Three Latinas Take the Stage

Rocks in My Salsa. Highways Performance Space. 10/6/06.

While this show was titled "Rocks in My Salsa" by Cristina Nava, what it turned out to be was three shows in one. It featured "The Tales of Calzones Cagados...aka Pretty Pretty Princess" by Sara Guerrero and "When Songleaders Go Bad!!!" by Elizabeth Szekeresh in addition to Nava's piece. This was much more of a Latina New Works Festival curated by Monica Palacios than the show I saw a few weeks ago was a Latino New Works Festival curated by Guillermo Gomez-Peña. All three ladies were energetic and entertaining in this evening of pieces dealing with identity, sexuality, and coming of age as Latina women in Southern California.

The evening began with a lovely introduction by Palacios, who seemed quite committed to this show. I hope I get to see her perform sometime soon, though I understand she's doing more writing and teaching than performing these days.

Sara Guerrero began the first piece aboard her bright red bike. It was a tale of childhood told with wide-eyed innocence and a lot of enthusiasm. There were points when this piece didn't quite hold together, when the stories she was telling were too erratic or the transitions were too rough, but Guerrero's grace and her mobile, expressive face and dramatic gestures carried her through so that the piece ended up being funny and charming.

Elizabeth Szekeresh's "When Songleaders Go Bad!!!" was darker than the first piece, almost painful to watch at points, but darkly funny as well. Szekeresh related her experiences as a young "brown" woman in Huntington Beach (in Orange County) with undiagnosed bipolar disorder. She illustrated both mania and depression in a disturbingly honest portrait in which the rough ride helped to make her point.

Cristina Nava's "Rocks in My Salsa," the final piece in the evening, and the longest and the strongest (it was the one we were there to see, after all), told the story of some of the bumps on the road to becoming the confident, self-accepting actress Crisina is today. It was a piece about learning to assert control over her own sexuality as it intersects with her Latina identity. There are both hilarious and profoundly disturbing moments along the way. The most powerful moment for me was an interlude in which Nava donned some beautiful teal heels and danced. Whether I was right or not, I interpreted this as a salsa dance, giving the play a beautiful double meaning in which the dance becomes a metaphor for the acceptance of herself and her sexuality in this moment of dancing alone (with Guerrero and Szekeresh keeping rythm in the background).

The show overall wasn't perfect. There were moments in each of the pieces in which the rythm or the emphasis weren't quite right. I'd say that each of the performers tried to cover too much ground and occasionally wandered farther from their central theme than I would have liked. I would have liked Nava, whose piece was the most polished, to have told her salsa story (which was in the publicity, so it wasn't a secret) earlier, to expose the organizing framework at the beginning. But these are tiny quibbles in the face of three promising performers. Each of these women is beautiful and talented and I look forward to hearing from them again in the future. I hope they have many more stories to tell.