Past Work
Past Work
¡Harken! is a transfiguration of the flawed and fragmented pieces of history written about Juan Rodriguez – a mixed-race Atlantic Creole who arrived in 1613 from Santo Domingo as a fur trader for the Dutch. In ¡Harken!, Rodriguez’s ghost, wanting desperately to be a real person, asks ChatGPT to tell him more about his life. The AI responds with hallucinations; and distortions based on secondhand accounts written by colonizers and accepted as “history.” Using generative AI, audience prompts, face-swapping, and image generation, ¡Harken! Audiences help Rodriguez re-write his story by ‘feeding’ the AI new information generating new images and landscapes.
Mercedes (a work-in-progress) is a multidisciplinary art experience inspired by Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez’s grandmother, Mercedes, and the legacy of Latine individuals she helped migrate to the country. After immigrating to America as a kid, Flako was raised by his grandmother in Brooklyn. As an adult, he served as her main caregiver as she battled dementia. In the process of taking care of his “mama”, he uncovered years of letters, receipts, and papers that documented her impact on the Latine community. This journey of care, memory, and discovery is the heart of the work, Mercedes. This multidisciplinary art experience deals with our relationship to aging, dementia, and inherited trauma through a series of components: a theater piece based around Mercedes’ life, including her own migration to the U.S.; art therapy workshops in ‘The Mercedes Healing Room’; a gallery of artwork and photography created by workshop participants; a VR (Virtual Reality) healing experience; and a documentary, which will depict the entire project to share with wider audiences.
TAXILANDIA, originally created and written by Oye Group’s Modesto “Flako” Jimenez, immerses its audience in the flavors, sounds, sights and dynamic history of a neighborhood confronting social stigmas and the realities of gentrification. Weaving a dramatic, performative ‘tapestry’ that interconnects generations, social classes, races and cultures, TAXILANDIA complicates our notion of what it means to be a local, an immigrant or a resident of a place, challenging us to answer: “What is my personal roadmap of home?”
Originally developed in Jimenez’s own neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn, the piece was inspired and drawn from his nine years driving a taxicab and his documentation of conversations with passengers, residents, locals, and immigrants to the neighborhood. Flako and ¡Oye! Group are now working with presenters all over the country including New York Theatre Workshop and La Jolla Playhouse to develop local versions of TAXILANDIA specific to each city.
This richly imagined audio drama is produced by the Onassis Foundation, co-produced by the Brooklyn theater ensemble The TEAM, and distributed by PRX. Peabody Award-winning showrunner Julie Burstein created the series, which is directed by Tony Award-winner Rachel Chavkin ("Lempika," "Hadestown"), Zhailon Levingston (“Tina: The Tina Turner Musical,” "Chicken and Biscuits"), and Keenan Tyler Oliphant (“Hadestown,” “The Broken Ear Setlist”). Tony and Grammy winner André De Shields is Hermes, host of this “GodsPod” filled with tales of monsters, gods, and heroes.
Proud of all my grandbabies and no laws can take that away. It's never too late, too early or too far to come on out to your grandma's house. Shot at NACL, North American Cultural Laboratory With Modesto Flako Jiminez
Song Written by Fantasy Grandma
Song Produced by 808 Annie and Mason Rose
In a funk, Kristen, a physically disabled New York woman, walks dogs for a living but dreams of being a writer and as her life unravels, she must make a choice to fall apart or straighten up.
CHURROS is a dramatic short film about Jo-Jo, a 15 year-old Mexican-American boy who lives with his street vendor single mother and little sister in Brooklyn. He breakdances with a crew and dreams of being "the illest" b-boy in the world, but a local gang member attempts to lure him away. One night, Jo-Jo is forced to make one of the most important decisions of his life.
Presented on a 3-D immersive interactive projection stage, this bio-digital play is set in a visually charged universe of decadence inspired by Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos paintings. Featuring live actors and digital avatars, the story is about the last day of a blind poet, Max Starpower. The project is a universe where tragedy, sarcasm, and comedy are portrayed as a deformed and apocalyptic mirror of reality; In this world, circumstance is the source of tragedy, and the grimace produced by this tragedy is what rules its form.
JACK & considers re-entry into society after prison; focusing not on the time one has served, but the measure of one’s dreaming that is given to the state. “Jack” works the night shift at an industrial bakery. He returns home to bake a cake for his wife “Jill.” “Jack” ends up whirling through a dance – part dream, part ritual – re-entering his own internal life. The performance draws on aspirational class stories like those in The Honeymooners and Amos & Andy; the paintings of Agnes Martin, Ellen Gallagher and Ruth Azawa; tigers in Harlem; real and imagined entering society ceremonies like Cotillion balls; and markers of transition from John Canoe traditions, to the mirroring and mimicry found in African American dance pageantry of the late 19th Century.
“Listen to the beats / The rhythm of my Bushwick streets.” Brooklyn impresario Modesto Flako Jimenez conjures his beloved borough in this bilingual elegy, told through poems, projections, and music. With lyrical brilliance and irreverent play, ¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn complicates our perceptions of race, language, and gentrification and calls us to be truly present to ask the question: “What is my moral worth?”
In EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS, The Wooster Group channels the 1976 LP of the same name recorded by the Sisters of the Shaker Community in Sabbathday Lake, Maine, giving a new live rendering to their songs and finding inspiration for a series of dances.
On the fringes of the frontier, a messenger embarks on an arduous journey to collect a debt from a man he’s never met. Friends set out to atone for a mistake that can’t be undone. Strangers look for a little bit of comfort wherever they can find it.
In a reworking of his 2013 work for one actor and a dirty Sesame Street Army, playwright and director William Burke is joining forces with Modesto “Flako” Jimenez and Brooklyn Gypsies Collective in a new and explosive Spanish/Spanglish/human translation of FURRY!/LA FURIA depicting the struggle of a pan handling Time Square Elmo. In order to care for his ailing son, a man dressed in his street Elmo best, attempts take over the blocks of 42nd - 46th street, using The Art of War, an army of Elmos and his deepest and most violent self. Naked Cowboy beware. When Elmo Close…Elmo appears Far. The army gathers.
A dark comedy about a gardener who is invited to be part of the house staff of a mansion. While inside, he gets more than he bargained for while dealing with other members of the staff.
A meditation on the history and current state of affairs of race relations in the U.S., featuring original poetry by acclaimed spoken word artists Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez and Saroya Marsh, who have interwoven historic video and audio with present-day text, surrounding it in a visual art landscape which is created afresh each night.
Yoleros is an award-winning, original play created by the Teatrica Theater Company. The company was born in 2011 to continue the vibrant tradition of producing theater in Spanish in New York City. A journey through illusions toward a new beginning; Maximo gets through life by various trades: lottery vendor and guide of risky ventures through the Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, for those looking to escape reality with no future. Along with Demecio and Dinora, Maximo embarks on a journey across the sea, across numbers and dreams.
Last Night at the Palladium is an interactive art installation and part immersive play set at an epic party. Accompanied by a live DJ and projections, Last Night At The Palladium tells the story of New York City’s transformative art scene – from Andy Warhhol’s famous Silver Factory to the closing of the Palladium Night Club. Actors, graffiti artists, musicians and poets take us through the decades, bringing to life Warhol, Basquiat, Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Fab Five Freddy, Edie Sedgwick, Patti Astor, among many other irreverent voices of the city.
TAKE ME HOME is a site-specific live performance project in New York that takes place inside the mobile heart of the city: a taxicab. Transporting three audience members only, from a secret location, the Driver takes you on a radical journey through the city, along streets both familiar and strange. The windows to the cab become eyes to a vast theatrical landscape as the streets of New York transform into an unending performance installation. Integrating live performance, sound, video and street action, TAKE ME HOME offers a captivating, dark and irreverent view of the city through an intimate and innovative theatrical experience.