The coquí frogs’ chirping fills the audible space before any voices do. It’s a familiar noise for some, a nostalgic memory for others. Layered atop the coquí, slowly creep in a multitude of voices, some holding higher notes, others prolonging a shushing sound that is reminiscent of the never-ending stream of a river. Two words all too familiar, La Libertad, “freedom” ruptures this soundscape. Another, La Libertad introduces the chorus to the spectators. Paulathena stands in front of the microphone with her loose curls, golden necklace, pink manicure, and lips slightly parted, anticipating her next utterance. La Libertad, La Libertad, La Libertad, she reiterates, as others maintain the soundscape. The camera tilts upwards, revealing not only Paulathena’s blue lashes and the sprinkle of glitter on her cheekbones, but her serious, pensive look. Amidst a sea of whispers and harmonies, other actors wait for their turn in front of the mic. There is a desire to be heard; to fill the silence. Emma, with her blue tinted hair and marble framed glasses confidently approaches the stand, grabs onto the microphone, and asks: ¿Qué pasa, qué pasa, que pasa, when one consents to being more than one thing at the same time?
Like a spectral image that flickers in the corner of one’s eye or a fragmented history that lives beyond the page, the narrative of Natalia Lassalle-Morillo’s En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (2024) refuses to stand still. Entangling personal storytelling with speculative fiction, En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy is a multi-channel film and live performance series that calls upon nonprofessional actors from Puerto Rico and the New York City diaspora to revisit, rewrite, and reenact the Greek myth of Antigone through their own perspectives. As a transdisciplinary artist, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo deploys theater-based methodologies, experimental film, and participatory research to chronicle the complex subjectivities of Puerto Ricans who have lived through economic crisis, ecological disaster, infrastructural decay, massive exodus, and dispossession. The first chapter of this series is a 60 minute 3-channel video installation that centers the experiences of the New York City-based cast and weaves together rehearsal, performance, and behind-the-scenes footage of the actors. Akin to how Greek tragedy evokes a release of emotion for its audience, this work facilitates a collective catharsis for the actors and, by proxy, the spectators at Amant. Alongside her collaborators, Lassalle-Morillo mobilizes performance as a medium to metabolize traumatic migratory experiences, push against the colonial violence of archival silences, and co-create simulacrums of a decolonial otherwise. Rather than the final product, the true impact of this production lies in the collaborative doing, fostering alternate modes of kinship for Puerto Ricans on the island, the diaspora, and those in the perpetual vaivén.
Lassalle-Morillo is part of a long tradition of Caribbean artists reimagining European canonical plays to comment on the colonial, postcolonial, and diasporic conditions, e.g., Aimé Césaire’s parodic retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. In an interview with Carina del Valle Schorske, Lassalle-Morillo shares that her interest in Greek tragedy was reignited after witnessing the devastation in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, while she was living in the diaspora (2024). Sophocles’s Antigone resonated deeply with her, as many Puerto Ricans were dying in the hurricane’s aftermath, morgues reached capacity, and bodies were buried in relatives’ backyards. As a play dealing with themes of state control, family loyalty, and insurgency, Antigone speaks to the socio-historical context of Puerto Rico as “the oldest colony in the world” (Trias Monge 1997). Instead of exclusively aligning Antigone’s plight with Puerto Rico and Creon’s antagonism with the United States and other systems of oppression, Lassalle-Morillo distributes the roles to various actors. Emma/Antigone, Erica/Ismene, Raquel/Haimon, and Tiresias/Nina each weave their own stories into the fabric of Sophocles’s tragedy. However, this does not mean that Sophocles’s words are superimposed onto them, as Lassalle-Morillo instructs the actors not to “perform,” but to “lend [their] voice” to the character (2024, 3:00). This enables Emma to “hijack” Antigone’s story, reject the archetype of the tragic heroine, and separate the character from Sophocles and the patriarchy that denies her autonomy. As Emma reimages Antigone escaping into the multitude of the diaspora—leaving Thebes for New York City to work in a garment factory—she also portrays a feeling of “in betweenness” that plagues diasporic beings (2024, 7). Likewise, Creon is humanized, initially a personification of oppressive systems, the character in this adaptation is portrayed as kin—a father or an uncle who firmly believes in statehood for Puerto Rico and upholds colonial structures in the everyday.
The restaging of Antigone by the Diasporican actors resists the linearity of the original play and the plot devices that conduce the tragic heroine’s death. Lassalle-Morillo reveals that, while in conversation with elements from the play: “none of us were interested in ‘honoring’ the Greek tragedy. We creolized Antigone (2024). The film’s title, En Parábola, suggests that the ways in which the actors reinterpret the Greek tragedy resembles a parabola—as a U-shaped curve, Antigone’s themes become the point of departure, but the narrative is taken somewhere else. For Lassalle-Morillo, her theater-making was “composed of many parabolic relationships, in which I throw something and a collaborator throws something back, and a dialogue is formed” also mirroring the “parabolic” relationships between Puerto Ricans in the archipelago and the diaspora (2024, 5). The work thus aligns with Hans-Thies Lehmann’s concept of postdramatic theatre, where a fragmented narrative challenges the dominance of the original material (2006). While tragedy as a genre provides, as Lehmann argues, “a logical order to the confusing chaos and plenitude of Being,” Lassalle-Morillo challenges the need to define Puerto Rican experience through such decisive frameworks (2006, 10). Raquel, for instance, as a Nuyorican telling the story of reverse migration, questions whether one can truly return to Thebes/Puerto Rico post-disaster. Al otro lado de la tragedia, ¿qué existe? Then, in an alternate universe where Antigone and Haimon don’t die, their survival becomes the “ultimate revenge” against colonial powers (2024, 50:49). These evocations destabilize the cycle of yearning and stagnation for the Diasporican subject, they activate speculative futures where survival is possible—ni unx menos—and where Puerto Rico is free.
Leading up to the climactic chorus scene, Raquel posits that a “big Puerto Rican tragedy” has been the nurturing of ruptures between Puerto Ricans to their land, resources, and other Puerto Ricans, and questions what would happen if, instead of reinforcing this rupture, we held our “multiplicities as one” (2024, 48:44). This resonates with Emma’s question, “What happens when one consents to being more than one thing at the same time?” where she references Édouard Glissant’s notion of departure. For diasporic individuals, departure is not merely leaving one’s homeland; it represents an irreversible “passage from unity to multiplicity,” an encounter with other worlds and new ways of being (2011, 6). Throughout the performance, the actors process and metabolize the anxious experience of the colonial migrant, contributing to the production of a shared diasporic sensibility. Depicting both loss and a simultaneous desire to return to Thebes/Puerto Rico, Lassalle-Morillo creates a space for the “always-in-waiting” Puerto Rican subject (Ruiz 2019, 150). Existential waiting, as José Esteban Muñoz defines and Ruiz expands on in Ricanness, refers to a mode of existence “attuned to both Ricanness and Brownness as a projection into that which is not yet here” (2019, 147). Thus, performance becomes a way of coping with the arduous experience of waiting, whether it is to return home or for freedom that seems out of reach.
In a segment of the 60-minute film, a chorus of about fifteen actors, led by multi-instrumentalist Xenia Rubinos, stands together, humming, whispering, and chanting with disparate vocal tones to form a kaleidoscopic soundscape. At various moments, actors step forward with microphones, allowing the audience to hear their individual voices and subjectivity, once lost in the polyphony. Powerful reclamations, such as Paulathena’s La Libertad and the chorus’s enthusiastic participation in Nina’s Maravillosa, embody a multi-generational desire for a liberated Puerto Rico. In contrast, voices like José’s, who feels he is “walking blindly through a desert,” and Erica’s, who mentions unspeakable “bad things,” express the pain of exile (2024). The 3-channel video installation allows viewers to see the chorus from multiple perspectives, underscoring what Nina calls the “alternate universes of being Puerto Rican” (2024, 48:32). Jorell Melendez Badillo notes that an archive of puertorriqueñidad based on dominant political ideologies often excludes the global diaspora, determining “who is deserving of belonging to the nation” (2022). Therefore, the Diasporican chorus serves as a counter-discourse and “activates these [archival] silences, bringing about the release of latent sounds and language that hold memories yet to be vocalized” (Lassalle-Morillo 2024). The chorus’s rehearsal and performance not only serve as a means for the actors to explore their interiority but also disentangle what it means to be Puerto Rican from geopolitical borders and a mythic unity that has historically excluded Black, queer, disabled, and other marginalized communities.
Despite the chorus’s departure from complete unison, the actors are compelled to echo each other’s utterances or maintain a shared harmony. When they join Nina’s prolonged Ma- and clap in unison, Nina sings Maravillosa with renewed power and conviction. The chorus also unites actors through movement, as vertebra by vertebra, they roll downward, rise, stretch their arms outward and upward as they inhale, and exhale to roll down again. Their collective kinesthetic movement alludes to the migratory and political histories of their ancestors, which shape their separate journeys but also bring them together—these bonds made tangible through song and dance. In the context of Sophocles’s play, Judith Butler argues that Antigone’s defiant act of performing burial rites for her brother is not solely a result of a profound, already established kinship, but rather that this performative act continuously “reinstitutes” kinship through the “practice of repetition” (2010, 133). Antigone’s actions cultivate an affective relationship, akin to the chorus’s rehearsals, which both strengthen kinship and co-create a world of political resistance. For Lassalle-Morillo, who “re-envisions sovereignty as an affective citizenship,” the chorus symbolizes not only the shared sensibility of the diaspora but also enacts an “otherwise” through these collaborative performative acts (2024). The assembly of this chorus actively pushes against the “here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality” and begins enacting the “then and there” in the present, feeling moment (Muñoz 2009, 1). Through collective catharsis, the chorus members co-create simulacrums of liberation, rehearsing and gesturing toward a freedom that is still in the making.
Entre estas, entre estas, entre estas aguas—Raquel’s utterance unsettles the rest of the chorus with the memory of departure, her voice transporting us to the imagery of the boat traversing the sea in the film’s prelude. What begins as soft whispers and shooshes grows into a chorus of desperate cries—agua, agua, agua. Some voices call out La Libertad, while others simply wail, their distress resonating with Raquel’s sense of urgency. The voices come together like an encroaching tide, crashing onto the coast, and slowly fizzling out, resembling an eerie calm after a hurricane. The cathartic surge of emotion prompted by Raquel’s Agua concludes as a tear flows down one of the actors’ faces. Throughout the scene, the chorus mimics the sound of water, that in its many forms—tears, rain, hurricanes, rivers, oceans—conveys the trauma of disaster, the loss of departure, the hope for return, and all in all, the indeterminate state of Puerto Ricanness. Envisioning a future beyond the idea of homecoming, Lassalle-Morillo investigates what emerges at the site of existential waiting. A liberated future is not yet here, but in the meantime, we gather and engender an affective citizenship to push against the colonial singularities that impose boundaries for belonging and ultimately inhibit decolonial movements. Through performance, we negotiate what Puerto Rican identity means for us and begin forging liberated futures within our precarious ‘here and now.’ To conclude my response to En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy, I echo “What does departure mean to you?” as these conversations have only just begun.
References
- Butler, Judith. 2010. “Promiscuous Obedience.” In Feminist Readings of Antigone, edited by Fanny Soderback, pp. 133-53. Albany: State University of New York Press.
- Glissant, Édouard, Manthia Diawara, and Christopher Winks. 2011. “Édouard Glissant in Conversation with Manthia Diawara.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 28 (2011): 4–19. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/453307.
- Lassalle-Morillo, Natalia. 2021. “Conversations on Tragedy | Excerpt.” Vimeo. Jan 26, 2021. Video, 2:35. https://vimeo.com/504832415.
- Lassalle-Morillo, Natalia. 2024. “El Coro | Excerpt | En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I).” Vimeo. March 12, 2024. Video, 8:34. https://vimeo.com/922411671.
- Lassalle-Morillo, Natalia. 2024. “En Parábola/Conversations on Tragedy (Part I) | 2024 | (3-channel mock-up).” Vimeo. Apr 16, 2024. Video, 01:03:03. https://vimeo.com/922411671.
- Lehmann, Hans-Thies. 2006. Postdramatic Theatre. Translated by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge.
- Meléndez-Badillo, Jorell A. 2024. “A Brief Reflection on Thinking Against the Archive of Puertorriqueñidad.” The Caribbean Philosophical Association (Blog: Caliban’s Readings). April 24, 2024. https://caribbeanphilosophy.org/blog/archive-puertorriqueidad.
- Muñoz, José Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia the Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
- Ruiz, Sandra. 2019. Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance. New York: New York University Press.
- Schorske, Carina del Valle. 2024. “Diaspora’s Magic Mirror.” Pioneer Works Broadcast. July 3, 2024. https://pioneerworks.org/broadcast/carina-del-valle-schorske-natalia-lassale-morillo-amant-antigone.
- Trías Monge, José, 1997. Puerto Rico the Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.