Live film narrations by Jaime Cortez, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Douglas Kearney and Nicole McJamerson, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Konrad Steiner, Jennifer Tamayo, Anuj Vaidja, and Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal
organized by Konrad Steiner and Anuj Vaidja
co-sponsored by The Poetry Center and Artists’ Television Access
http://poetry.sfsu.edu/events/
The New Talkies is a evening-length program featuring live film narrations by Jaime Cortez, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Douglas Kearney and Nicole McJamerson, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, Konrad Steiner, Jennifer Tamayo, Anuj Vaidja, and Stalina Emmanuelle Villarrea.
This evening of neo-benshi performances will consist of screening several film clips (short edits from feature films or other mass media) re-narrated live for the audience. Scripts are written and performed by authors from the Bay Area, New York, Los Angeles, and Houston to short excerpts from such blockbusters as The Sound of Music; the Mexican feature, Lola La Trailera (Lola the Truck Driver); the animated series Dora, the Explorer; and the obscure The Assassination of Trotsky; to the cult classic Carnival of Souls.
Writer/performers include:
Anuj Vaidya
Douglas Kearney
Jaime Cortez
Jennifer Tamayo
Konrad Steiner
Nicole McJamerson
Stalina Villarreal
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Jaime Cortez is an California artist, writer, and cultural worker. His art practice encompasses mixed media, photo, sculpture, installation, and often centers on drawing. He has exhibited his art at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, The Intersection for the Arts, Galería de la Raza, Southern Exposure, Martina Johnston Gallery, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Jaime’s short stories, comics, and essays have been anthologized in over a dozen anthologies, including “KinderGarde,” “Street Art San Francisco,” and the groundbreaking LGBT comic anthology “No Straight Lines.” Jaime has given readings and occasional performances at venues across the Bay Area. He received his MFA from UC Berkeley.
Tongo Eisen-Martin, originally from San Francisco, is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He has taught in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California county jails. He has been a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and designed curricula for oppressed people’s education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is also a revolutionary poet who uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. His first full-length book of poems, Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press), was nominated for a California Book Award. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi. His second book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, will be out soon in City Lights Books’ venerable Pocket Poets series.
Douglas Kearney has published six books, most recently, CLMP Firecracker and California Book Award silver medalist Buck Studies (Fence Books, 2016), which BOMB says: “remaps the 20th century in a project that is both lyrical and epic, personal and historical.” Publisher’s Weekly called Kearney’s Mess and Mess and (Noemi Press, 2015) “an extraordinary book.” He teaches at CalArts.
Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta is an artist. They are the author of The Easy Body (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017). Born in Mexico City, raised in HIghland Park (Los Angeles), they live in San Francisco.
Nicole McJamerson is a bureaucrat and a writer. She has, in the name of live film narration, acted as a film critic, a sociologist, and a marketing executive for a company that rents humans to other humans. Raised in Northern and Southern Louisiana, she lives with her family in California’s Santa Clarita Valley.
Konrad Steiner has lived in the Bay Area since 1979. Since then he has made single-channel works in film and video; curated, produced and performed in live cinema events; served as a film programmer at SF Cinematheque; collaborated on original film and performance works with poets Leslie Scalapino and Carla Harryman, and composers Lisa Mezzacappa, Matt Ingalls (sfSound) and Jon Raskin (ROVA Saxophone Quartet); and with Irina Leimbacher produced the screening and performance series Kino21 from 2007 through 2009 in San Francisco, CA.
Jennif(f)er Tamayo is a queer, migrant, latinx poet, essayist, and performer. JT is the daughter of Nancy, Flora, Leonor y Ana. Her books include [Red Missed Aches] (Switchback, 2011) selected by Cathy Park Hong for the Gatewood Prize (2010), Poems are the Only Real Bodies (Bloof Books 2013) and YOU DA ONE (2017 reprint Noemi Books & Letras Latinas’s Akrilica Series). Her essays and poetry have been widely published including in Poetry magazine, Best American Experimental Poetry, Mandorla: Writing from the Americas, Bettering American Poetry 2015, and Angels of the Americlypse; An Anthology of New Latin@ Writing. She has held fellowships from NYU’s Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics and CantoMundo. Currently JT is studying the liberatory possibilities of voice and voicing. You can find their writing and art at www.jennifertamayo.com.
Anuj Vaidya is an artist, educator and curator who is currently pursuing a doctoral degree in Performance Studies at UC Davis. His own artistic practice has grown from addressing questions around the constructed nature of gender/sexuality (through films like Chingari Chumma and Bad Girl with a Heart of Gold, and neo-benshi performances such as Aur Paschim: Transvestites in Space) to the constructed nature of nature/culture. In his most recent work, Miss Piggy, Live with Diane Sawyer, Miss Piggy (played by the artist himself) gives an interview about her latest celebrity cause – ecology. Anuj’s ongoing project, Sitayana: Forest Tales is a queer eco-feminist film adaptation of the Indian epic, The Ramayana. Since 2007, Anuj has been co-director for the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival in San Francisco.
Stalina Emmanuelle Villarreal lives as a rhyming-slogan creative activist. She is a Generation 1.5 poet (Mexicana and Chicana), a translator, a sonic-improv collaborator, and an instructor of English. She is a Ph.D. student in the Creative Writing Program at University of Houston. Her M.F.A. in Writing is from California College of the Arts. She coauthored an article with a historian in the book ¡Chicana Movidas!: Mapping Technologies of Resistance in the Movimiento Era (University of Texas, forthcoming). Her poetry can be found in the Rio Grande Review and the Texas Review. She has published translations of poetry, including Enigmas, by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Señal: a project of Libros Antena Books, BOMB, and Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), but she mostly translates regiomontana poet Minerva Reynosa (Mandorla, 2012); Reynosa and Villarreal’s most recent publication is a chapbook called Photograms of My Conceptual Heart, Absolutely Blind (Cardboard House Press, 2016).
The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University
http://poetry.sfsu.edu/
