Performance Artist – Alina Troyano aka Carmelita Tropicana

Alina Troyano aka Carmelita Tropicana

Cuban Artist – Performance Art,

Carmelita Tropicana can be a beast. In the past, she has been a horse, pig and even a bear. In short, we can describe Alina Troyano’s performance persona, Carmelita Tropicana, as a queer assemblage. Assemblages are not simply characters or personas; instead, they are something else, something multiple. An assemblage consists of lines of articulation, strata and territory, but also lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization and destratification. These lines represent different intensities and different speeds and textures. We can think of the assemblage known as Carmelita Tropicana as a body without organs, which is a body that is constantly dismantling the organism, causing asignifying particles or intensities to circulate differently. This queer assemblage is always becoming. (José Esteban Muñoz 2013)

Carmelita Tropicana has been performing in New York’s downtown arts scene since the 1980s, straddling the worlds of performance art and theater in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe with her irreverent humor, subversive fantasy and bilingual puns. She received an Obie for Sustained Excellence in Performance and is a recipient of the Performance and Activism Award from the Women in Theater Program/American Theater in Higher Education. Notable and recent works include: Schwanze-Beast, a performance commissioned by Vermont Performance Lab; Recycling Atlantis, a performance installation at 80WSE Gallery; Post Plastica, an installation/video and performance presented at El Museo del Barrio; and the highly anthologized Milk of Amnesia. Her publications include the book, co-edited with Holly Hughes, Memories of the Revolution: The First Ten Years of the WOW Café. Tropicana has taught at numerous universities and sits on the Board of Directors at Performance Space 122 and NYFA. (Creative Capital)

More Information