For the three-channel video Salidas y Entradas Exits and Entrances, artists Jessica Hankey and Erin Johnson worked with applied theatre facilitator Gina Sandi Diaz to offer performance workshops at public daytime senior centers managed by the city of El Paso’s Parks and Recreation Department. With the senior center as a stage, the elders who participated in the workshops enacted social, political and geographical imaginaries for the camera. Through improvisation and performance exercises drawn from the work of Viola Spolin and Augusto Boal, themes emerge: the dynamics of the U.S.- Mexico border, the desire to be seen, the role of musical storytelling as a soundtrack to daily life, power dynamics, and gender as performance. As the boundaries between rehearsal, improvisation, and performance blur, the ways in which individual lives and sociopolitical realities merge together are foregrounded.
2023