Carmelita Tropicana

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Alina Troyano, more commonly known as Carmelita Tropicana, is a Cuban-American stage and film lesbian actress who lives and works in New York City.

Contents

Career

Tropicana burst on New York's downtown performing arts scene in the 1980s with her alter ego, the spitfire Carmelita Tropicana and her counterpart, the irresistible archetypal Latin macho Pingalito Betancourt. She also has performed as Hernando Cortes's horse and la Cucaracha Martina from her childhood fairy tales in Cuba.

In Tropicana's work, humor and fantasy become subversive tools to rewrite history. In 1999, she received an Obie Award for “sustained excellence in performance” [1] [2] El Diario La Prensa , a daily Spanish-language newspaper, named Tropicana "One of the Most Notable Women of 1998". [1] [3]

Tropicana is the sister of the independent film director Ela Troyano, who directed Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen. [4] Their collaboration on this film won them an award for best short film at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994. [5] [6] Both also 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. [7] In 2010, Tropicana served as a co-hostess to Vaginal Davis' performance piece "Speaking from the Diaphragm" at Performance Space 122. [8] Tropicana often collaborates with her sister and with other performers such as Marga Gomez. [9] [10] [11]

Tropicana 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. [12] Some of her work was featured in tatiana de la tierra's magazine Esto no tine nombre, which gave voice to Latina lesbians all over the world and published the artistic pieces of Latina lesbians like Tropicana's. [13]

Tropicana's performances plays and videos have been presented at venues such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, Centre de Cultura Contemporanea in Barcelona, the Berlin International Film Festival, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Mark Taper Forum's Kirk Douglas Theater in Los Angeles, Center for LGBTQ Studies in New York, and El Museo del Barrio in New York. Her work has received funding support from the Independent Television Service, the Jerome Foundation, and the Rockefeller Suitcase Fund. [14] Other projects include Schwanze-Beast, a collaboration with filmmakers Ela Troyano and Susanne Sachsse, and El Comandante, based on her father who fought in the Cuban Revolution. [15]

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. [16] [17] [18] 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. Muños also analyzed her use of animals as stand-ins for humans in With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit? in his essay Performing the Bestiary. Using animals as characters and their symbolism occurs in several other works as well. [19] Her work has also been cited in: From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Film and Culture, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory, José, Can You See?: Latinos on and Off Broadway, Virtual Gender: Fantasies of Subjectivity and Embodiment.

Works

Awards

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References

  1. 1 2 "Brooklyn Museum feature on Carmelita Tropicana".
  2. ↑ "1999 Obie Award Winners". Obie Awards.
  3. ↑ "Carmelita Tropicana: Leche de Amnesia". hemisphericinstitute.org. 2001. Archived from the original on March 27, 2018. Retrieved March 27, 2018.
  4. ↑ "Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (1996)". Movies & TV Dept. The New York Times . Archived from the original on 30 January 2013. Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  5. ↑ Shohat, Ella (1998). Talking Visions. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
  6. ↑ Holden, Stephen (19 July 1996). "FILM REVIEW; A Lesbian Perspective". The New York Times . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  7. ↑ WOW Café Theater Story, WOWCafe.org. Retrieved 23 September 2012.
  8. ↑ "Vaginal Davis". Studio Museum in Harlem . 6 July 2010. Archived from the original on 8 June 2012. Retrieved 12 March 2013.
  9. ↑ Grode, Eric (24 May 2012). "Post Plastica". The New York Times . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  10. ↑ Klein, Alvin (16 April 2000). "JERSEY FOOTLIGHTS; Summer Stock With Edge". The New York Times . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  11. ↑ La Rocco, Claudia (29 June 2011). "An Auld Lang Syne Kicks Off an Artistic Diaspora". The New York Times . Retrieved 5 September 2012.
  12. ↑ Troyano, Alina. I, Carmelita Tropicana: Performing between Cultures. Boston: Beacon, 2000. ISBN   0807066036
  13. ↑ PhD, María Dolores Costa (2003-06-01). "Latina Lesbian Writers and Performers". Journal of Lesbian Studies. 7 (3): 5–27. doi:10.1300/J155v07n03_02. ISSN   1089-4160. PMID   24816051. S2CID   149030062.
  14. ↑ "carmelitatropicana.com/". carmelitatropicana.com. Retrieved 2016-04-02.
  15. ↑ "Carmelita Tropicana". hemisphericinstitute.org. Archived from the original on 2016-04-10. Retrieved 2016-04-02.
  16. ↑ Muñoz, José Esteban. “No Es Fácil: Notes on the Negotiation of Cubanidad and Exilic Memory in Carmelita Tropicana's ‘Milk of Amnesia.’” TDR 39, no. 3 (October 1, 1995): 76–82. doi:10.2307/1146465.
  17. ↑ Muñoz, José Esteban. Disidentifications : Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Cultural Studies of the Americas 2. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
  18. ↑ 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.
  19. ↑ Muños, José Esteban (2020). "Performing the Bestiary: Carmelita Tropicana's With What Ass Does the Cockroach Sit?/Con Qué Culo Se Sienta La Cucharacha?". The Sense of Brown. Duke University Press. pp. 78–85.
  20. ↑ "Creative Capital - Investing in Artists who Shape the Future". creative-capital.org. Archived from the original on 2016-11-15. Retrieved 2016-11-14.
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