Imagine a world where anything is possible. That’s what Ricardo Vazquez and Jessica Huang did. Together they formed Other Tiger Productions, a new company bent on outside-the-box creativity to be able to make whatever it wants via theatre, film, movement, storytelling, visual arts–you name it–in the process, carving out opportunities to highlight multicultural talent that may otherwise remain hidden from a broader audience. And they are doing it all on their own terms. Good for them; great for us!
From July 8 to 17, Other Tiger will present its inaugural production, The Palabras Project, at Park Square Theatre’s Andy Boss Thrust Stage. It is billed as “an immersive musical and theatrical experience featuring some of the Twin Cities’ top Latino talent,” involving several artistic forms of expression: flamenco dance by Susana di Palma, hip-hop influenced Boricu music by Maria Isa, indigenous art by Armando Gutierrez G., masks and puppets by Gustavo Boada and storytelling by Dario Tangelson.
The idea for what ultimately became The Palabras Project evolved from Vazquez and Huang’s initial vision to create an outdoor festival centered around the words of legendary Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Years of visioning clarified and distilled the project into its current form, a production inspired by Lorca’s play Blood Wedding, a tale of star-crossed lovers caught in a generation-old feud, that will be a “complete sensory immersion” that weaves throughout the theatre.
Asked to describe how the performers will actually take over the theatre, Vazquez chuckled and revealed little: “No one has adapted Blood Wedding in this way before. The audience can come with that exciting question. We shall surprise them.”
(Look forward to more in-depth blogs about The Palabras Project and Other Tiger Productions!)
