“Clown has taken a lot of pressure off my own work, and it made me less afraid of how I’ll be received and more willing to take risks without needing things to feel polished.”
“It can be isolating and disheartening to be the only person of color in a room, especially in spaces dominated by older white men who hold the keys to the city. What helps is knowing that many women of color are doing this work all over the world, even if we don’t always see each other.”
“We are living through a moment in which artists are expected to do more with less, to move between institutional logics and community urgencies, to survive precarity and still be visionary. Too often, artists are spoken about rather than spoken with. Too often, institutions prioritize metrics over lived realities. If we are to build a sustainable arts ecosystem in Los Angeles, institutions must realign, not with trends or mandates, but with artists.”
A free-swirling debrief of Los Angeles Performance Practice’s latest iteration of CASUAL–co-authored and co-curated by Marsian De Lellis, William Ruiz Morales, and gina young–is now published on Mid Theory Collective.
“I’m the person who texts someone at 1 a.m. with an idea I just had. Writing the novel put me in a more intimate space with language. No bodies, no logistics, just words. It’s lonely, but I like that too. With theatre, I’m always thinking about the audience. With the novel, I’m just asking, how can I make myself laugh?”
“The history of Estrada Courts needs to be documented,” says muralist and CAC Legacy Artist Norma Montoya, for the sake of the whole community. “I’m so, so proud that we got this fellowship. It’s not my fellowship. It’s a fellowship that a lot of us worked for.”