Dispensado
About the Project
Puerto Rico
In the 1950s, USA doctors conducted birth control trials on Puerto Rican women without their knowledge or comprehension of the potential side effects. Few investigative reports on the subjects involved- including documentation of three women who lost their lives- exist to this day. This moment in history echoes and reverberates as something that continues to happen in our Western culture- the entitlement that we have to advance at the cost of the disenfranchised. From this under-developed story, we will unpack the intricacies of culture, gender, class and ethics.
Creation
Dispensado is becoming a collection. Through all our research we have found that the topics of feminism, colonialism, body and land is too large to iterate in one piece. Our first production will be an exhibition that evolves from conversations we all have with our mothers about their relationship to their bodies. Our second development is to create a workshop in conjunction with The University of Puerto Rico for the students to explore the topics through writing, movement and composition.
The need
This is a 3 year project in the making. Any financial support goes to creating the different elements, sustaining us as artists as we work on the performance: the ability to travel, rent space, and pay our collaborators.
The Collective
In 2015, we attended SITI Conservatory, a year-long training intensive in The Suzuki Method of Actor Training and The Viewpoints Technique.
Melissa has written, constructed and performed her way through female migration and displacement-- her own story and the stories of others that culminated into a documentary performance art piece, Pangea.
Jackie embarked on an 11-week tour with Agile Rascal Bicycle Touring Theatre. Devising and performing environmentally-themed plays on bicycle through the rural Northwest.
We come together now with a shared interest in how theatre can be experienced and created through journey and embodied research.
Melissa is a white, cis-gendered Straight woman who’s been on Birth Control since the age of 17.
Jackie is a Puerto Rican, cis-gendered Queer woman who has never taken Birth Control.
We have questions.
MElissa Flower
Melissa currently works as a freelance director, collaborator, performance artist, and dramaturg in New York and Houston. She is the Director of Communications at Luciole International Theatre Company and sits on the board of Wordsmyth Theatre. She runs a training group that spans both Houston and NYC called Basic 6. Her directing credits include: Masseur (Theatre for the New City), The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Cassandra, A Doll’s House (AD), Big Love at Theatre B in Fargo, Roadside, Milo and Barbara, Caleb, and Vigils. She has also served as assistant director at Classical Theatre Company for A Doll’s House, Ghost Sonata and Mrs. Warren’s Profession as well as The Vibrator Play at Stages Repertory Theatre, and Hot L Baltimore at UH. Her performance/devising credits include Here Now at the Martha Graham Studios in New York, Things Missing/Missed and Hypocrite at Obsidian Theatre. Her performance art credits include: Pangea, John Cages’s Lunch and Dinner, Black Hole, and My Blog with Some Google Searches. Her other dramaturgical credits include: Hamlet, and Comedy of Errors at the Houston Shakespeare Festival. Melissa has devoted her career and scholarship to avant-garde methods of actor training: Viewpoints and Suzuki. She has trained in various workshops with the SITI Company in Manhattan and this past summer, she traveled to Toga, Japan to train with Tadashi Suzuki and the SCOT Company. She completed the SITI Conservatory and studied with Double Edge Theatre in Grotowski inspired practice and circus in Ashfield, MA. She holds a BFA from Baylor University and an MA in Dramaturgy from the University of Houston.
Sylvia Bofill
Es dramaturga, directora e intérprete puertorriqueña. Obtuvo un MFA en Dramaturgia de Columbia University, NewYork. En el 2009 ganó el Schomburg Distinguished Scholar and Artist Grant (Playwright-in-Residence), residencia artística durante la cual colaboró con el Departamento de Drama, Español y Estudios Latinoamericanos de Ramapo College, New Jersey. Ha escrito y dirigido Tres puntos en un límite (43er Festival de Teatro Puertorriqueño del ICP, Teatro Lucy Boscana, San Juan, 2002); Rosa viejo (Teatro Yerbabruja, Río Piedras, 2004); Windows (INTAR Theatre, Workshop Theater, New York, 2006); Muchas palabras (Quintas Fiestas Coreográficas Hincapié, ICP, Teatro UPR, 2009); Insideout (Teatro Victoria Espinosa, 2010); ¡Oh! Natura (Teatro Victoria Espinosa, 2013; Teatro Tapia, 2014). Su obra Hi- Bye fue parte de una trilogía (UHaul trilogy) en el Live Arts Philadelphia Fringe Festival dirigido por Juan Souki, 2006. Coescribió con Peter Campbell Medea and Medea/for Medea (Incubators Art Project, Ontological Theater, N.Y, 2011). Actualmente es profesora de Apreciación del Teatro y de Dramaturgia en la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras.
Julia Taveres
Born in 1991, the year Terminator was a thing, Julia Lucrecia Taveras López grew up in a town with no movie theatres and two ginormous hospitals. She received a B.A. from The New School University in New York, completing an interdisciplinary degree in Literary Arts with a focus on Theatre. During her studies she was part of the ensemble of Triangle: From the Fire (Rubino & Swados), wrote and directed a micro play titled "Tiger", as well as assistant directed As You Like It. During the interim, she traveled through Guatemala and taught movement and dance at La Cambalacha. Needeless to say, the students were much more talented than her. The same goes for her time in Acre, Brazil; a town so isolated that the students learning English had no idea how much they knew. Currently, she is completing an MA in Translation at the University of Puerto Rico, teaching French part time at the Alliance Française, and is a student of flamenco under Jeanne D'Arc Casas when time and money allow it. She has teased the world of subtitling via the work of documentarist Johanné Gómez Terrero. Recently, she was allowed to collaborate in the translation of Sylvia Bofill's 2018 play Blackbird. Julia is eager to dig deeper into the mud, which is why she volunteered for a position as interpreter during Dispensado Project's first visit to Puerto Rico.
Naty Technicolor
Born Natalie Romero Gonzalez in Barranquilla, Colombia, she is a media and performance artist, documentary filmmaker and cultural producer currently based in the New York City Area. She has worked collaboratively in a variety of interdisciplinary projects in the United States, Europe and Latin America; beginning her career with films that addressed the socio-political conflict and the humanitarian crisis of the refugees in Colombia. In 2008 she immigrated to the U.S where she has participated and collaborated in award winning independent films such as I Tweet by Miles Productions; as a dancer in Sylvain Emard’s Le Grand Continental NYC Edition for the LMCC; in experimental and immersive theater in Richard Schechner’s Imagining O at Peak Performances, in radical performance art workshops with Guillermo Gomez Peña’s La Pocha Nostra. Recent collaborations include artist Sarah Berkeley and Melissa Flower.