Tonguebreaker: Poems and Performance Texts by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Author:Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press
Published: 2019-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

5. ritual prayers: performance texts from mangos with chili

introduction: qtpoc disabled ritual prayers

The following pieces are longer performance texts I wrote and performed with and for Mangos With Chili, the queer and trans people of color performance collective and tour I cofounded and codirected from 2006 to 2015—as in, almost a decade of wild adventures, hard learnings, mistakes, beauty and working class femmes of color making our dreams real. These pieces were created and performed in a very specific moment in time in the Bay Area of California, when QTPOC art and politics were blooming, when we could all still afford to live there.

In Mangos, we believed that performance was/is political. Our shows were rituals, healing spaces and places that created and sustained the community we wanted. We produced our performance spaces as a place to gather, dream and create/remake ourselves by telling stories. This looked like everything from La Chica Boom doing performance as her alter ego Chico Pow (the worst MECHistA fuckboy you could imagine), saying things like, “Gloria Anzaldúa? Yeah, I’ll fucking do her!” while the audience vented their rage at brown misogyny by hurling tortillas at the stage (sweeping up all the tortillas at midnight with fibromyalgia was hell) to performers cutting their arms in blood offering for the ghost of Gwen Araujo to an invented Black Queer Church service, the Congregation of Liberation. We did a million brilliant things and made a million mistakes.

In the time we flourished in the Bay Area, from 2008 to 2015, we did three large annual shows a year. This was an evolution from our original conception of our performance project as a tour, a QTPOC version of other, white-led and majority white, queer performance tours popular at the time that excluded us. And while we did do five North American tours in our time, we became more focused on doing local Bay Area shows, especially after the 2008 economic collapse made financing our work challenging, and after many of our tours proved to be both amazing and completely exhausting and, as a friend says, 1,000% Bananatown.

There is so much I can say about the Bay Area Mangos shows—how we performed everywhere from long-standing BIPOC-controlled theater spaces like the African American Art & Culture Complex, La Peña, Brava Theater and EastSide Arts Alliance to an ever-changing roster of legendary QTPOC performance spaces that gentrification shut down, like Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, The Lab and The Living Room Project. Our shows were fueled by little money, 20 to 40 volunteers, a very intent fan base, a muscling of internet 2.0 (like searching for “QTPOC and (name of city)” and cold-calling tiny social groups in cities we were visiting, saying, “Hi, you don’t know me, but I codirect this QTPOC performance tour and we’re coming to town, can you tell all your friends?”) and thousands of hours of unpaid labor. As a co-coordinator, I often worked ’til 2 a.m. six days a week. The mixtapes we played as folks entered and the

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