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MFA 2 Concert Mind The Gap featuring El Cruce Presented March 6 - 8, 2003

This piece, El Cruce, is based on a Pulitzer Prize winning article and photographs that I read in the LA Times, a true story of a boy who repeatedly left his home in Guatemala (where he was living with his grandmother and younger sister) to go in search of his mother who left for the U.S. a few years earlier. The mom had left to make a better life for her family. She left with the promise that she would send soon for her two children, but life in the U.S. was not as easy as she had imagined, and making the money to do this was extremely difficult. In the meantime, the boy's grandmother was getting old and soon lost control over the boy. The boy stopped going to school regularly and was getting into trouble, even developing a glue sniffing drug habit. But he never forgot his mom and the promise of being reunited in the States. He made repeated attempts to cross the border into Mexico, making his way up through the country and trying to cross in to the U.S. through the Texas border. He hopped trains, crossed plains, and swam across rivers ... always at great danger. His attempts always failed. He was beaten, and robbed, stopped by border police, and immigration officers. On his seventh try, smarter and more strategic, he finally made it across.
With this piece, I attempted to represent the splintered family of a mom (played by Ana Maria Alvarez) in the U.S. working in a sweat shop, the teenager (Danny Galeon) on the journey to find her, and the small child (Kenny Claustro) left behind in Guatemala. I also incorporated bunraku -- a Japanese theater device of stage movers, who are on stage at all times, part of the piece, but moving figures without characters.

MFA 2 Concert
MIND THE GAP

Featuring

El Cruce

Direction and Choreography by: Kevin Kane

Performed By:
Daniel Galeon IV, Ana Maria Alvarez, Kenny Claustro, Orlando Beltran, Cesar Garfiaz, Nic KoneffKlatt, Mike Hummer, Tittus Mendez

Music by:
Manu Chao, Moby

MFA 2 Concert Also Featuring Works By:
Marianne Kim, Sandra Chatterjee, Tamrahenna, Peter Carpenter

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