false if I were to say I didn’t pose those questions to myself every so often: Who am I? Who do I serve? Why am I here? My position places me right at the intersection of identity, access, and art. I interact with people of varying levels of artistic and entrepreneurial skill, from those who can throw an art opening together in the blink of an eye, often the darlings of the New Haven arts scene, to those who can make a tag jump off a surface but can barely keep a dollar and have no idea about the Arts Council and those who are making their own waves through theater, photography, and dance while bringing together what community they can in New Haven. I simply have to get to the core of my mission and think about the arts and the community in terms of creativity and access. Break it down further, and it’s all about working to help artists be supported and validated, knowing they can become vehicles for cost-effective, influential and creative access to art.

A twisted air of grandeur accompanies the Arts Council, a perception of access-granting and encrusted arts patronage — of people shaking gnarled fists at struggling artists deemed unworthy of their benevolent support. This actually works in my favor as I continue to demystify my organization, meeting artists who choose to work in communities facing negative perceptions as they create access to something wonderful and positive.

It’s breathtaking to see how some of the groups I have run into adapt their identities and goals to create such great and groundbreaking organizations.

I’ve kept up with Tina Lee Hadari, executive director of Music Haven, a group of conservatory graduates who run a free after-school music education program for string players in the New Haven Schools. The program is quite simple, but the sheer impact of this work sheds light on the fact that strings are not familiar instruments in many school programs, particularly in lower-income environments with large populations of people of color, which the group mainly serves. There are very few programs like this in the country, and this access to the arts is cultivating a generation of musicians of color whose artistic careers could include joining string sections of orchestras.

Sharece Sellem is the director of the youth drama group Artistik Xpressions, which recently completed a New Haven Public Library Tour with its show Feelings and Footprints. The show highlighted Black History Month. This was a successful monologue series in which talented young student actors portrayed influential African American figures in history as children and later as adults. During the performances, which were held in libraries throughout New Haven during the February school vacation, the audience participated by asking questions of the actors in character as adult historical figures. I later found out that these actors are Sellem’s students from Davis Street 21st Century Magnet School, a school focused on literacy and maintaining high-level reading skills where Sellem teaches.

Enter Ibrahim and Sabhir, two charismatic and motivated young men I recently had the pleasure of meeting. They run a group in New Haven called The Youth Revolution, which is geared toward using community, hip-hop and spoken word to create an environment of positive reinforcement for New Haven’s youth. Their annual event, which gives youth space for creative and expressive outlets, is a great way to bring individuals, parents, students, and communities together to help creatively transform negative perceptions of youth and hip-hop in New Haven.

I’ve been keeping tabs on Rose Garcia, site coordinator for Youth as Leaders, another after-school program that has increasingly started using the arts as a way to engage youth and get them invested in their own community. From sending the students out to take pictures and putting up their work for a gallery opening to bringing in a Brazilian Capoeira group to one of its community functions or hosting a family night out where students bring their parents to an event with local arts programming. With is student arts focus group Arts Anonymous, Youth as Leaders is a model for non-arts organizations using the arts to help students and community gain access to essential resources and tools.

For urban design and street artists, there is a large void that needs filling in terms of space in which to gather and feel connected. After talking with several individuals about this, and the role the Arts Council can play, the idea of having a simple gathering space in which to critique work, meet, and socialize struck me as a basic necessity. I’ll be hosting an Arts Council after-hours for artists in the area who aren’t classically trained and don’t have access or exposure to traditional means of creative and visual expression.

Another empty space that can be filled with eye-opening and thought provoking art is women’s theater. Another individual addressing access and perception is Halima Flynn, artistic director of Fire Dragon Productions, who is producing events such as New Haven’s Celebration of Swan Day featuring female artist performances while preparing to host and set up the city’s first chapter of 50/50 in 2020. This will be a local organization, part of a national collective tackling the ongoing issue of women in theater not fully being represented across the board. In addition, the New Haven Theater Company’s Kaia Monroe is accepting play submissions for the Second Sex Playfest in order to present “theatrical material that would utilize only young female actors in order to expand the breadth of female-centric dramatic literature.” Again, a festival such as this is doing much to bring attention to the issues of accessibility, perception, and the struggle of women’s to find their identity and establish a presence in theater.

My position in the community leads me to believe that community knowledge and exposure to the arts at the local level is essential, and that is how I will serve my creative neighborhoods. The perception and identity of the Arts Council strikes a chord with me as a think about my position. I play an important role in demystifying and changing some of the perceptions of the Arts Council. I can tell focus groups and conference attendees that the face of art has never changed — it’s the administrative focus that has shifted. The lens is always revolving, and yes, the economic climate has made us artists get very creative.

Artists in this community from every income bracket need to feel as if they are part of the Arts Council. But how? While I don’t know the answer, I do know what will help create my approach. My angle is artistic accessibility, and the groups that I have mentioned represent that fully. I look at this cross-section of artists in the communities creating a platform that can encircle an at-risk population and through art slowly reduce risk — child by child, family by family — while also being deemed worthy of support by contemporary peers and groundbreaking patrons who are fully capable of understanding, relating to, and being supportive of the community dynamic.

This is the opinion of OluShola A. Cole, the Arts Council’s coordinator of community programs.



Performance after what seems a lifetime
Ambassadors bring ‘beauty and treasure of their culture’ to New Haven

David A. Brensilver

La Malinche, an inactive volcano, rises behind a church in Tetlanohcan

At press time, 29 women from the Mexican village of Tetlanohcan were due to arrive in New Haven at the end of March. The women are scheduled present La Casa Rosa: Fighting for a Future in a Free Trade World, a play by Daniel Carlton and Soame Citlalime, the theater group the women make up.

La Casa Rosa is a work of fiction that melds the actresses’ life stories, specifically their experiences of migration. The play will be performed in Spanish — and, in, part, in the indigenous Nahuatl language — with English subtitles. During their three-week stay in the area, the members of Soame Citlalime will perform La Casa Rosa in Hartford and New York and will offer cooking demonstrations here in New Haven that feature authentic recipes from their home. Their visit, though, is about much more than these cultural events.

In April, Tetlanohcan, a village in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala, will become the seventh of New Haven’s Sister Cities, following Afula-Gilboa, Israel; Amalfi, Italy; Avignon, France; Freetown, Sierra Leone; Hue, Vietnam; and León, Nicaragua.

Stephanie Bifolco, a New Haven Sister Cities board member and a community organizer with the bi-national nonprofit Institute for Social and Cultural Practice and Research (IIPSOCULTA), whose United States presence is here in New Haven, said the latter’s mission is “to create conditions for justice and equity in Latin America and in the United States through education, organizing, and solidarity work.” The New Haven/Tetlanohcan Sister Cities Project mission, according to its Statement of Exchange, “is to create a sisterhood of social and economic benefits between residents of both cities through education, fundraising, and exchange.”

Bifolco said there are more than 300 families from Tetlanohcan living in New Haven, that’s about one-tenth the number of immigrants in the United States from Tetlanohcan. Most, Bifolco said, live in the Tri-State Area. The first person to immigrate to New Haven from Tetlanohcan did so more than a decade ago.

Bifolco described the 29 women who’ll be in New Haven for three weeks in April as “radical,” explaining that, “in order to participate in this type of program (IIPSOCULTA’s Families Without Borders program) you have to be pretty radical. … Most of these women have had to overcome a lot with their husbands and their children.”

Fabiola Mendeita came from Tetlanohcan to the United States nine years ago, spending three years in New York before moving to New Haven six years ago.

“I was a single mother,” Mendeita said, “so I tried to have something better for my son.”

Mendeita said she was five months pregnant when she came to the United States. Her son died five years ago.

“They thought it was crazy,” Mendeita said, referring to her family’s reaction to her immigrating to the United States. Two of Mendeita’s brothers have since settled in New York. Another brother left Tetlanohcan more than 15 years ago and lives in West Haven. He hasn’t seen their mother in 10 years. But he will. She is part of Soame Citlalime, and will be among the 29 women from Tetlanohcan living with host families in New Haven for three weeks.

Mendeita said the women’s arrival will give their family members here “a little bit of what is Tetlanohcan.”

Marco Castillo, director of IIPSOCULTA, said people have been immigrating to this country from Tetlanohcan since the late 1980s. An adverse result of that migration, he said, is a loss of traditions and “the division and separation of families.”

One of those traditions is the Nahuatl language.

“It’s one of the communities that still speaks the native language,” Castillo said.

It’s a community that’s proud of its cultural heritage.

Still, he said, “there’s a sense of classism.” People leave Tetlanohcan to work in the cities where they can earn more money and return wearing new clothes and listening to new music.

“It’s capitalism, basically,” Castillo said.

While some in Tetlanohcan view this as progress, others see it as destructive to the village’s cultural traditions. It’s the “paradox of migration,” in Castillo’s words.

Mendeita said she’s told the women of Soame Citlalime that there are many opportunities here, but that living and working here, as an immigrant, can be difficult.

Most of Mendeita’s communication with family is through letters and postcards.

And Castillo travels back and forth between the United States and Mexico, bringing household items such as iPods, cell phones, TVs, shoes, and clothes from the United States to Mexico and authentic food from Mexico to the United States.

“We bring about 200 pounds each time we go, back and forth,” he said, about 100 pounds each way.

Those who’ve come here from Tetlanohcan have “found a pretty friendly community,” Castillo said.

Most of the 29 women coming to New Haven from Tetlanohcan have relatives here or in New York. Castillo describes them as ambassadors of the “beauty and treasure of their culture.” The focus of the Families Without Borders program, he said, is “not reuniting families.” That’s something that’s a “consequence, it’s a secondary thing.”

The women of Soame Citlalime are coming, he said, to promote culture and traditions.

Performances of La Casa Rosa: Fighting for a Future in a Free Trade World are scheduled to take place on April 10 at the Fair Haven Branch Library, and on April 13 and April 14 at Fair Haven School. The official inauguration of the New Haven/Tetlanohcan Sister Cities Project will take place in late April. For more information visit nhsistercities.org and iipsocultaus.wordpress.com.

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