Teaching Statement

Arts education is a family business. Whether it was my parents, my aunts, my sister, or my cousins, we have all been teachers. I continue the legacy passed down to me and have added to it the experiences I have gained during more than twenty years as a theatremaker, writer, and artist. I share these lessons to inspire the next generation of artists in the same way that my mentors inspired me. 

Regardless of the creative outlet, I guide my students using the values of “Necessary Theatre,” a theatrical concept defined by Chicano theatre scholar Dr. Jorge Huerta as a lens to analyze the work of Mexican American (Chicano) theatremakers. I have added and expanded upon Dr. Huerta’s definition to illuminate and define the core elements of the creative act as “Necessary Art.” Through this definition, I have developed a philosophy that allows me to teach and inspire any artist looking to create work that is meaningful for them and their intended audiences. Whether they are writing an essay or work of fiction, making visual art, crafting a poem, or choreographing a dance, the root values of Necessary Art are always the same. Their art must be:

1. Rooted in their communities

2. Informed by an acute political consciousness

3. Necessary to themselves and the world around them

To allow the principles of Necessary Art to guide my classes, I place the creative act at the center of the learning experience, designed for iterative, malleable educational spaces. Doing so enables me to adjust the course progression to be slightly faster than the students can learn, which encourages them to push themselves as artists to work at their creative edge. After all, it is through the act of creation that, as artists, we understand our craft and, by extension, ourselves. 

The Necessary Art approach is one that I have been practicing for several years, and I have been fortunate enough to directly witness the impact it has had on students. I have had incredible moments in these classes, from artistic breakthroughs to intimate, personal revelations that opened students up to new understandings about who they are and how they relate to the world around them. And something I always have found beautiful about this approach is that these understandings often come from moments of joy. Necessary Art, after all, comes from a place of laughter, humor, music, and dance. There are few things in my teaching life that give me more satisfaction than when my students create necessary works of art that uplift their communities and speak to the challenges they face in the world.

Antiracism Statement

My work as a playwright and educator is strongly rooted in the values of anti-racism and social, ethnic, and racial justice. I have a background in anti-racism and equity, diversity, and inclusion practices, having been trained by The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB). I have experienced their Understanding and Undoing Racism workshop multiple times, both as a participant as well as a supporting trainer. I am also an active participant in Artists Co-Creating Real Equity (ACRE), the arts and cultural workers affinity group of the People’s Institute. In addition, I have also completed the National Facilitator Training program with ArtEquity, an arts and cultural workers training program for equity and inclusion work. My background and training are an added benefit to any professional environment in our diverse city, in particular, educational settings where students from an array of backgrounds come together to learn about the subject matter of the class, the world around them, and, ultimately, themselves.

I have incorporated many elements of Felicia Rose Chavez’s excellent book The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, which encourages new ways to “recruit, nourish, and fortify writers of color through innovative reading, writing, workshop, critique, and assessment strategies.” This text has been a valuable addition to my work and anti-racist values as an educator, and it aligns with the core beliefs of Necessary Art.

As a part of my classroom teaching practice, I bring the values of anti-racist organizing into every creative room. For example, one principle of anti-racist organizing (as defined by PISAB) is to “understand, share, and celebrate culture.” Students begin their experience in my creative classrooms with “cultural shares,” short presentations where students share an artifact from one of their cultures. Students have shared West Indian folk dances, challah, family portraits, rosaries, and more. This exercise connects students to their cultures, bringing them closer together and affirming our collective humanity.

Click here to view a sample assignment: Cultural Sharing for Playwrights.

Teaching Methodology

To achieve the goals of Necessary Art, I work with my students to create environments where they feel empowered to take creative risks and fully participate. It is important they understand their work is an intimately personal journey inextricable from a lifetime of self-discovery. I encourage honesty and transparency by providing personal examples from my working and writing life, sharing both my successes and failures as guideposts for learning. I encourage my students to do the same and open up about how they view the world so they can draw inspiration from their personal experiences. And we work to do so in a way that illuminates and reaffirms our communal truths.

The ever-evolving work of bringing Necessary Art pedagogy into the room is one that I have learned (and unlearned) through many years of teaching. There is no simple formula that can illuminate how I bring this approach into my classroom. Like anti-racism and other liberatory approaches, it is an all-encompassing practice that touches every element of my methodology, from pre-semester preparation all the way through the final stages of the evaluation process. At each step of this process, I ask both myself and my students if what we are making aligns with our definition of Necessary Art.

This being true, there are two key concepts that I believe serve as useful examples to lay the groundwork for this approach for my students.

Decolonized Classrooms

A decolonized classroom in Necessary Art is one that recognizes that different communities have different values regarding beauty, humor, communal truths, modes of storytelling, and much more. It is of vital necessity that students of all cultural backgrounds recognize this truth. There is no such thing as a perfect play. There is no such thing as a perfect dance or a perfect piece of pottery. There is only the subjective truth — that different communities, ages, and cultures have different idealizations informing what they consider to be perfect art. Students recognize this truth for both themselves and their peers, and find their own answers as to how they determine these values. To do this, it is most valuable to connect their investigations to their own communities’ artistic values.

One example of how this plays out in my classroom occurred in the Spring of 2022, when I was honored to be the first person outside of the historic El Teatro Campesino to teach Theatre of the Sphere — the physical theatre technique created by Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino — in a formal academic setting, at Brooklyn College. I have had the great pleasure of maintaining a now ten-year relationship with the company and have studied this technique alongside many of its experts. Theatre of the Sphere utilizes Maya technologies and aesthetics to develop a body-centered approach to theatre and is a direct counterpoint to Western performance approaches. It de-emphasizes the “psychological realism” of European performance techniques and requires artists to think of their “body-heart-mind-spirit continuum” to create the total or “spherical” actor. During the semester, students explored the “Viente Pasos” (twenty steps), each represented by a different day of the Sacred Maya Calendar. This class was particularly resonant for the Latine and Caribbean American students who found in these theatrical techniques a place to explore ideas more aligned with their cultural histories. For students who did not share a background connected to these locations, there was an expressed understanding that this approach allowed them access to explore their full selves and how their current identity connects to their ancestry. 

Historical Connections

To develop an acute political consciousness, Necessary Art leans heavily on understanding how our histories inform the present. In another class, Intro to Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, a student made the “mind blown” gesture when we discussed the origin of the terms “Latino/a/x/e,” “Latin American,” and “Romance Languages,” and explored the connection between the Spanish language and centuries of imperialist, colonialist practices that originated during the Roman Empire. Another day, in the class Theatre as Performance and Protest, through reading and discussing the Chicano Theatre classic La Victima, students began to understand how the military-industrial complex assimilates communities of color and economically disadvantaged communities into what bell hooks defines as the “imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy.” I live for these moments in the classroom when the world’s complex past is revealed, and students recognize the larger historical continuums at play in their own lives.