Secos y Mojados (S&M) is an all-immigrant performance collective based in San Francisco, California. Our members include Víctor Cartagena, visual artist and video maker from El Salvador, Violeta Luna, Mexican actress and performance artist, David Molina, an Angelino-Salvadoreño musician and composer, Antigone Trimis, collaborator and production coordinator from Greece, and Argentinean theater director Roberto Varea. We have all teamed up in different pairings and threesomes for the past 10 years, including performance art pieces, art installations and works of theater. All of us collaborated for the first time together in 2006, when we joined forces with the actors of El Teatro Jornalero! (ETJ!) a Latin American immigrant workers collective founded by Varea, in the development of the play No Olvidado / (Un)Forgotten.
The creative process of ETJ! is based on collective dynamics that privilege the voice and the acting of our immigrant-worker co-creators. El Teatro has developed 5 original dramatic works and performed its Spanish language plays to hundreds of mostly immigrant audiences, as well as non-Spanish speaking Americans, through translation devices and student volunteer support from the University of San Francisco. Our last piece focused on the dangerous crossing into the U.S. by immigrants who risk their lives, and indeed die by the hundreds every year in the attempt. S&M was born out of the desire to continue the exploration of the themes raised by No Olvidado, in a more manageable “chamber” format, where fewer artists are involved. Our creative process is not driven by the “ethics of communicative exchange” of ETJ!, but rather by techniques that yuxtapose, and layer the individual “self-expressive” output of the S&M members.
Our process for Enterrada en el cuerpo del recuerdo / Buried in the Body of Remembrance began with the exploration of a “conceptual container” and the hashing-out of a written dramaturgy of themes, images and structure. Each artist then worked his or her response to these ideas on her own. Working in the controlled environment of the studio, we presented these ideas to each other in our format of choice, and then began the process of alternating, rubbing, or smashing them against each other, and later defining the need for transitional material, editing, and structural cohesion. (Web site)
