✨️dramaturgy✨️with the help of my assistant dramaturg nikka de torres.
the idea for both the front of house and the souvenir program is to give political context about Balikbayan, linking various struggles together, locally and internationally. when we prepared to decorate the FOH, i printed a bunch of headlines that look like newspaper cut-outs. nikka and i first arranged them on the table, but the collage isn't random. we deliberated how each cut-out will lead to the adjacent cut-outs, going around the sysnthesized "political milieu" text organically. combined with the timeline in the souvernir peogram, our goal was to ease the audience into a deeper understanding of stella and katrina, as well as juday, and their experiences as people in the global south. Balikbayan's narrative asserts, ultimately, that gender is inextricably tied to class under the influence of US imperialism.
bonus: a peek into the dramaturgical presentation given to the team weeks prior.