Flying Free: Virginia Grise's 19th Annual Kieve Performance Lecture

On Tuesday, April 9, the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity welcomed Virginia Grise, award-winning playwright, performer, and producer, to the Pigott Theater stage to give the 19th Annual Anne and Loren Kieve Lecture. In a lyrical and moving performance lecture, Grise described the process by which she has developed a multi-media collaborative project that adapts Helena Maria Viramontes’ monumental novel Their Dogs Came with Them to the stage. Years in the making, and employing a wide variety of disciplinary forms, Grise’s project has and will involve collaborations and collaborators from across the country—from Perryville Prison in Goodyear, AZ to under the freeways in Tucson, AZ; from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY to Stanford University in Stanford, CA; from the Magic Theater in San Francisco, CA to the Las Maestras Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara; back to the City of San Jose, CA and ending in New York City. At Stanford, Grise centered the performances of several of CCSRE’s most cherished faculty affiliates, including Jonathan Rosa (GSE), Rose Salseda (Art & Art History), Samer Al-Saber (TAPS), as well as TAPS PhD student Maria Zurita Ontiveros.

A genuinely interdisciplinary performance, Grise’s Kieve lecture highlighted some of the major themes of Viramontes’ novel—especially how it feels to be trapped by institutional forces (i.e. prisons) and ideological constructions (i.e. identities) that prevent emotional flourishing as well as physical mobility. Specific examples from the novel, such as the displacement that occurs when freeways are built through one’s neighborhood, were bolstered by references to the explosion of state-funded and for-profit prisons that are filled by people of color. Certainly, one of the most moving moments in the lecture consisted of the braided readings by several different actors of the shockingly long list of institutions of incarceration that exist just in the State of California.

Over the course of the show, Grise talked about premiering the play Their Dogs Came with Them in 2019 at the Perryville Women’s Prison in Arizona and the work it took to gain access to the prison and the trust of the women incarcerated there. She discussed staging the play as a full-scale production, directed by Kendra Ware, in the Julian Wash Archeological Park under the I-19 freeway in South Tucson, an event that also saw the birth of Grise’s own production company, A Todo Dar Productions, founded in concert with Maricella Infante. Grise ended her talk with a moving invocation to the Danza del los Voladores, a present-day ceremony in Mexico involving music and high-flying acrobatic dance performances with origins in ancient Mesoamerica. This visually striking ceremony involves four “flyers” who climb up a central pole and then launch themselves tied with ropes to descend to the ground. Importantly, the theme of people who can fly is central to Their Dogs Came with Them and is the main motif animating the phrase “riding the currents of the wilding wind” from the last page of Viramontes’ novel. It is also a theme central to the desire of Latinx people, queer people, and people with physical and mental disabilities to free themselves from the constraints in which they too often find themselves.

As Grise explained in her talk-back after the lecture with Theater and Performance Studies professor Samer Al-Saber, she expanded the project of adapting the novel considerably by going in a very different direction during the Covid pandemic. In collaboration with Martha Gonzalez of the East LA rock band Quetzal, Grise worked for several years to create a concept album entitled Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind. The album was released in late April 2024 at the World Premiere Theatrical Concert, also titled Riding the Currents of the Wilding Wind, at the Magic Theater in San Francisco. The concert was directed by Kendra Ware and featured the dancing and singing abilities of the amazing musician Martha Gonzalez. Once again Grise displayed her signature ability to develop collaborations that produce nothing short of musical theatre magic.

The successful 19th Annual Kieve lecture was preceded by a lecture hosted at El Centro Chicana/o y Latina/o by CCSRE Faculty Director Paula Moya on the novel Their Dogs Came with Them in which she discussed the structure and major themes of the novel.

For more information about Virginia Grise, and for updates about future performances, see her website: https://www.virginiagrise.com.