INTERVIEW: Dominican Artists Collective has important stories to tell
Image courtesy of DAC / Provided by press rep with permission.
The expanding company-in-residence program at New York Theatre Workshop welcomed some new friends earlier this year. Among the new arts-based companies collaborating with NYTW on future projects is the Dominican Artists Collective, or DAC. This collective, which began a few years ago, features a group of storytellers, community-centered gate openers and culture expanders, according to press notes. In their work, participants honor their Blackness, their ancestors and their stories.
DAC is run by a producing team that consists of Cindy De La Cruz, Gineiris Garcia, Maribel Martinez, Andres Piña, Little Veras and Merlixse Ventura. Then there are multidisciplinary members of the collective who help bring the vision to reality. The collective has had a relationship with NYTW for some time; both companies worked together on a three-part series called The Cooking Project. They already have plans for a spring collaboration as well (more details below).
Ventura, an Afro-Dominican artist born and raised in the Washington Heights section of New York City, is one of the artistic producers. She is an alumnus of SUNY Purchase where she studied theater, performance and philosophy, according to her official biography. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree in acting at Columbia University. She recently spoke with Hollywood Soapbox about DAC’s accomplishments so far and what the collaboration with NYTW will look like. Here’s what she had to say …
On how DAC began as a collective …
Dominican Artists Collective began after the strength of a Facebook event in September 2019. It was kind of just a call to action for Dominican artists coming together just to share in community, and from that moment on, we kind of realized there was something bigger there. There was an opportunity to tell Dominican stories from the diaspora and abroad, and so at the beginning of the pandemic, we started to envision what a collective like ours would look like. … Really the essence of Dominican Artists Collective is community and being able to tell our specific and unique stories with one another so we can bring it to a broader, larger audience. We really believe the specific is universal, and that’s the genesis of how we started.
On how decisions are made within DAC …
We have a larger collective, and our artistic producing team kind of functions as a board. We have six artistic producers, me being one of them, and this format we kind of created it ourselves. We’re all artists who are pursuing the career and have our lives. Some of us are teachers. Some of us are still in grad school, and so having six people kind of share the same vision and share the same will to make this thing go forward helps manage the weight. If we had just one or two people, it’d be a full-time job, but being that we are a community center, having six people allows us all to continue to pursue our individual dreams, our individual careers while still maintaining the collective and continuing to bring it up.
On whether the artists in DAC are theater-based or multidisciplinary …
We have many different disciplines. We have a lot of people from the theater world — actors, playwrights, directors — but then we also have musicians. We have authors. … We have visual artists. For us, it’s pulling in all the resources that you may need to create a piece of work. You can’t function without the artist who is making the poster. You can’t function without the artist who is making the music to underscore the play — all of those things. We kind of have different artists who fill that for us through a Dominican lens when we are creating work.
On what the partnership with NYTW will look like …
Our relationship with New York Theatre Workshop really started through their Artistic Instigators Program. We were fortunate enough to create a three-part series called The Cooking Project that really explored the topics of spirituality, our Dominican diaspora Blackness and our ancestry. So we created this three-part series, and it was basically a bunch of devised stories that came together to create The Cooking Project, hence the title. You have a bunch of different ingredients.
That’s how our relationship started, and we’re really fortunate to be doing this partnership and this residency because it gives us an opportunity to give our community more access to different programming that we don’t necessarily have access to on our own. In the spring of 2022, we’re actually working on a really incredible master class series with New York Theatre Workshop that is going to be taught by Dominican artists who are working in the industry today, with the sole purpose of giving other up-and-coming artists the tools they may need to create their own work. Oftentimes everyone has a story they want to tell, but they just don’t have the tools. They don’t know how to exactly write a script or how to really bring their vision to life, and so that’s what I’m most excited about is the master class series we’re working on and seeing how that little seed planted in our community flourishes into 10, 20, 30 more Dominican diasporic stories and beyond. So it’s really exciting.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Dominican Artists Collective is a new company-in-residence with the New York Theatre Workshop. Other companies in the program: Safe Harbors NYC, JAG Productions and Noor Theatre. Click here for more information.
