San Diego REP Hosts Jose Torres-Tama for One Night Only

San Diego Repertory Theatre (San Diego REP) announced today a special, one-night-only performance of Aliens, Immigrant & Other Evildoers, a one-man show written and performed by award-winning performance artist José Torres-Tama. This free performance will take place on Tuesday, October 15 at 7:00 p.m. at San Diego REP's Lyceum Stage Theatre.

Aliens, Immigrants & Other Evildoers is a sci-fi Latino noir solo show written and performed by MAP Fund award-winning performance artist José Torres-Tama. Visually dynamic, profoundly moving and provocatively funny, Torres-Tama takes the immigration issue head on with a genre-bending multimedia performance informed by film projections, personal stories and poetic texts. Inspired by a docu-theater process of filmed interviews of immigrants who have crossed the border to escape economical despair and war, it addresses the anti-immigrant hysteria gripping the United States of Amnesia, a system that seduces you to embrace forgetting its hypocrisies. Torres-Tama exposes a "freedom-loving" nation that dehumanizes the same immigrants whose labor it readily exploits. Aliens has been critically acclaimed for putting a heart and face on the persecuted immigrant and Torres-Tama shape-shifts into a variety of voices that humanize a people in search of a dream.

"Jose Torres-Tama performance is a brilliant and funny performer," says San Diego REP Playwright in Residence Herbert Siguenza. "He tackles broad issues in a brave and enlightening way. I think we will all take away a great deal from his show."

Admission to Aliens, Immigrants & Other Evildoers is free. Tickets can be reserved by calling 619-544-1000 or online at sdrep.org.

Jose Torres-TAMA (WRITER & PERFORMER): Since 1995, Jose Torres-Tama has been touring across the country with solo shows that thrive on a fusion of spoken word prose, bilingual poetry, rituals of fire, symbolic movement and exaggerated personae, creating spectacles that are visually dynamic and politically charged. Add to this cauldron a heady dose of hilariously absurd observations on consumer culture and you have a unique vision coming from a New Jersey/New York bred, Ecuadorian-born brujo performance artist based in New Orleans. The recipient of a Louisiana Theater Fellowship, he has also received a "Regional Artist Project" Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to develop $CASINOAMERICA$, his acclaimed piece examining a culture that glorifies greed. His performances have been presented in Mexico, Eastern Europe and extensively across the USA at venues such as Performance Space 122 in New York; El Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego, CA; DiverseWorks in Houston, TX; Tigertail Productions in Miami, FL; The Arts Exchange in Atlanta, GA; Cornell, Duke, Louisiana State, Dillard, Spelman and Rutgers Universities. As an arts educator, he is dedicated to working in minority communities with Latino and African American teens through his Youth Performance Projects that introduce performance art and poetry as a means of self-empowerment. These projects have been profiled on National Public Radio and supported through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Performance Network, and the Philip Morris Foundation. Youth Performance Projects have been realized at centers such as MECA in Houston, TX; The Walker's Point Center for the Arts in Milwaukee, WI; and the Center for Cultural Exchange in Portland, ME. In addition, he is a contributing editor to ART PAPERS, a national arts magazine published in Atlanta for which he writes a column on performance art and politics, and he has written for the Chicago New Art Examiner, The Mexico City Times and Urban Latino Magazine published in New York. His poetry has been published inFrom A Bend in The River, an anthology of 100 New Orleans poets and in the Mesechabe Surregional Press.

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