Institute For Cultural Partnerships - Building Cultural Bridges

Littleglobe exists to create collaborative art, fostering life-affirming connections across the boundaries that divide us. We are an artist-run, multi-lingual organization devoted to social and environmental healing and justice.

New Mexico is a predominantly rural state with one of America’s lowest per capita incomes. While Anglos (50%) are the fastest growing segment of the population, Hispanics (39%) and Native Americans (8%) compose larger portions of the population than in most states. According to statistics in 2005, Santa Fe County’s population of 140,000 is composed of Hispanics (49%), Anglos (45.5%), and Native Americans (4%). People in Santa Fe living at or below the poverty level are 13.1% compared to the 18.5% in the state of New Mexico. Of the County’s foreign-born residents, the majority comes from Mexico (64%), followed by small groups from Germany (4%), UK (4%), Guatemala (3%), Canada (3%) and Asia (3%). Among Santa Fe County residents, 63.1% speak English at home, and 33% of residents speak Spanish at home (69% speak English very well, 15% speak English well, 10% speak English not well, and 6% don't speak English at all).

Littleglobe believes in the power of sustained creative engagement, and relationships are the nexus of our work. Littleglobe (LG) recognizes that only with time do trust and relationships blossom. When working with people who have experienced various kinds of social exclusion, marginalization, and historical trauma, time is essential for revising perceptions of one's self and others. From this place of changing perceptions and evolving relations arises an artistic project of significance and meaning for the community.

Unlike many community arts practitioners, LG avoids the helping model of community arts work. Instead, LG believes that co-equal participation in the creative process, including shared risk, generates new forms of art and Memorylines participant and teenager Brenda Granados at the Lensic Center for the Performing Arts, Santa Fe

Memorylines participant and teenager Brenda Granados at the Lensic Center for the Performing Arts, Santa Fe

performance. We begin with open-ended workshops, integrating a range of creative media such as journals, 'sound-mapping,' spoken word, video and other digital media, thus encouraging experimentation, trust, and developing relationships. LG assures potential project participants that no experience is required for this kind of work and that there are no mi stakes. Together, through interactive workshops, the ensemble of artists and community members begin to envision both the forms and content of an original installation/performance to share with the broader community.

Memorylines was a groundbreaking contemporary opera that illuminated Santa Fe’s unique and diverse cultures. Commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera and the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Memorylines brought together 25 community participants, ages 8 to 88, across economic, generational and cultural lines over a four-month creative process that fostered community dialogue, empowerment, and empathy.

Working collectively, the Memorylines ensemble sculpted a new opera based on personal journals, exchanges, and material that had developed during the time together. The group generated material via reflections on the landscape of Santa Fe and other places the ensemble members have called home. The libretto and the opera were culled from all this material. Thus Memorylines had 25 librettists. The community participants created and performed the work with an 11-piece orchestra, along with a group of middle school students and residents of a nursing home who also contributed to the program. The performance integrated elements of contemporary video, set design, acoustic ecology, storytelling,choreography, and movement into a rich musical tapestry.

Over the course of the Memorylines project, Immigration and Naturalization Service activity in Santa Fe heightened. For the four project participants in the US without legal status, these weeks were terrifying. The ensemble dealt directly with the affects of INS sweeps as some participants went into hiding. Suddenly this was something the entire group was experiencing, including one ensemble member who was born and raised in New Mexico and said he “had never had a conversation with a Mexican person before.”

Memorylines: Voces de Nuestras Jornadas premiered at the Lensic in May 2007. The performance elevated individual perspectives rarely featured on Santa Fe’s main stages: personal words and stories about immigration, self-identity, culture, home, and community. Likely for the first time on the main stages of Santa Fe, border crossing stories were given a voice in a manner that was safe for the participants. Ensemble members performed their own and each other's stories, embodying a question we often pose at Littleglobe: when does your story become my story? In Memorylines we explored identity and race, as well as many things that connect and separate people in Santa Fe.

Prologo		Prologue

"Esucho paginas pasando, iluminar		“I hear the pages turning, illuminate
El viento esta conmigo, susurrando		I know the wind is with me, whispering
Nuestros viajes tejidos, lineas de		Our journeys strung together—a line of
	memoria		memory
Nuestros viajes tejidos, lineas de		Our journeys string together—a line of
	memoria		memory
Del corazon		Maps of the heart

No se donde estoy		I don’t know where I am.
Estas en tu hogar		You’re home.
Estoy en mi hogar		I’m home
¿Estas?		You are?


	Soy una mezcla de razas. Mi sangre tiene todo tipo de mezcla de	I am a mixed-blood mutt of mixed-
	todos las mezclas. La gente siempre		blood mutts. People always
	hace preguntas, voces en mi		ask questions, voices in my ear:
	oido: "¿De donde eres?" "¿No, me		“Where are you from?” “No, I
	refiero a que nacionalidad?" "¿De		mean what nationality?” “What
	que etnia?" "Que RAZA?"		ethnicity?” “What RACE?”

¿Que eres?		What are you?

Soy una poeta, una sobrevivente, una		I am a poet, a survivor, a native who
	nativa que huyo y que regreso.		fled and came back.

Me presento a ti, tal como soy.		I come to you as I am.

The overwhelming response to the opera, by an audience as diverse as the performing ensemble, has underscored the resonance of such themes and the desire for similar kinds of projects/performances in the future. The premiere of the piece had great meaning for the participants and many community members, but Littleglobe artists missed the opportunity for a grassroots engaged dialogue and informal exchange integrated into performance, such as the sharing of food and post-performance conversations.

The performance of Memorylines was a complex transition for the Littleglobe artists and participants from an in-depth intimate creative community process to a large proscenium stage. Littleglobe desired the opportunity to create a new piece from the old one that would more directly engage grassroots audiences, embrace transparency, and foster post-performance dialogue. Though Littleglobe values high production standards we felt locked in by the piece in terms of sharing this kind of work with smaller communities and incorporating participants from other communities.

In response, Littleglobe is now developing Letters from Home , an intermedia performance project created by a multi-lingual, diverse, intergenerational ensemble of individuals and Littleglobe artists. Letters draws from the most powerful themes and expressions that emerged from the Memorylines project. In the earlier performance, the concept of home was one of several important themes, each with enormous potential for further exploration. Letters from Home allows members of the Memorylines ensemble and new participants to delve more deeply into what “home” means to those who may or may not share a particular ancestral history.

Through a multiple month-long process of sustained creative collaboration, the ensemble is experimenting with “letters” of various forms (video, music, visual art, poetry, animation, dance, etc.). From these “letters,” the ensemble will develop a performance that serves to deepen and broaden our understanding of rootedness, displacement, migration, occupation, belonging, and other elements that form our sense of home. The piece also blurs the lines and makes transparent the realms of process, performance, and dialogue. Through structuring the piece’s structure around “letters,” LG is creating a performance that can be toured to small communities in New Mexico and the southwest and incorporate local participants.

With Letters from Home we seek to create a piece that incorporates contemporary intermedia integrative performance strategies with a grounded, collaborative community approach, to generate content structures that could be augmented by contributions from host communities. Letters encompasses a highly moveable, dynamic set structure for on-going community performance work.

The concept of “home” is historically layered and ethnically complex in New Mexico and the southwest. Memorylines dance with material

It is a story of land, of rooted and nomadic peoples, of drawn and re-drawn boundaries, of occupation and re-occupation. What was originally home to indigenous people became “home” for the Spanish conquistadores, for the Mexican nation, and for the expanding United States. How we feel about the landscape, about our sense of belonging, about home, depends essentially on where we stand, where we came from, and how others claim the earth beneath us.

A Memorylines documentary and excerpts are available through Littleglobe, Inc. Contact Info(at)littleglobe.org or 505.989.1437 for more information. Learn more about Letters and other Littleglobe projects at www.littleglobe.org .

Memorylines ensemble on stage at the Lensic Center for the Performing Arts, Santa Fe.

Memorylines participant and teenager Brenda Granados at the Lensic Center for the Performing Arts, Santa Fe