The artists Rita Indiana and Noelia Quintero Herencia will be developing, during their five month residency, from February to June 2023 the production and development of the world premiere of Tu Nombre Verdadero, hosting talks and a celebratory gathering in their studio during our annual Open Studios in May. Short films will also be developed by Quintero Herencia that document and celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Clemente Center founding and the passing of Puerto Rican Poet Clemente Soto Vélez.

On April 14th we held a sold out NYC premier of Tu Nombre Verdadero in support of The Clemente’s programs and legacy.

Tu nombre verdadero is a live performance, with music and lyrics by Rita Indiana and libretto and direction by Noelia Quintero-Herencia, dedicated to Jorge Pineda Perez. A post-pandemic abstract tale that visits experiences of illness and death in the context of artistic practices and their markets, the piece was commissioned by Americas Society after the couple moved to New York City in 2021. Quintero-Herencia, who also designed the sets, conceived the piece as “a system of goodbyes, the lights and shadows multimedia machine we would need to be able to look at things that are difficult to portray, such as loss.” 

The songbook, arranged for piano and drums with Luis Amed Irizarry, departs from Rita Indiana’s storytelling and popular music staples reaching into “uncharted places of my musical memory, the sounds of early childhood or how I remember them, a time before I knew what death meant.” Musical genres are approached in their bare-bones form, stripped of irony or fusion, as if death had also kissed them.

Tu nombre verdadero was created out of the need to share an intimate space with those of us who were left behind, a need to memorialize the departed outside of social media, in the present, where the living remain.

Performers:

Rita Indiana, voice

Luis Ahmed Irizarry, piano

Efraín Martínez, drums

Melissa Bonetti, Andrea Chavarro, Teresa Davis, Kayla Faccilongo, voices 

 

Production team: 

Artistic Collective Matahambre 

Lyrics & Music: Rita Indiana 

Director: Noelia Quintero Herencia 

Producers: Rita Indiana, Noelia Quintero Herencia 

Script: Rita Indiana and Noelia Quintero Herencia 

Musical Arrangements: Rita Indiana and Luis Amed Irizarry 

Sound Engineering: Antonio Caraballo 

Lighting Design: Marién Vélez 

Set Design: Noelia Quintero Herencia 

Graphic Design: Ian Vfctor - Modafoca 

Set Dresser: Gerardo Calderón 

Stage Manager: Noelia Quintero Herencia 

Technical Director: Marién Vélez 

Film & Video Production: Noelia Quintero Herencia, Ian Victor, Sebastian Gonzalez Quintero, Ricardo Goitfa 

Video Mapping: Xiao Jiang

Ligthting Technician: Florencia Lechin 

Costume Assistant: Ivette Hernandez - Mantoherida 

Acting Coach: Vicente Santos 

Production Assistants: Daniel Gonzalez Quintero, Zilah Felix, Luz Esther Hernandez 

Tech Consultant: Lenino Comprés 

Production Consultants: Angela Sofía Santiago Caro, Maribel Caro Cruz (ontological coaching)

Rita Indiana is a Dominican-born New York-based music composer and a key figure in contemporary Latin American literature; her novel Tentacle was the first book written in Spanish to win the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers in 2017.  She is the author of five novels with translations to eight different languages and a driving force in experimental Caribbean popular music, receiving a nomination for a Latin Grammy in 2021. Currently, she is the Director of New York University’s MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish.

Noelia Quintero Herencia is a Puerto Rican filmmaker, multimedia artist,and researcher. During the 2000s, she created, directed, and produced the Suncoast Emmy winning documentary series on Puerto Rican art and culture Prohibido Olvidar. She wrote and directed the documentary on urban art La Motora Roja tiene que aparecer (2008) and the film PAPI, which won the Dominican Soberano Award for Best Film in 2020. From 2013 to 2017 she was Director of the City of San Juan’s Art Department. She is the longtime collaborator of Dominican writer and composer Rita Indiana for whom she has developed and directed several music videos and performances. In 2021, her documentary Ellas, mujeres en la música, won her another Suncoast Emmy. Her work has been exhibited at the Centro León (Dominican Republic), Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala) and at the Leslie-Lohman Museum (United States), among others.

Documentation of Rita Indiana and Noelia Quintero Herencia working in Studio 406

Tu Nombre Verdadero was commissioned by Americas Society, and made possible, in part, by a grant from the Association of Performing Arts Professionals through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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