A special work in progress viewing of
Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind

Stories and songs about sharp shooters and earthmovers,
roaming dogs, helicopters in the sky, quarantines and men that fly,
inspired by Helena María Viramontes' epic novel
Their Dogs Came with Them

Created in collaboration with musical director Martha Gonzalez and writer Virginia Grise, Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind is a theatrical concert about what happens to a community when six intersecting freeways are built right through the heart of a neighborhood. Inspired by Helena María Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came with Them, the concert directed by Kendra Ware features stories interwoven with songs about sharp shooters and earthmovers, roaming dogs, helicopters in the sky, quarantines and men that fly. The performance at Cornell University will be the first in progress showing of the work before it premieres at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco April 2024.

This event is part of Lest Silence Be Destructive: A Celebration of Chicana Feminism and the Work of Helena María Viramontes, with a full day of activities on Saturday, October 21.

Martha Gonzalez is a Chicana artivista (artist/activist) musician, feminist music theorist and Associate Professor in the Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o Latina/o Studies at Scripps/Claremont College. Born and raised in Boyle Heights Gonzalez is a MacArthur Fellow (2022), Fulbright Garcia Robles (2007-2008), Ford (2012-2013), Woodrow Wilson Fellow (2016-2017) and United States Artist Fellow (2020). Her academic interests have been fueled by her own musicianship as a singer/songwriter and percussionist for Grammy Award (2013) winning band Quetzal. The relevance of Quetzal’s music and lyrics have been noted in a range of publications, from dissertations to scholarly books. Their latest recording “Puentes Sonoros” (Sonic Bridges) was released on Smithsonian Folkways in the fall of 2020. Gonzalez along with her partner Quetzal Flores has been instrumental in catalyzing the transnational dialogue between Chicanx/Latinx communities in the U.S and Jarocho communities in Veracruz, Mexico. Gonzalez has also been active in implementing the collective songwriting method in correctional facilities throughout the U.S. Most recently, and as a testament to the body of music and community work Gonzalez has accomplished on and off the stage, in the summer of 2017 Gonzalez’s tarima (stomp box) and zapateado dance shoes were acquired by the National Museum of American History and are on permanent display in the One Nation Many Voices exhibit. Gonzalez’s first manuscript Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community, and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles was published by the University of Texas Press and was recently awarded best first book (non-fiction) by the International Latino Book Awards. Gonzalez currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband Quetzal Flores and their 17 year-old son-Sandino.

 Virginia Grise writes plays set in bars without windows, barrio rooftops, and lesbian bedrooms. She is a recipient of the Alpert Award in the Arts, Yale Drama Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Princess Grace Award in Theatre Directing. Her published work includes Your Healing is Killing Me (Plays Inverse Press), blu (Yale University Press), The Panza Monologues co-written with Irma Mayorga (University of Texas Press) and an edited volume of Zapatista communiqués titled Conversations with Don Durito (Autonomedia Press). Her interdisciplinary body of work includes plays, multimedia performance, dance theater, performance installations, guerilla theater, site specific interventions, and community gatherings. She is a founding member of a todo dar productions, an alumnae of the Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, the Women's Project Theatre Lab & the NALAC Leadership Institute. Grise has been a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, a Matakyev Research Fellow for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, a Jerome Fellow at the Playwright’s Center, and a Herberger Institute Projecting All Voices Fellow at Arizona State University. Currently, she is the Mellon Foundation Playwright in Residence at Cara Mia Theatre. Virginia has taught writing for performance at the university level, as a public school teacher, in community centers, women’s prisons and in the juvenile correction system. She holds an MFA in Writing for Performance from the California Institute of the Arts.

Helena María Viramontes is the author of The Moths and Other Stories and two novels, Under the Feet of Jesus and Their Dogs Came With Them.  She has also co-edited with Maria Herrera Sobek, two collections: Chicana (W) rites: On Word and Film and Chicana Creativity and Criticism. A recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the John Dos Passos Award for Literature, and a United States Artist Fellowship, her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized and her writings have been adopted for classroom use and university study. Her work is the subject of a critical reader titled Rebozos De Palabras edited by Gabrielle Gutierrez y Muhs and published by the University of Arizona Press. A community organizer and former coordinator of the Los Angeles Latino Writers Association, she is a frequent reader and lecturer in the U.S. and internationally. Currently she is completing a draft of her third novel, The Cemetery Boys.

Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind by a todo dar productions is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana, Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University, Cornell University’s Department of English and Critical Race Theory Series, Las Maestras Center for Xicana/x Indigenous Thought, Art and Social Practice at UC Santa Barbara, the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and NPN with support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s National Playwright Residency Program administered in partnership with HowlRound Theatre Commons. Developed at Texas Performing Arts at the University of Texas at Austin and The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center at the University of Maryland, the tour of the show has been made possible in part, through the sponsorship of Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, with funding by the New England Foundation for the Arts' National Theater Project, with lead funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and additional support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation.

The Cornell performance is hosted by Cornell’s Department of Literatures in English and Creative Writing Program with support from the College of Arts & Sciences, the Departments of Comparative Literature, History, Music, Performing & Media Arts, and Romance Studies, American Studies Program, Society for the Humanities, Alice Fulton, Robert Morgan, and Stephanie Vaughn.