Written & Directed by — and Starring — J.D. Mata

Premiering at The Griff x Hollywood Fringe Festival 2021

Livestream link for August 20th at 9pm (pacific time) here.

Additional live & livestreams shows on August 25th at 8pm & August 27th at 9pm.

“CHALE, a musician of Chicano, Mexican American, heritage – finally hits the BIG TIME and is a world sensation! As his UNIQUE style of music is finally exposed to the world, so is his OUTDATED pseudo machismo! TRAGEDY strikes at his final concert performance! HOW did this horrible incident happen, and WHY? We go back in time, where his band performed at dive Go Go bars to make ends meet, for answers! SEXY dancers groove, and sing – to the sounds of Chale’s music, all of who catch his wondering eye. One in particular – a drop dead Goddess, ANTONELLA – steals his heart and much, much more! There’s one slight problem, she’s ……..! That never stopped him before. Be careful, what you pray for – because you just might get it (and more that you bargained for) like a STRONG Latina woman! Precisely why, A NIGHT at the CHICANO ROCK OPERA – a night of an exhilarating chicano rock concert, erotic dancing, and romantic tragedy – will bear you more than YOU bargained for!” — *synopsis by J.D. Mata

See you at the show!!

Read about “ILLUMINATING THE CHANDELIER” — a Zoom-specific work by Heidi Duckler Dance & performed live (virtually on Zoom) on April 30, 2020 — reviewed by Sophie Bress in the LA Dance Chronicle here — and featured in the LA Times in an article about LA dance companies adapting to quarantine by Makeda Easter here. (Photos by Susannah Rodriguez Drissi)

CONTACT is a performance about bodies coming together and becoming undone through sound, movement, touch, and play. 

In CONTACT bodies encounter other bodies, whether human-animal or material, whether fabric or image or nature’s detritus. 

CONTACT occurs through the unexpected, which brings risk and joy. 

CONTACT is about being present and about using bodies as a vehicle to articulate the unique environment of the moment. 

Through CONTACT,  we — SOMA 2020, aka Magdalena Edwards & Sohani Holland & our special guests — invite stillness and presence and the unknown. 

CONTACT happens before the eyes of our audience and performers, a shared experience of consciousness through layers of containment, contrast, conflict, and connection.

CONTACT will take place on February 28th and February 29th at 8.30pm at HIGHWAYS PERFORMANCE SPACE in Santa Monica. Tickets available for 2/28 here and for 2/29 here. Join us!

Magdalena Edwards is a writer, actor, and translator obsessed with hybridity, border-crossings, and the creative process in all its public intimacies. Sohani Holland is a Los Angeles-based artist and creative director who uses performance and textiles as mediums for documenting and storytelling. Magdalena & Sohani are SOMA 2020. More at @sohanidesigns and @msmagda8lena

In Rio de Janeiro, 2002.

I have been reading, studying, and writing about Clarice Lispector’s work for more than 15 years. My introduction to Clarice first came in Santiago, Chile, in 2000 when I was teaching ESL at the Nido de Aguilas International School and my students were reading her final novel The Hour of the Star (originally published in Portuguese in 1977) as translated by Giovanni Pontiero. After a year of teaching and working as a journalist in Chile, I went back to school to pursue a PhD in Comparative Literature. My first year I enrolled in an intensive Portuguese class to learn the language (my teacher was then a graduate student — her name is Alessandra Santos). By the spring semester I found myself taking a seminar at UCLA with Elizabeth Marchant that was devoted entirely to Clarice and her work in Portuguese. I went to Brazil for the first time that summer, which is winter in South America. I returned with focused energy and  a sense of what would become my dissertation project.

In October 2002, I gave my first academic paper on Clarice’s work at a graduate student conference at UCLA. The keynote speaker at the “Crime & Punishment in Literature and the Arts” conference was Hélène Cixous, whose 1979 book Vivre l’orange centers on Clarice and her oeuvre.

UCLA, Crime and Punishment in Literature and the Arts, 2002.

My paper for the conference was titled “Silence, or the Translator’s Inevitable Treason: Elizabeth Bishop’s Translations of Three Stories by Clarice Lispector.”

UCLA, 2002.

I went on to write about Clarice — in particular the “Three Stories” translated by Elizabeth Bishop and published in The Kenyon Review in 1964 —  in my doctoral dissertation, and I have continued to write about her work in my published essays, which you can find below.

Rio de Janeiro, 2005.

I feel a deep and long-standing connection to her legacy — specifically  as seen in her published works and in her influence upon scores of artists and writers within and beyond Brazil.

Rio de Janeiro, 2006.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Special Guest. ABC RN in Australia. Book and Art’s Latin American Book Club. June 28, 2017. Podcast here.

Special Guest. Los Angeles Review of Books’ LARB Radio Hour on KPFK-FM. On Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories (New Directions 2015) translated by Katrina Dodson. October 29, 2015. Podcast here.

Speaker/Interviewer. A conversation with translator Katrina Dodson about Clarice Lispector’s Complete Stories. Skylight Books, Los Angeles. October 14, 2015. Podcast here. 

“A Horribly Marvelous and Delicate Abyss: The Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector.” The Millions. August 10, 2015.

“‘The House We Live In’: Elizabeth Bishop on the Big Screen.” The Paris Review Daily. November 7, 2013. 

Special Guest. I gave a short lecture and then had a conversation with Mona Simpson as a special guest for her “Emerging Writers Series.” UCLA’s English Department and UCLA Friends of English. October 21, 2013.

Three Monkeys in Brazil, 2006.

The artist Lenka Clayton has created an amazing opportunity for mothers who are artists. It’s an open source residency called Artist Residency in Motherhood. Mine begins to today and goes through October 10, 2017. I have ambitious plans for my work. I must complete my translation of Clarice Lispector’s novel THE CHANDELIER for New Directions. I am working on a first draft of my literary memoir IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD: Traveling with Elizabeth Bishop, Clarice Lispector, and Raúl Zurita. I am also working on a one-woman show called I WANNA BE ROBERT DE NIRO, which I will perform under my stage name Magdalena Emar. One of the things I am most interested in exploring as I do all of this work is how we must all mother ourselves; we must all — girls, boys, men, women, trans, queer, non-gender identifying, humanoid, sentient creatures — become the child we would most like to parent. In this regard we are all mothers. Though I do recognize that I am the specific mother of three specific children I grew inside my body and gave birth to on this earth, I also know very deeply that mothering as we understand it is neither merely nor exclusively biological. More on all of this soon. For now, back to work. #artistresidencyinmotherhood

My great-grand-uncle, my great-grandmother’s brother, the surrealist writer Juan Emar (1893-1964).

We have begun our own correspondence, across the ether…

And I see him in my children, the blood line is strong.

WOMP WOMP photo by Magdalena Edwards @MEMAR 2015

I’ve just returned from four days in New York, where I attended a writing conference called BinderCon, went to see Sarah Ruhl‘s play Dear Elizabeth at Women’s Project Theater, and started reading Maggie Nelson‘s The Argonauts. A provocative trio of pursuits.

I am not the most skilled at Twitter, and I have my reservations about participating in a sport that feels like high school all over again, but the concision of a tweet appeals to my lyrical sensibilities. A challenge, like a haiku.

I felt the impulse to tweet the evening of Sarah Ruhl’s play Dear Elizabeth, which I attended with Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts in hand — to read before each act began. I wanted to highlight the triangulation of two texts coursing through the mind of one reader/listener/viewer (me). We do this kind of triangulation all the time.

Here is a draft, a draft of my tweet with bluets:

It’s reassuring to me and my Twitter skittishness that neither Maggie Nelson nor Sarah Ruhl have Twitter handles (hence the hashtags instead of the @_____).

And, with the above draft in mind,  a ménage-à-3 of voices:

“the romance of letting an individual experience of desire take precedence over a categorical one”

— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf Press 2015)

*

Lowell: I seem to spend my life missing you!

…

Bishop: I love my poem–and you, too, of course…

–Sarah Ruhl, Dear Elizabeth (Faber and Faber 2014)

*

“I don’t even want to talk about ‘female sexuality’ until there is a control group. And there never will be.”

— Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Graywolf Press 2015)

I invite you to read Maggie Nelson’s book alongside Sarah Ruhl’s play if you can, and remember that I was the one to make the suggestion.

You won’t regret it.

GOODBYE, NEW YORK Photo by Magdalena Edwards, @MEMAR 2015