Malinxe
Created by Indigenous composers Autumn Chacon (Diné – Navajo/Chicana) and Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache), Malinxe is a contemporary retelling of the myth of La Llorona, or "the weeping woman." Tracing back to 1550, La Llorona is well-known in American Southwest and Latin American cultures as a vengeful spirit who roams near bodies of water, mourning the children she drowned and warning others of water's power. In this original opera, Chacon and Ortman examine Malinxe, the real Nahua woman deemed the mother of modern Mexican people, whose complex story is often equated with that of La Llorona. In this interpretation, Malinxe embodies a contemporary woman who submerges herself into La Llorona's dangerous realm and must make transformative decisions to save her own spirit from continuing down the destructive path of La Llorona. In this interpretation, Malinxe is a woman outside of time who is submerged in Llorona’s dangerous realm and must realize herself. Physically set alongside a body of water, Malinxe will be performed by experimental musicians and artists hailing from New Mexico and New York. Produced and commissioned by Prototype, hosted in the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place.
Co-created by — Autumn Chacon and Laura Ortman
Libretto by — (interpretation of the myth of La Llorona) by Autumn Chacon
Starring — Marisa Demarco as Malinxe & Jeffrey Gibson as La Llorona
Directed by — Autumn Chacon
Original Composition by — Laura Ortman
Video Design by — Mateo Galindo & Razelle Benally
Sound Design by — Bob Bellerue
Costume Design by — Korina Emmerich
Makeup by — Deyah Cassadore
Set Fabrics by — Kathe Mull
Stage Manager — Bea Perez-Arche
Team
Laura Ortman (Composer)
A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Martha Colburn, New Red Order, and as part of the trio, In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, and often sings through a megaphone. She is a producer of capacious field recordings. Ortman has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, The Stone residency, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe. In 2008, She founded the Coast Orchestra, an all-Native American orchestral ensemble that performed a live soundtrack to Edward Curtis’s film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first silent feature film to star an all-Native American cast.
Ortman is the recipient of the 2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Fellowship, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. Ortman was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Autumn Chacon (Director, Librettist)
Autumn Chacon, born in 1987 is a Native American (Navajo/Chicana), Conceptual, and Performance Artist, best known for her electronic, broadcast and sonic installations. Chacon has been writing and presenting performance pieces since 2007. Since 2011 Autumn has exhibited large scale audio installations throughout the United States and abroad, however her performance work mostly comes to form when Chacon is inspired by and desires to write for others. First showing Noise Cooking at the Art gallery of Onterio in 2012, an abstract score written for food to be performed by friend, artist and chef Lisa Myers. Autumn began by writing pieces for artists whose work she already admired and wanted to create multi-layered story telling with. Autumn has been performing with the experimental and spontaneous performance group Death Convention Singers based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico since 2015. DCS is group of avant garde musicians and artists who take turns presenting collectively designed pieces in non traditional locations around the southwest United States, Death Convention Singers is where Autumn first met and began to collaborate with Marisa Demarco and realized she wanted to write work specifically for Demarco's unique style of mixing vocalization and electronic processing. After many years of friendship Autumn Chacon and Laura Ortman got to share the stage at The Whitney in 2022 during the series of performances known as For Zitkála-Šá (by Raven Chacon) and soon after began to work on Malinxe. Having had an early career in broadcast television, Chacon wrote the first draft of Malinxe in 2011 as short story told using multiple forms of new media and in three acts. The storyline draws from a traditional Folk Lore known as La Llorona prevalent in the Southwest and in Latin America. Having grown up along the Rio Grande river in New Mexico, among fast moving irrigation channels, Chacon veers away from telling the traditional version of the Crying Woman who drowns children, but instead brings her audience into the world of a contemporary protagonist who must confront the paradox of living in an ancient body in a new and colonized world.
