Carmelita Tropicana

Alina Troyano, better known as Carmelita Tropicana, is a Cuban-American stage and film actress who lives and works in New York City. In 1999, she received an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Performance. She is the sister of the independent film director Ela Troyano, who directed Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen.[1][2] Both form part of the alternative arts scene in the East Village and Lower East Side. Tropicana started her career in the early 1980s performing at the WOW Café Theater (a woman's theater collective) and now performs extensively in spaces such as Performance Space 122 and Dixon Place.[3] In 2010, Tropicana served as a co-hostess to Vaginal Davis' performance piece "Speaking from the Diaphragm" at Performance Space 122.[4] Tropicana often collaborates with her sister and with other performers such as Marga Gomez.[5][6][7] Tropicana is openly lesbian.[8] She is the author of a collection of performance pieces and short essays called I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing between Cultures that includes four performance scripts, a screenplay, and three essays.[9]

Criticism and Interviews

The performance art of Carmelita Tropicana has received considerable critical attention from scholars of queer latinidad and performance art, most notably José Esteban Muñoz and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano.[10][11][12] She also published an autobiography, I, Carmelita Tropicana[13] In his text, Disidentifications, Muñoz uses the work of Carmelita Tropicana to illustrate the ways "camp" and "choteo" function as distinct comedic modes of disidentification.

References

  1. ↑ "Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (1996)". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  2. ↑ Holden, Stephen (19 July 1996). "FILM REVIEW; A Lesbian Perspective". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  3. ↑ WOW Café Theater Story, WOWCafe.org. Retrieved 23 September 2012.
  4. ↑ "Vaginal Davis". Studio Museum in Harlem. 6 July 2010. Retrieved 12 March 2013.
  5. ↑ Grode, Eric (24 May 2012). "Post Plastica". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  6. ↑ Klein, Alvin (16 April 2000). "JERSEY FOOTLIGHTS; Summer Stock With Edge". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  7. ↑ La Rocco, Claudia (29 June 2011). "An Auld Lang Syne Kicks Off an Artistic Diaspora". The New York Times. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  8. ↑ Carr, C. "Two Latinas, Two Lesbians, Two Laff Riots." Village Voice 8 October 2002. Retrieved 23 September 2012.
  9. ↑ Troyano, Alina. I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing between Cultures. Boston: Beacon, 2000. ISBN 0807066036
  10. ↑ Muñoz, José Esteban. “No Es Fácil: Notes on the Negotiation of Cubanidad and Exilic Memory in Carmelita Tropicana’s ‘Milk of Amnesia.’” TDR (1988-) 39, no. 3 (October 1, 1995): 76–82. doi:10.2307/1146465.
  11. ↑ Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications : Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Cultural Studies of the Americas 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
  12. ↑ Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Traveling Transgressions: Cubanidad in Performances by Carmelita Tropicana and Marga Gómez.” In Reading and Writing the Ambiente: Queer Sexualities in Latino, Latin American, and Spanish Culture, edited by Chavez-Silverman, Susana and Librada Hernandez, 200–217. Univ of Wisconsin Press, 2000.
  13. ↑ Troyano, Alina. I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures. Beacon Press, 2000.

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