Radical Evolution Sobremesa

December 2024

By Meropi Peponides

Last month, Radical Evolution had the pleasure to share some time with the artistic community of San Antonio, thanks to an invite from Virginia Grise and Maricela Infante of A Todo Dar Productions. We made many meaningful connections with artists and organizations across the city who are working at the intersection of arts and politics, the highlight of which was the sobremesa that A Todo Dar hosted at Galería E.V.A. 

At the event, we talked about how our politics show up in our artistic practice and some of the joys and struggles of embodying our politics through our work. We wanted to share some of what we talked about as well as what resonated for us in the conversation. 

Radical Evolution is a producing collective committed to creating artistic events that seek to understand the complexities of our multicultural existence in the 21st Century. We use an ensemble-based approach to create aesthetically and formally rigorous events that bring together people from many different identities with whom we build capacity to relate to each other across lines of difference. We do this with a focus on engaging people of color, to seed the field of performance with practitioners that celebrate the intersectionality of perspectives and aesthetics of the city around us. Through this approach, we work to assert a vision for cultural and social equity in our field, city, and nation.

Here are some of the ways that we embody this philosophy …

Compensating Artists - We understand that life in our home city of New York is expensive and artists have less time than ever to engage in uncompensated work (however much they care about and want to participate). We endeavor to compensate everyone for the time they share with us while creating, rehearsing, and performing. We recognize that being able to pay people for their time has transformed who is able to participate in making our work, and opens up our process to many more people from varying walks of life. 

Of course this is difficult and there are never enough funds to meet our vision. Even being able to pay people a modest fee for their time does little to counteract the overall challenges of artists attempting to make their life in the city. The resources required to do a full production have increased drastically in the past few years, and organizations have less money than ever for artists to make their work. However, as artists who support labor organizing and progressive political projects, we know we have to start by compensating the labor of our collaborators.

Multiethnic ensembles - All of our work includes the practice of bringing together artists from different cultural, and ethnic groups –- sometimes even linguistic and geographic backgrounds. As artists who grew up in bicultural households, this feels natural to many of Radical Evolution’s collaborators, but is a rare practice in a theatre industry fraught with tokenism in white institutions and sectarianism in some culturally specific institutions. Some of our shows celebrate particular cultures and histories, but there is always some element of cross-cultural connection.

We’re currently developing a show called Canciones, an immersive piece about a Mexican American family of Mariachi singers. Even in this piece, one of the characters who married into the family is Asian American and plays everyone’s favorite Mariachi tunes alongside everyone else. In addition to building pathways of cross-cultural solidarity through this work, we hope to subvert certain people’s assumptions and open up viewpoints into the nuances of our modern extended families. 

Making work outside theater buildings/in different contexts - Canciones also doesn’t occur in a theatre building, but instead happens entirely in people’s homes. We are currently identifying hosts to open their homes for performances of the show, and the action of the story takes place simultaneously in different rooms, creating an immersive, environmental experience. The audience is treated as members of the extended family who have shown up for the family reunion and are given opportunities to participate in the world of the play in whichever ways feel comfortable to them. Audience members can help make tamales, sing along to the Mariachi classics throughout the piece, or sit back and watch it all unfold.

In addition to making this site-specific work, Radical Evolution has a street theatre team that creates and performs short, politically focused works on street corners, at protests and rallies, at community events, on picket lines, and anywhere else we are asked to go. 

This evolution of our work is relatively recent, becoming our primary focus in the last few years. It came from audiences’ flagging interest in returning to traditional theatre institutions in the wake of covid, high ticket prices at those same institutions, and a sense that so many members of our community were feeling alienated from those spaces and the work happening inside them. We wanted to bring our work to where people already are. This necessarily changes the forms and aesthetics we use, and we consider it an opportunity to think differently and flexibly about how each work is realized, according to the material conditions in which it exists and the resources and needs of the communities with which we’re collaborating.   

Celebrating our cultures and using traditional forms in new ways - We’ve already talked about the beloved mariachi classics that run through Canciones. In addition to this, our work is deeply influenced by two companies with which we’ve collaborated - El Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista, CA, and Jana Natya Manch in New Delhi, India. From them, we learned to use elements of popular culture, folk music, myths, visual styles, and more to create work that is accessible to a wide range of audiences and multilayered, containing many different meanings at once. 

This was one of the places where the work of San Antonio artists really resonated. So many incredible makers throughout the city talked to us about how they were using traditional music, visual arts, food, and other cultural practices as modes of expressing their own complex present-day identities In particular, we heard about artists troubling categories of gender and sexuality through cultural forms, which academics may call “queering” these cultural forms.

This is one of many reasons why we feel a deep affinity with the artistic community we met in San Antonio. We hope to be back soon and often to continue conversations and collaborations. In the meantime, we’ll be keeping up with all the awesome work from afar and cheering y’all on from NYC!