Sor Juana
The Sor Juana Project
Opera – A Work in Progress
Sunday, June 6th, 2004. 2:00 pm
SomArts Cultural Center
934 Brannan St, SF
Tickets: $5-10
Please join co-librettists Carla Lucero (composer) and Alicia Gaspar de Alba for a presentation of their opera in progress, The Sor Juana Project. Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz was a 17th Century Mexican philosopher, playwright, feminist and Catholic nun who rocked the church and the literary world with her romantic love poetry to another
Carla Lucero, originally from Los Angeles, has made her home in the Bay Area since 1997. In June, 2001, Lucero’s first full-scale opera, Wuornos premiered at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. Lucero’s compositions have been written for a wide spectrum of projects. Before moving to the Bay Area, she worked extensively with the Los Angeles-based Collage Dance Theater. In 1998 Lucero won Los Angeles’ Lester Horton Outstanding Composition in a Dance Performance for her work in Most Wanted. She has also written film and video scores. While studying composition at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), she studied with composers Leonard Rosenman, Morton Subotnik and Rand Steiger, graduating in 1986 with a B.F.A. in Music Composition. Lucero has received many grants, awards and commissions for her work including San Francisco Arts Commission, Creative Work Fund, Zellerbach Family Fund, and the Astraea Foundation. In December 2001 and January 2002, she was honored with the awards of “Best of Stage” and the ten best in music from the “OUT 100 Success Stories of 2001” in The Advocate and OUT magazines for Wuornos.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is a native of the El Paso/Juárez border, and recognizes herself as “the first Chicana fruit of her family.” She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico (1994), is an Associate Professor of Chicana/Chicano Studies at UCLA and serves as Associate Director of the Chicano Studies Research Center. She is the author of a historical novel, Sor Juana’s Second Dream, and an academic book, Chicano Art Inside/Outside the Master’s House: Cultural Politics and the CARA Exhibition. The novel received First Place in Historical Fiction in The 2000 Latino Literary Hall of Fame Book Awards, and was translated into Spanish and German. Her full-length collection of poems, “Beggar on the Córdoba Bridge,” appears in the volume Three Times a Woman: Chicana Poetry, and her first collection of short stories, The Mystery of Survival was awarded the first Rudolfo and Patricia Anaya “Premio Aztlán” in 1994. Her writing has been anthologized in many publications, and has been published in French, German, and Spanish. Her second collection of poetry is forthcoming from Arte Público Press in 2003, and her first edited volume, Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture & Chicana/o Sexualities has just been released. She has recently completed a novel on the murdered women of Juárez.
