The road to La Llorona

This play has come from a series of one day festivals and week long festivals that started in 2012. Both Amy Solis and Sainte Marine Hernandez wanted to do something to celebrate their shared Mexican heritage.

They had been involved with the back community and black history month, but there wasn’t much happening. With a grand of funding from the council for the writing our legacy umbrella, a community organisation promoting diverse story telling and literature, they went onto create a platform for celebrating Latin culture.

They stopped doing festivals as they didn’t just want to create parties for the Latin community, she said people say: “all Mexican people do is party”, asserting “and it’s not true.”

Having a Mexican family she grew up with the Myth of La Llorona, she says: “It was sort of our version of the boogie man, where if you stayed playing outside too late Llorona would come to get you and snatch you away in the dark.”

The myth has different meanings: “So for instance when I was growing up La Llorona was kind of a spirit that lived in the rivers, but also she was kind of could be found in like the old ladies or the people who were just a bit weird or you kind of stayed away from their houses, so there was a sense of kind of witches, magic and you know stories really.”

"I got some arts council funding to do a very small kind of R&D in 2014 I think. Where are we now 2015... And I pulled together a very small team of collaborators and I wanted to work with, including Rikki Tarascas as the director, Hannah Baker and Billy Mather as artists. And Linda White as education person who involved with Latin Voices live from the beginning an we spent four days working together all day long in the studio, creating and sharing and kind of trying to come up with ideas around this, you know the Myth that we could explore as a new production."

"La Llorona puppet made kind of a structure of her by Hannah and Billy did a whole bunch of really cool visuals, artistic visuals with strong iconography. He was the one that designed our poster and then for the second R&D we wanted to make it into an actual Theatre production."

“We really want people to think about the theme of the play, which is about migration, economic migration and kind of what happens also when people go to America looking for the American dream and trying to make a better life and sometimes people are really abused by the system, by the capitalist system and not treated well and chasing after false dreams, which is all very relevant.”

"I wasn’t conscious of wanting to tell this story, but I was conscious for a long time of wanting to share my experiences of growing up in Texas in the kind of the Mexican experience, both the Mexican and the Mexican American experience is sort of a spectrum really. I feel like I had a really unique upbringing, because my family are third or fourth generation."

Rikki, dealt with picking actors, "he’s a very, very experienced Theatre director he was looking for Mexican actors, there were none, so he found people who were Spanish people who were kind of different Latin backgrounds."

“The ambition of the of the artists who we’ve been involved with in making huge kind of gigantic puppets, really detailed costumes, just kind of incredibly you know time consuming kind of making. Everybody’s sort of thrown so much of their personal time and energy into everything with the making of this and it’s kind of gone from something that was meant to be a very short production and kind of it’s truly grown into this epic kind of thing you know on a very small budget, so I’m just really proud of the achievement that they’ve made.

"They’ve created something really big and there’s a real sense of strong community everybody feels very invested in this show and you know I know everybody does in Theatre, but this is something that when you see it you’ll understand it’s something that’s visually quite stunning."

She credits the interest by saying: "I think it’s mainly because I find that people who are interested in the culture are maybe not even from it, it really, really inspires them and also the main motivation is that I’ve in Brighton huge, huge talent… people really wanna make this vision happen."

“Yeah I think there will be more interest in kind of more Mexican experience… I’m really looking forward to taking this show on a bit of tour. People want to take this tour up north and Manchester and regionally and we’re really up for doing all that.”