Take Five: José Torres Tama October 21, 2008

The Cone of Uncertainty: New Orleans after Katrina
Performance, Lecture, and Community Conversation

Hailing from "The Big Easy," writer and visual/performance artist José Torres Tama performs a 30-minute excerpt from his solo multimedia “live art” performance ritual, The Cone of Uncertainty. Torres Tama recounts his escape from the flooded New Orleans on a stolen school bus with “a magical-realist Latino voodoo aesthetic,” offering a moving work that is visually engaging and politically provocative. Following the performance, Torres Tama will engage the audience in a lecture, "Performance Art as a Tool for Social Change," exploring the role of the performance artist as a social provocateur. The program will conclude with a community conversation on the larger issues concerning race and class in the U.S., the historical context of the storm, and the displacement of thousands of Latinos, whose traumatic experiences of displacement were ignored by the mainstream press, as well as the Reconstruction of New Orleans by an exploited Latino immigrant labor force.

José Torres Tama recently received a “Funds for The Arts” Ford Foundation Fellowship from the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture to develop a new book, The Dream Knows More Than You: Performance Chronicles of a Latino Immigrant.

Official Website: http://claricesmithcenter.umd.edu/2007/c/performances/performance?rowid=7704