Green,howIwantyougreen, 2015-2017. The Conservatory of Music of Puerto Rico in San Juan, The Whim Plantation Estate in St Croix, Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden, and Gateway Project Spaces. 50 minutes performance.
The experimental and interactive, bilingual performance is based on the last eleven poems, Sonnets of Dark Love, by the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca. The poems were banned for 50 years after his assassination in 1936. The poems are fused with personal narratives and text from Lillian Hellman's The Children Hours and Oscar Wilde by Leslie and Sewell Stokes, both written around the time of Lorca's assassination. The music is composed and arranged by Daniel de Jesus.
Green how I want you green, is a follow up to The Opera, commissioned for El Museo del Barrio and presented for Performa 13.
Green, How I Want You Green a performance by David Antonio Cruz, Jennifer Jade Ledesna, Diego Carvajal Peñaranda, Lisa Strum and musicians, Daniel de Jesus and Samuel Thompson. Guest performances by Elia Alba and Kharis Kennedy. All music is composed by Daniel de Jesus.
Photos by Quina Adams. Photographs of Green in Puerto Rico and St Croix are provided by Alaina Simone Inc.
THE PERFORMANCES
The opera-like performances are a loud psychological manifestation of the portraits frozen in the paintings. The performers are often the model sources for the paintings. Like the paintings, the performances explore the physical, emotional, and metaphorical disjunction between the body, society, and structures.
The operatic performances borrow from queer texts, plays, and films to construct visible queer narratives and to expose forgotten histories. The performances fuse multiple texts together with references from popular culture and personal narratives of coming out. The multilingual performances clash high art against queer slang, playing with language, music and double entendres particular to Latino and Black underground gay culture.
Green,howiwantyougreen at ICA Philadelphia, 2023. Video, sound, and editing by Christopher Andrew Studios.
