¡BRILLA! El Despertar del Alebrije en Mi, an original bilingual play created La Carpa Teen Ensemble performed at the Senate Theater from April 24th – April 27th.
Los Alebrijes is the name of the brightly colored and fantastically creative folk art sculptures of imaginary animals that are made out of paper mâché.
La Carpa Teen Ensemble takes the origin of this art and presents us with a playful look at the politics of color and authoritarian control.
The play starts with Pedro Linares the actual originator of the art form. At the age of 30 in 1936 he became severely ill and had a dream in which he met these creatures, colorful and chimerical, that is to say having mixed features of different animals: A donkey with wings or a rooster with horns. These polychrome colored animals told him their name, “Alebrijes”. When he recovered he began to recreate them in paper mâché, cartonería, and it developed as a new art form that has become popular not only in Mexico but as ambassador around the world as a cultural representative of Mexican culture.
The play transports us to that night when Pedro Linares is sick in bed and then we go with him as he journeys to the world of the Alebrijes known as Prismatica. The colorful creatures are polarized in their beliefs and each side is in a cultural battle of whose beliefs are true. They seek the wisdom that belongs only to humans but Pedro successfully helps them see that acceptance of others leads to the solutions that they seek. That the answers are found within each of them, with the message that it is found within each of us.
The backdrops showed the iconic corner store of the neighborhoods of Mexico, with Las Bellas Artes the national performing arts center of Mexico City in the background as a nod to theater. It also showed the old radio station from where we hear an old radio show.
The Teen Ensemble performed with professional excellence delivering their lines and conveying the joy that is found in youth and alebrijes. Yet, the youthful energy and playfulness of the plot allowed for a non-threatening look at issues of diversity and faith of problem solving to resolve issues that made this politically relevant.
La Carpa Teen Ensemble is a bilingual program of A Host of People, created to center the voices and stories of Latiné youth in Detroit. A Host of People is a multi-racial Detroit-based ensemble theater company creating original work for social change that celebrates imagination, complexity, and the synthesis of seemingly disparate elements—at once epic and intimate, political and personal, poetic and approachable.
The Director of the play is Karilú Alarcon Forshee who has directed other productions of La Carpa and had performed in a one woman performance She was raised in Juárez, México. She began her artistic education at a young age at La Academia Municipal de Arte and has been performing ever since. Alarcon Forshee is an interdisciplinary performing artist with a degree in theater arts and English-Spanish translation from the University of Texas and a 2020 Kresge Artist Fellow.
