For Culture Clash alum, a new stage
Performer Herbert Siguenza adds his voice to Pixar’s new animated hit, ‘Coco.’
Herbert Siguenza is best known in Los Angeles as the co-founder of the Chicano performance troupe Culture Clash, but recently he expanded his reach from the stage to the big screen: His voice is heard prominently in the Pixar animated feature “Coco.”
Siguenza plays the identical great-great granduncles Tío Felipe and Tío Oscar in the film, which follows the adventures of a Mexican boy named Miguel as he accidentally stumbles into the Land of the Dead during Día de los Muertos celebrations.
When Siguenza took his wife, Samantha, and 6-yearold daughter, Belen, to the movie’s starry premiere in Hollywood in November, the expression on Belen’s face told him that this time he’d really made it.
“She was so proud,” recalls Siguenza, who’s playwright in residence at San Diego Repertory. “To me that was worth it, right there, just looking at her face.”
Siguenza, whose work within and outside of Culture Clash has long focused on matters of Latino identity, also took his own pride in the project and his part in it. “I hadn’t seen the film until the opening in L.A.,” he says. “And it really blew me away. I mean, I bawled my eyes out at the end.
“I cried for two reasons. I cried at the emotional impact of the story. But I think I also cried because I was so happy that they got it right. And I think a lot of Latinos are crying because of that.
“We’re just so happy that they understood our family traditions.”
Siguenza wasn’t expecting to be in “Coco” at all when he was first contacted by producers about a year and a half ago. He initially was asked to be one of the behind-the-scenes advisers to the film, in the wake of controversy that Pixar’s parent, Disney, stepped into in 2013 when it tried to trademark the phrase “Día de los Muertos.”
“Which was, you know, very weird,” Siguenza says. “The Latino community was in an uproar about it.”
So the company had the idea to bring in experts in cuisine, in music, in comedy, Siguenza says. “To come in and give our 2 cents about the script.”
While Siguenza was advising, he mentioned that he had done some voice work along with his stage and screenwriting and acting. The name Culture Clash rang a few bells on the “Coco” team. “About a month later I get a call saying, ‘Come up and record some voices,’ ” he says.
About all he saw while doing the voice work was the inside of a recording booth.
“There was no animation at that point,” Siguenza says. “It was just a script and these drawings of the two characters. That was it.”
That’s different from the kinds of characterizations Siguenza is used to doing onstage, both in such shows as the San Diego Rep-commissioned “Culture Clash in Bordertown” and in a string of plays he has written outside the group — “El Henry,” “A Weekend With Picasso” and “Manifest Destinitis” among them.
“Basically you repeat a line 10 different ways, because they don’t really know how they’re going to use it,” he says of the animation work.
Having recorded the voices in relative solitude, Siguenza found it surreal to be suddenly a part of a massive pop-culture phenomenon. “Once you get into Pixar/Disney World, it just takes on a whole different meaning and has a whole different impact,” he says. “It just kind of elevates it to almost immortality.”
Siguenza praises the studio for its efforts to get things right and for even working in topical humor that could’ve come right out of the Culture Clash playbook.
“The people in the Land of the Dead still have to cross a border,” he notes. “They have a checkpoint — there are certain rules for you to cross into the Land of the Living. So I found that very interesting.”
Seeing “Coco” also makes Siguenza reflect on how his daughter is “so lucky to have a movie like this at her age. We never had anything like this when we were growing up. ‘The Jungle Book’ was the first brown kid I’d seen. We kind of related to him a little bit, but that was it.
“So it’s come a long way. It’s still Disney. Here and there, you still see some remnants of ‘Los Tres Caballeros’ (the Spanish title for a 1947 animated film that featured a gun-toting Mexican rooster named Panchito Pistoles). Which reminds you that it’s Disney.
“But they get so much other stuff right that you just forget it.”
OK, maybe not completely.
“Coco” has shown Hollywood that if you tell Latino stories well, audiences will come, he says. “But I hope to see an American story. This story could’ve been set in San Antonio, Texas, or Tucson, Ariz. But it’s in a small town in Mexico.
“I’m hoping they take this experience and Americanize it more, where we’re not seen through a foreign lens. It’s still foreign, we’re still in Mexico. We’re still seen as foreigners subconsciously, right? And not threatening because, well, we’re in our own country.
“So I want to see stories about real Mexican Americans living here.”
While he’s waiting, Siguenza has plenty more of his own stories to tell. He’s about halfway through his three-year tenure as the Rep’s playwright in residence, a position sponsored by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Up next is his ambitious, immersive world-premiere theater happening “Beachtown,” which will unfold in March and will be participatory in nature. He’s also directing “Cloud Tectonics” at Carlsbad’s New Village Arts Theatre this month.
In addition, Siguenza is collaborating with the klezmer musician Yale Strom and the choreographer John Malashock on a performance piece about the artist Marc Chagall, for the Lipinsky Family San Diego Jewish Arts Festival.
Siguenza has also written his first musical, a collaboration with the veteran songwriter-producer Mark Spiro called “Birth Day.”
“We call it a metaphysical musical,” Siguenza says. “We talk about people coming back from the dead on their birthday, for 24 hours. It’s a very deep musical, I think. It brings up a lot of questions about memory and longing and letting go. And love.”