Conversations with my Descendants via Sci-Fi Space Odyssey: a screenplay for the stage

Conversations with my Descendants via Sci-Fi Space Odyssey: a screenplay for the stage is a live multimedia performance that fuses speculative fiction, memoir, and post-colonial essay as an embodied future archive of inheritance concerned with the body/mind/spirit as technology. In the narrative, Mireya Lucio’s consciousness is reincarnated as a sentient spaceship in a distant future where humans have fled into space following the devastation of planet Earth. This narrative screenplay is the site for a conversation between Mireya-as-spaceship and her future descendant, Viajerx, the first space-born human to be sent on a return mission to Borikén (Puerto Rico).

Written and Performed by Mireya Lucio

Sound Design and Music Composition by
Ben Babbitt

This project received development support from Los Angeles Performance Practice‘s 2022 Research + Development Program for Parents/Guardians, with funding from Sustainable Arts Foundation.

Mireya Lucio (born in Puerto Rico and living in Los Angeles by way of New York) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, director, and performer. After training as an actor (BFA Tisch/NYU; Moscow Art Theatre; MFA CalArts), Mireya developed a performance-making practice stemming from a love of dramaturgy and intuitive assembling. Mireya’s work has taken the form of dinners, lectures, walking tours, videos, stage shows, and game nights. Her full-length solo performances unravel timelines embedded with precise historical reenactment into musical extravaganzas: “Brandenburg Gate: The American Hits” (an episodic timeline of US presidential visits and foreign celebrity presence in Berlin, along with renditions of number-one Billboard Chart hits of the day), and “¡Con la boca es un mamey!” (a non-authoritative lecture-cum-personal revisionist history of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony). Her collaborative practice with Sallie Merkel, Emotional Labor Co., weaves popular culture and academic inquiry into non-linear, transgressive studies of girlhood (as in Our-So-Called Sleepover, or, Freud and Jung Crash 1995 Through a Ouija Board), and creates transformative ritual via playful entertainment (as in The Commons digital series and the iterative Witches’ Cabaret).