One-man play search for ancestral voice
He was born here. He was raised here. And yet, for much of his life, Joseph Recinos didn’t feel like he belonged here.
So he travelled. Across Canada, across the U.S. Most importantly, back to Guatemala, where his parents fled a tense environment to come to Canada while his mother was pregnant with him.
The stories and insight he gained all come out in his Essential Collective Theatre oneman show “Blood Lightning,” opening today at FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre.
“At the forefront this is a message, from me personally, to those who have come before me and those who are currently struggling,” says the 30-year-old performer of Mayan descent who grew up in Niagara Falls. “It has been a cathartic experience for me.
“It’s my hometown, my family will be watching this. It’s my story, so a lot of people — family members, friends — are going to be hearing this for the first time.”
In the Mayan culture, ‘blood lightning’ refers to an ancestral memory that exists in the blood and is passed down to each generation. In the show, Recinos traces his heritage while tackling Niagara’s unique status as a border community. While trying to understand
his roots, he uses hip hop, storytelling, poetry and constant, exhausting movement, going from Canada back to Guatemala to eventually the Standing Rock protests against the Dakota Access pipeline.
Recinos created the show with Essential Collective Players artistic director Colin Bruce Anthes, who also grew up in Niagara Falls. They went to the same college, and share the same approach to theatre.
“We have a long past and share a lot of theatrical methodologies,” says Anthes. “We’re both very rooted in physical ways of storytelling, and ways that really emphasize the live interaction between the performer and the audience.”
As Recinos says in the show, “This is a story that begins at many different times, and arrives at many different places.” But telling his story in the current climate, with refugee children being taken from parents at U.S. borders, was important.
“As an artist, all of my art is influenced by community. It’s influenced by what is actually going around and happening, and championing those voices of the marginalized.”
“As a border town … we really wanted to engage in these major themes which are dominating our political sphere right now,” adds Anthes, who chose this as his first full production as Essential Collective Theatre’s new artistic director. “But maintain the specific and the personal, and to tell a story with all of its personal nuance, to see how an individual journeys through all that. Who is from here and not just from here at the same time.”